Subject: OBAMA WILL LOSE - Prediction by Hugh Downs


Dear Family, Friends, Classmates and Fellow Flyers:


Who is Hugh Downs? Hugh Malcolm Downs; born 1921, in Akron, Ohio; married Ruth Shaheen, two children.. He is an American radio and television broadcaster, actor, producer, and writer. At various time, Downs has appeared on, worked with or has been published by: ABC, NBC, Fox, PBS, Discovery Channel, Twentieth Century-Fox, RCA, National Space Institute, Holt, Doubleday, Argus Communication, Delacorte, Dell, Putnam, T. N. Publishers, Towery, Turner Publishing, Scribner, St. James Press, T. V. Guide, and abcnews.go.com. He's been there and has done that over the past 58 years!
No one can honestly say Hugh Downs is not qualified to make a prediction.
At 87, Downs has offered us his thoughts regarding November 2008. The following insightful analysis is well-worth reading and forwarding to all on your email lists:





OBAMA WILL LOSE E-mail | 26 August 2008 | Hugh Downs Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008 7:11:14 PM by ShadowAce

It's time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting the election results. So here i t is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all, one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I've yet seen. Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake. I'm using the term in its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a "fool with energy", as the Russian proverb puts it. ("A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare".)

Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it. The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors of the poor dope who can't grasp the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck.

The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It's as if he's the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When given a choice between left and right, the flake goes up - - if not through the 8th dimension. And although there's plenty of rationalization, there's never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop asking.

Obama's rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger story -- young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by slow degrees to within arm's length of the presidency itself. That's all well and good -- we need national myths of exactly that type.

But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each step of Obama's journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions, actions bizarre enough to require some effort at explanation, through such efforts have rarely been offered. It's as if the new Horatio made it to the top by stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in his path. And we, the onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put this man in the White House, are supposed to take this as the normal career path for a successful chief executive.

What are these incidents? I'm sure many of you are way ahead of me, but let's go to the videotape.

Here's a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a choice of positions anywhere in the country. He comes from a state generally held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that 0A can be characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the world, with harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks, but also Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it off, a state controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning Democratic machine. So where does he choose to go?

To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the country. One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is not. One that remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S. (Cicero, Al Capone's old stomping grounds, a suburb that is effectively part of the city, is completely segregated to this day.) It would be nice to learn which of these aspects most attracted young Obama to the city. But if you'd asked at the beginning of the campaign, you'd still be waiting.

And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult. Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church has been turned inside out since the videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it's claimed. But there are a plethora of black churches that would have provided him that without the taint of demented racism that Wright's church offered.

Obama apparently had to swear an oath of belief in "black liberati on theology" when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that sort that make it a "cult", and not simply a "church".) Did the thought of his career ever cross his mind? Didn't he realize that church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down the line? That he'd be required to repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can ask -- but we won't get an answer.

Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind of thing that would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his life, as has been the case with Obama. But then... he writes nothing for the journal.

Now, let's get this straight: here we have one of the leading university law journals in the country, one widely cited and read. Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship have been founded on appearances in the Review, including some that have led to the highest courts in the country. Yet here's an individual who, as editor, could easily place his own work in the journal -- standard practice, nothing at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the explanation? There's none that I've heard. We can go even farther than that, to say that there is no explanation that makes the least rational sense.

We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he vote d "present" over 120 times. What this means, as far as I've been able to discover, is that he voted "present" nearly as much as he voted "yes" or "no".

Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues and asks them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not. Some ask, "Is it a good bill?" and some don't. Either way, they customarily, except in unusual circumstances, vote "yes' or "no". All except for Barack Obama. And how did get away with it? How did mollify his colleagues? How did he square himself with the party bosses? Echo answereth not.

(A good slogan could be made of this: "You can't vote present in the Oval Office." I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)

We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal, only to be disappointed. But it's not surprising, really. After all, he was only there for 143 days.

