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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 6/21/17

Assessing Ossoff's Loss

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I attempt to dissect the election.

Jon Ossoff lost last night by 4.2%. Bashers of the Democratic Party are exulting in the fact that Hillary only lost the district by 1.5%. Republicans are exulting that the Democrats threw away over $20 million to lose an election.

Here's the another side of the story: Tom Price, the incumbent candidate the election was held to replace, after Trump appointed him to be Secretary of Health and Human Services. was elected with a 23% margin. Democrats would argue that Ossoff's campaign was a close one that forced the GOP to spend a record amount to defend, and that cutting incumbents margins by 19% can lead to massive victories in the 2018 elections. That nineteen point gain should be making GOP incumbents quaking in their boots.

Apparently, Ossoff started out more progressive. J oe Crowley, at DownWithTyranny blog said, "Ossoff started out as a progressive until the DCCC got their hands on him and turned him away from Medicare-for-All and away from a fairer tax system in their unending quest to force Democrats to sound more like moderate Republicans."

I've said before that the Democrats should do great in 2018 unless their stupidity undermines them. Clearly, that's a factor here. People always prefer the real thing and the Democratic establishment loves to offer up fake Republicans, disguised as moderate, centrist Democrats. Perhaps a sign of Democrats to support in primaries is to only support ones who refuse to bend to the demands of the DCCC or DSCC.

Greg Palast, shortly before the election, predicted an Ossoff loss because his opponent, Karen Handler, as Georgia Secretary of State, had engaged in sever voter suppression, using crosscheck and by no processing new voter registrations for thousands of South Korean voters who would have voted for Ossoff. It is crazy that Democrats, after Greg Palasts documentation, have failed to call for the banning of all electronic voting machines that allow votes that cannot be verifiably recounted.

Voter turn-out dropped about 20% for this election. That might be because less of the people who supported Price did not . show up. But the low turnout is also a bad sign for the Democrats. With all the money and attention to the election there was clearly a failure to wake up people who might have supported Ossoff. Progressives would argue that Ossoff used the same strategy that failed for Hillary, trying to get people to vote against Trump rather than for solid populist issues, like those mentioned earlier.

There's speculation that Ossoff will run again in the 2018 elections. I'm pretty certain that the money Ossoff raised, over 95% of it from outside the district, was not donated because people were thrilled with Ossoff. This was an opportunity to show the Republicans that they were in trouble, a way to dissuade them from passing a bill which replaces Obamacare with an abomination. If ever there's a district where a real progressive candidate is needed, it's Georgia's sixth. Between Our Revolution and Justice Democrats, it would be nice to see a real progressive run in the Democratic primary.

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Rob Kall Social Media Pages: Facebook Page       Twitter page url on login Profile not filled in       Linkedin page url on login Profile not filled in       Instagram page url on login Profile not filled in

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune 500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom Up Radio Show, and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
 

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