November 4, 2008 TUESDAY
I am at the Pelham Civic Center at 6:15. The line is not as long as I expected. I am done voting by 7:15.
I start watching TV around 5 before any polls are closed.
Indiana is close early so there is no early projection.
CNN says early that their exit polls show that the 61% of Americans say that the economy is the number 1 issue. That’s a strong early sign that it will be a big night for the party of the people. The second biggest issue is Iraq, and Obama wins that issue!
Around 7 states start being called as expected. No upsets early.
At about 7:15 comes projections that Obama will win Pennsylvania. How big this is!
Kay Hagan destroys Liddy Dole in N.C. That is great. This is the seat formerly held by segregationist Jesse Helms.
Just before 8 CNN calls Alabama for McCain.
At 8 comes the predicted New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
At 8:15 Georgia is called for McCain. I was hoping that Obama would be more competitive there.
I watch my TV while Moyna is in the bedroom watching hers.
Mitch McConnell wins reelection in Kentucky. That’s too bad.
At some point ABC calls Ohio for Obama. It’s over around 8:25. For all practical purposes, it’s over. How satisfying. I’ll stay up to watch Big Mac’s concession speech.
We hear that the McCain party in Alabama is in Mountain Brook. How appropriate.
Occasionally I flip to FOX and I laugh and laugh at those fools literally babbling over their crushing loss.
There is talk of the damaged brand of the Republican Party. I love it! I have despised the Republican Party for 40 years. I’ve waited 40 years for this and I am going to enjoy every minute of it.
At 8:36 ABC calls New Mexico for Obama. Big!
At 8:37 CNN calls Ohio for Obama.
It’s over for Old Man McCain. Maybe he should quit the Senate and move into assisted living. Cindy can afford it.
Lindsay Graham wins reelection in South Carolina. McCain’s buddy Graham returns to the Senate. He and McConnell are my most despised Senators.
At McCain headquarters in Phoenix the TVs are turned off as Hank Williams, Jr. sings for the losers. He sounds so mournful.
The American people want competence finally over identity politics, sham and Roveian division.
The people didn’t buy the McCain maverick bit. He’s just another Republican and would merely continue the Bush policies. That’s the truth. They didn’t buy the lie that McCain would bring change. The people weren’t fooled.
Obama outhustled and outworked his opponent. More important, he outsmarted his opponent, and he took advantage of McCain’s mistakes, the biggest being the selection of Palin, not being able to separate himself from Bush, and foolishly saying just before the Wall Street meltdown that the fundaments of the economy were strong.
The base of the disgraced Republican Party is mostly in the former slave-holding states.and a few Midwestern states. It is no accident that the Old Confederacy is the center of the Republican Party.
You compare the Republican gathering at the Biltmore Resort in Arizona and the throng at Grant Park gathering for Obama. It was in Grant Park in 1968 when the Democrat Party fell apart. This is sweet, sweet revenge. Democrats meet in a park; Republicans meet at an expensive hotel and in Mountain Brook. I go with the party of the people.
THE HUN GOES DOWN TONIGHT!
THE REAL AMERICA IS THE DIVERSE CROWD AT GRANT PARK. MCCAIN AND PALIN’S REAL AMERICA OF JOE THE PLUMBER IS FADING. If the Republicans have any sense, which I doubt, they’ll take down their White Only sign.
At 9 CNN calls Iowa for Obama.
One of the GOP apologists says it’s over. You bet it’s over!
Obama is a centrist. Even Republicans are saying tonight that the usual Republicans nonsense about Obama being extreme and a socialist is not true. Duh!
The youth vote goes strongly for the party of the people. This bodes well for the future of the party and spells doom for the GOP.
Evidence shows that Obama has taken the Democratic message to the suburbs. The Republicans are fading in the suburbs. Margins in the suburbs are trending strongly Democratic.
We cannot say that this country has transcended race, but this is a big step forward---a HUGE step forward. This win by Obama does not erase the stain of race from our nation’s history, yet we must celebrate this great happening.
David Gergen says a new order is emerging in this country: people of color, the youth vote, resurgent progressivism. Obama understands this; McCain is clueless. Whitey can’t win by himself anymore.
But the white male voters in the Confederate states are still here. Take this demographic away, and the GOP might as well relocate to Alaska.