And there lies one of the keys to Obama's rise. David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.

But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for president is under the microscop e, and can't duck anything, as many a candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic mode, now is when it would come out. And has it?

The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going for it -- the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued president, the media in the candidate's pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the results have comprised little more than one fumble after another.

First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it all -- a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes -- and allowed the revelations to take on a life of their own before bothering to respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he hadn't been listening for twenty years) did little to settle the crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly crippling his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back up at any time. The latest word is that Wright -- now a deadly enemy of his onetime protégé -- has written a book. I can't wait.

Obama learned his lesson, and confronted the next threat immediately, tackling The New Yorker cover with the avidity of a man having discovered zombies in the basement. A development that could have been defused with a chuckle and a quip (the customary method is fo r the politician to ask the cartoonist for the original) was allowed to explode into a major issue. The campaign's relentless attacks on one of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely perplexed the country at large. After all, any Republican has had to endure far worse.

Almost simultaneously, the birth certificate saga was unfolding. On no reasonable grounds, the campaign blew off requests for a copy of the document, at last releasing it through one of the least reputable sites on the Internet, and so badly copied that literally anything could be read into it -- and was. I'm not one of those who believes that Obama was actually born in Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I still have plenty in the way of questions, almost all of them arising from how the matter was handled. Well played.

The latest pothole (or one of them, anyway) involves Jerome Corsi's "The Obama Nation". Corsi has been given the full New Yorker treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John Kerry's "error" in not challenging Corsi's 2004 book, Unfit for Command. What Obama missed was the fact that Kerry's major problem was not with Corsi but with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted with Kerry's hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran, and set out to take him down. Corsi's effort dovetailed with the veteran's campaign and to a large extent was swept up with=2 0 it. No such campaign is in operation against Obama. The smart method of answering Corsi would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of drawing attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.

We could go on. The victory tour of Europe, and the speech in which Obama declared himself "citizen of the world", a trope guaranteed to focus the attention of Middle America. His inept handling of Hillary, in which he wound up appearing frightened of the opponent he'd just beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there, what's-his-name) a starring role in the Democratic convention is not a solution any sane individual would be comfortable with -- much less a roll-call vote.. This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire affair into BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a footnote. But it's all of a piece with the campaign Obama has waged up until now.

We've never had a flake as president. We've had drunks, neurotics, cripples, louts, and fools, but never a career screwup. (I except Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere, misguided goodwill.) And I don't think we're going to get one now. Another three months of flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image will do little to assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil crunch, a gyrating economy, and a bellicos e Russia. (Anyone doubting that Obama will go exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church fiasco, which unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently, the campaign goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into all but accusing John McCain of "cheating" by failing to take his place within the "cone of silence" during Obama's part of the program. The grotesque element here is that Obama's people and much of the liberal commentariat -- including Mitchell -- apparently believe that the "cone of silence", a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series, actually exists and was in use at Saddleback.)

Many of us have dealt with flakes at one time or another, often in settings involving jobs and careers, and not uncommonly in positions of some authority. We all know of the nephew, the fiancé, the boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose reputation must be protected, who must be constantly worked around if anything at all is to be accomplished, always at the cost of time, money, efficiency, and personal stress.

In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of national flakery occur only when there’s no real alternative. In this election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings, nobody ever called John McCain a flake.

He's obviously reached senility.
Do you have a link?

upon re-reading, I suspect this is just some chain e-mail, with the poor guys name attatched. with all of his media connections, wouldn't he show up on tv? who writes letters?

Do you idiots even check for accuracy before you cut and paste that crap???

Hugh Downs: Obama Will Lose - Urban Legends

Hugh Downs Calls Obama a "Flake" -Fiction!

snopes.com: Hugh Downs - Obama Will Lose

If you can't win an argument on its own merit, please sit down and shut up. Misappropriating a trusted news-man's likeness to make it appear as though he said something he never said is pretty low and completely unnecessary.

