Here’s a link to RFK JR.’s article in Rolling Stone about the 2004 election. Kennedy makes a compelling case that the Republicans won by way of cheating. What a…shock. Just about every major election is won by way of cheating. In fact, the winner is the side that can cheat better than the other side (like Henry Gondorff out-cheating Doyle Lonnegan in the poker game from The Sting. Lonnegan: “Four 9s”; Gondorff: “Four Jacks”).
For example, the supreme example of cheating to win is the 1960 US presidential election. No one knows exactly how much money the Kennedy machine spent on that race, but it ran into the millions. Relative to present day, it’s most likely 5 to 10 times what is spent on a modern presidential election. People remember RFK (SR.) walking around with a notepad on whose pages were written the names of county sheriffs and mayors like Chicago’s Daley. Beside each name was a monetary figure, typically $10k plus or minus $5k. The sheriffs and mayors “delivered” their counties and cities to JFK through…much the same tactics RFK JR. describes in the article linked to above. Of course, the Nixonians cheated their brains out too, just not quite as well.
The real question in any election is not “who’s running?”, or “what do they stand for?”, it’s who can cheat so well that they’ve made “a work of Machiavellian art” out of the business of voter fraud, to quote Sideshow Bob; the real question is who has the four jacks?
