Donna Brazille
CNN Political Contributor

Have your friends voted yet? What about members of your family? And how about you? How are you going to feel November 5, and for the next four years, if you don’t?

What if your candidate loses? You’re not allowed to complain if you don’t vote, and if you’re anything like me, it would be impossible to stay silent for four years.

Regardless of which campaign you’re working for or merely supporting, the next 72 hours are the most critical period in this, the home stretch. Campaigns are now focused on one thing and one thing only: getting out their voters. And you registered voters are their targets.

Over the next few days, Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s campaign teams will begin their “dry run” up to Election Day. Dry runs are held to work out any kinks, test the field operations, and recruit last-minute volunteers to fill in the gaps.

There’s also the “fire drill” with key campaign staff members gathering in the “boiler room” and testing everything, including the databases with lists of supporters and undecided voters and the auto dialers used to make last-minute calls to voters who need reassurance. iReport.com: Share your early voting experience

The street operation, sometimes called Operation Sweep, involves teams of volunteers who will be deployed to major intersections, football games, shopping malls or anywhere they can reach people where they work, play, shop, and eat out on weekends

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Editor’s Note: Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, serves as a political contributor for CNN. She also serves as the chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee’s Voting Rights Institute, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and founder of Brazile & Associates, a Washington-based political consulting firm. Brazile, who served as the campaign manager for the Al Gore-Joe Lieberman ticket in 2000, wrote “Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics,” a memoir about her life in politics.

Donna Brazile
CNN Political Contributor
Our nation’s economic foundation is crumbling like sand beneath our feet. Middle-class families are losing their jobs, homes, savings accounts and college funds.

Retirement nest eggs are fried to a crisp. Nine million children in America don’t have health care coverage. We’re fighting wars on more fronts than we can handle.

And John McCain is talking about ACORN?

Just as a top McCain adviser admitted that his candidate wouldn’t campaign on the economy because it’s a losing issue, so too it seems that the GOP has made a collective decision to abandon any real discussion of the issues in favor of distortion and distraction.

Through its 850 neighborhood chapters in more than 100 cities across the United States, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now organizes the powerless to work together for social justice and stronger communities through affordable housing, quality education and better public services. They are dedicated to looking out for those with little means in our society.

In the world of some elites, low- and moderate-income families and the organizations that work to empower them are the bad guys. There is all-out class warfare going on here, folks.

Another example of it is how people in the low-income bracket are being blamed for the subprime market crash — rather than the unscrupulous lenders who redirected them from the fixed 30-year prime rates they could have paid to the subprime and adjustable rate mortgages destined to implode. The victims are revictimized.

It is an unfortunate reality that “poor” and “racial minority” are invariably overlapping circles in a Venn diagram. But the class animosity now being bred is, as it always has been, a cover for racial antipathy. And, make no mistake, this is exactly what’s going on here. How pathetic and immoral in the face of the challenges we must confront as a nation.

Experts who have examined the allegations against ACORN have concluded that there is no significant threat of voter fraud. For the fraudulent registration forms to turn into fraudulent votes, they would have had to get through the election officials’ vetting systems and make it onto the voter rolls.

Next, someone would need to arrive at the assigned polling location with valid identification that lists the same name and address as the fraudulent registration. (This is fairly difficult to do if you’re dead or named Mickey Mouse.)

Then, having passed all these hurdles, that someone would cast a vote that will cost him or her 10 years in jail. Just find me someone willing to spend 10 years in jail just for a chance to vote for Obama or McCain?

Let’s look at the facts. ACORN labeled as “suspicious” the fraudulent registration forms a few of its paid volunteers submitted. Moreover, ACORN delivered them to election authorities under that heading. ACORN offered to help election officials pursue prosecutions against those who filled out the fraudulent forms.

The so-called ACORN scandal is no more than a few canvassers trying to meet their quota and make easy money by cheating the system.

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Donna Brazile
CNN Political Contributor

After two years of talking about the 2008 presidential campaign ad nauseam, I still get one question repeatedly: Is America ready yet?

My firm answer after being on the road nonstop and witnessing the crowds of ordinary people standing together for a cause greater than themselves is that the country is poised to write a new American chapter.

All the polls say Sen. Barack Obama is leading and that his rival Sen. John McCain should be very, very worried. From mid-single digits to low double-digits, some pollsters and pundits seem to believe that Obama has got this election in the bag.

But anyone who’s been in this game for more than a round or two knows not to pop the bubbly too early. Who knows what can happen in the final weeks, days and hours of a presidential election? October has earned its reputation for surprises.

Usually it takes an event — an illegitimate child or the rumor of one, a past DUI conviction or a current mistress, a closet drug addiction or some other skeleton rattling its bones — to reverse the fortunes of a front-running candidate.

Editor’s Note: Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, serves as a political contributor for CNN. Brazile, who served as the campaign manager for the Al Gore-Joe Lieberman ticket in 2000, wrote “Cooking with Grease: Stirring the Pots in American Politics,” a memoir about her life in politics.

Editor’s note: During the New Yorker Festival, Jeffrey Toobin hosted a panel discussion with Donna Brazile, Alex Castellanos, Ed Rollins, and Joe Trippi. Below are Donna’s impassioned closing remarks. You can also watch a video of the entire discussion here .

Donna Brazile
CNN Political Contributor

I’m gonna say it and get it off my chest, because for the next thirty days, I’m gonna be the best Catholic woman ever… If Obama loses, and there’s a possibility he might lose, I would hope that people voted against him because they didn’t like his economic vision, his energy plan, they didn’t like the fact that he came out against the war so early when everyone was going with the status quo. I would hope that people decided that during the debates maybe he didn’t do as well as he possibly could and maybe that’s right. We’re at a time of trouble and maybe you want someone who’s been on the planet a lot longer. A hell of a lot longer, and God bless him…

But my friends, I have to tell you, as a child who grew up in the segregated Deep South, de facto and de jure, we’ve come so far in this country. This country, and you have to have lived as long as I’ve lived to have seen so much progress. But I remember when I used to get on the bus, and this was after segregation was so-called “over with”: my mother would tell me, “Donna, now you get on the bus, you and your brothers go all the way to the back, and don’t look at anybody.” And of course, I would get on that bus and tell my brothers go straight to the back, don’t look at anybody, because I didn’t want them to get in trouble. And I would sit there and say, let me see if everything’s okay. Is it really changed?

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