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Just passing on what was sent to me.

Point is, does the article ring true. Idiot

whoa!
don't make it personal Red.

And who was called an idiot first? Don't you think it best to admonish others?

Fake fake fake fake fake.

It makes a huge effing difference when it's coming, or in this case not coming from one of the most respected journalists in American history, Hugh Downs.

Check your facts next time before mindlessly posting this tripe.

Anyone who has had access to the internet for 30 minutes knows how to do a simple fact check via Google. If you don't like being called what you are for being so reckless with the truth, don't do it next time.

BTW, the article mentions Obama never wrote for the Harvard Law Review as an editor. The author didn't do his homework. Law review students seldom publish any work. They're there to write comments, edit, do research, etc. They do write publish-quality stuff most of the time, but it's seldom published. Something like the Harvard Law Review is probably only going to be publishing the scholarly work of the country's leading legal scholars.

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Thank you for the apology.

Now comment on the comments.

You are believing something that is not true. If thats not the definition of an idiot, then, please, tell me what is?

You could have made the same point without calling names.
Desperate times call for desperate measures, eh?

"eh" Are you from Canada?

You got problems with other countries, amigo?

I'll try to comment on the article itself.

I wouldn't call Hawaii a political and racial paradise. This is the Hawaii whose natural inhabitants were placed under forced rule by British and US forces in the aftermath of a monarch's overthrow less then a hundred years ago, whose indigenous inhabitants still harbor bad feelings towards 'outsiders' on the island today? I'm not saying it is worse than the norm but I don't believe it is better than the average either. I think someone is taking artistic license.

Chicago is a racist haven? More so than any other major city in the US? Where is the data that backs up that claim? Why do the FBI crime statistics related to hate crimes not agree with this? Why was Chicago one of the first cities in the nation to extend hate crimes legislation to basically every minority group you can think of, including gays, if this is the case?

The Flake discussion is just opinion. There is really nothing to logically argue there.

The Trinity United Church section. I spent a lot of time just now trying to determine the validity of the statement that "Obama had to swear an oath of belief in the black liberati on theology." It has the feel of a completely false chain email type of statement. I was not able to verify it.

Harvard Law Review section. Seems to have been debunked by MidTowner.

Birth Certificate section. This section seems kind of petty to me. We know his mother was a US citizen... what is this section trying to accomplish? I kind of equate this to the folks who were trying to get McCain disqualified from the election a few months ago because he was born in Panama before the passage of a law in the early 1900s that would have clarified his US citizenship status....

Obama not voting / no voting record / etc. section. The often heard statement is that Obama has deliberately missed all votes on anything significant so we have no idea what he really thinks. The thing is this statement is easily challenged. I know I have personally been to websites that track the voting records of all Senators and Representatives and have reviewed both Obama and McCain's records earlier this year. Both have voted on significant policy issues. Yes I agree that there were several no votes out there, but not so many as to obscure either candidate's voting patterns. I feel that I have a reasonably good idea of where both candidate's opinions lie.

Corsi Book section. I guess if I were to offer an opinion, it seems that Obama's strategy on this got him what he wanted, so it is hard to fault it.

To sum it up, I think the article is just a rant. Some of the points that he brings out might be legitimate concerns, such as Obama's Chicago church affiliation, but the way this whole thing is presented with its ignoring of the hard issues and focusing on the, shall we say more colorful issues, it just smacks of a chain letter. (Which in fact it appears to be).

I would rank it up there with the fake Obama/Koran pictures from a few threads ago. At the end of the day the article probably does more harm than good to McCain and his supporters.

Is there a reason why the Mods haven't banned the trolls on this forum yet?

I'm sorry...Midtowner is a very well respected member on this forum who has contributed a HELL OF A LOT more than Rabid's flame bait that he posts in this forum. What is the purpose?

There are those of us that try to debate ISSUES. Rabid, GWB, Prune, etc...do everything they can to avoid debating the issues we bring up and instead try to label and dismiss everyone against them. Then when they bring up what they call an issue, and the response isn't exactly inline with that they have said...they take it personal and question the intellect of that person.

You want to debate issues....then lets debate issues. But if all you are here for is to get a rise out of people and start personal arguments...take your trash somewhere else where you will be appreciated.

I'm amazed anyone actually bothered to read the article after it was pointed out that the article-author connection was a lie.

The lie itself, I think was a big aspect of this article.

I suppose it wasn't good enough, valid enough on its face, when written by its original author, so some jackass, somewhere down the line decided it'd be more credible and salient if it was endorsed by Hugh Downs... an octogenarian who I'm sure is quite fond of writing hit pieces on the internet full of factual errors.

I say "idiot" because an idiot is the only sort of person I can envision giving this article a second look.

I have to wonder whether the Hugh Downs identity misappropriation was perpetrated by McCain fans or by Obama fans who thought that by doing so, they could portray McCain supporters as morons who thought they could get away with misappropriating the identity and endorsement of a famous and respected journalist. It's a close call.

For anyone to take the perpetrators of this thing seriously though? Sorry, but "idiot" seems to be a more descriptive than normative.

I will be voting for McCain. Ain't no question, but this sort of dishonesty and idiocy has no place in the public forum. To "debate" this article is to give the cut/paster more credit than he or she deserves. They are either liars or morons for not checking the factual basis of the article they chose to repost. There's no excuse for this.

I maintain that if one truly believes that politically speaking, they are in the right, outright lies have no place in their arguments and to maintain that this is anymore than a lie is to admit that one is too stupid to check the facts before cutting and pasting.

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Okay...I got sucked into this. In total, I read about half of it, but started planning to check Snopes on this about 3 sentences in, where "Hugh" talks about Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the cable system. That didn't even remotely sound like anything Hugh Downs would say. "Thank you" to Midtowner for doing a little fact-checking. I should have scanned the responses before bothering to read the article.

Rabid Red - a fool with energy, indeed. How ironic.

Nothing surprises me, but seeing as most Americans don't bother to do their homework, I can't think of any reason for Obama supporters to throw this out there. It's the same minds who put out the wildly inaccurate tax e-mails, info on how he's a terrorist, etc.

Good thing Rabid Red is there to lap it all up like the dog he/she is. A fool with the energy to perpetuate it.

A choice "C" occurs to me, which is that someone puts this out seeking attention and for Snopes to chronicle their activity, which is basically documented proof that the perpetrator fooled someone.

I think RR will be more careful what he cut/pastes in the future.

Another funny aspect of all of this occurs to me.

RR of course celebrates the author of this hit piece and others for refusing to "move on" past things like Jeremiah Wright while at the very same time, he's essentially asking us to just 'move on' and discuss the article anyhow. I'm sure he's 'moved on' past this embarrassing little indiscretion.

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning!

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C'mon, wsucougz, cut RR some slack. When poll numbers are tanking for the party you're a slave to, you have to cut and paste as much garbage as you can to distract away from the real issues. It's in the Republican play book.

Remember, I'm a moderate because I say so.

Democrats would never dream of cutting and pasting inaccurate articles, would they?

Oops.. they would.

Daily Kos: Palin's faked "pregnancy"?  Covering for teen daughter? UPDATE #2!

Don't pretend that the partisan shill morons are on only one side of the aisle.

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Of course they are on both sides. On this board these tactics seem to reside squarely on one side of the aisle the majority of the time.

That's a mighty fine bit of cognitive dissonance you must be experiencing then.

Have you kept up with Huffington Post or DailyKOS? I mean these folks have made lies and innuendo as part of a campaign into some sort of an art form. I'm not saying things are equal. That'd be impossible to quantify, just that it goes on quite a bit on both sides.

We, the 'little people' just have to be smart enough to separate the wheat from the chaff, unlike the OP.

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