The people this year demanded change. What Obama had to do was to reassure the voters that he could be trusted and that he was ready to be Commander in Chief. Mission accomplished. Everything he did was always smooth, calm, and reassuring. He ran a brilliant campaign.
AT 10 P.M. CNN PROJECTS THAT OBAMA WILL BE ELECTED. WHAT A GREAT MOMENT! WHAT A GREAT MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF THIS COUNTRY!!! I AM SO HAPPY.
A man of the people, a man of color, a Democrat will be the next president of the United States.
We see joyous celebrations all over the country.
Freddy calls and we jointly celebrate on the phone. How wonderful. Yes, I never thought I would live to see this day. It’s unbelievable.
John McCain gives a gracious concession speech. I give him credit for this. McCain kindly mentions Obama’s grandmother. This is the first good speech I’ve ever heard McCain deliver.
Let us hope that the country can come together.
Republican Ed Rollins says that Obama ran the best campaign he’s seen in 40 years of politics. He did not make a single mistake. He ran a modern campaign, combining organization with the internet and other technology. He has a list of volunteers that any other candidate would kill for.
It’s a new day in the United States of America.
We cracked the sound barrier as a country tonight.
David Gergen makes the point that with the additional states that Obama gained over Kerry in ’04, he will go to Washington as a national president. This is a victory of the masses, not a narrow liberal victory. Of course, Obama will govern as a centrist, which he always has been.
McCain’s country of Joe the Plumber is obsolete. On TV I am watching celebrations all over the country including in front of the White House. It’s like New Year’s Eve. We have overcome.
The body politic in this country has changed overnight.
Just before 11 p.m. here comes the Obama family before the hundreds of thousands in Chicago. What a moment! We see the new President-Elect. It’s electric. I wish I were there.
Change has come to America says our winner.
The President-Elect delivers an inspiring speech. It’s time for a new spirit in this country. It’s time for change. It’s time to get going.
A new dawn of American leadership is at hand.
I listen to this speech and all I can say is “WOW!” It is stunning. It’s a new day in the United States of America.
I go to bed tonight proud and happy for my country. It’s great to be an American.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Barack Obama, John McCain and the Language of Race
This article argues that the Republicans use race-laden language against Obama, which has its roots in the history of the South.
BY Brent Staples
It was not that long ago that black people in the Deep South could be beaten or killed for seeking the right to vote, talking back to the wrong white man or failing to give way on the sidewalk. People of color who violated these and other proscriptions could be designated “uppity niggers” and subjected to acts of violence and intimidation that were meant to dissuade others from following their examples.
The term “uppity” was applied to affluent black people, who sometimes paid a horrific price for owning nicer homes, cars or more successful businesses than whites. Race-based wealth envy was a common trigger for burnings, lynchings and cataclysmic episodes of violence like the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a white mob nearly eradicated the prosperous black community of Greenwood.
Forms of eloquence and assertiveness that were viewed as laudable among whites were seen as positively mutinous when practiced by people of color. As such, black men and women who looked white people squarely in the eye — and argued with them about things that mattered — were declared a threat to the racial order and persecuted whenever possible.
This obsession with black subservience was based in nostalgia for slavery. No sane person would openly express such a sentiment today. But the discomfort with certain forms of black assertiveness is too deeply rooted in the national psyche — and the national language — to just disappear. It has been a persistent theme in the public discourse since Barack Obama became a plausible candidate for the presidency.
A blatant example surfaced earlier this month, when a Georgia Republican, Representative Lynn Westmoreland, described the Obamas as “uppity” in response to a reporter’s question. Mr. Westmoreland, who actually stood by the term when given a chance to retreat, later tried to excuse himself by saying that the dictionary definition carried no racial meaning. That seems implausible. Mr. Westmoreland is from the South, where the vernacular meaning of the word has always been clear.
The Jim Crow South institutionalized racial paternalism in its newspapers, which typically denied black adults the courtesy titles of Mr. and Mrs. — and reduced them to children by calling them by first names only. Representative Geoff Davis, Republican of Kentucky, succumbed to the old language earlier this year when describing what he viewed as Mr. Obama’s lack of preparedness to handle nuclear policy. “That boy’s finger does not need to be on the button,” he said.
In the Old South, black men and women who were competent, confident speakers on matters of importance were termed “disrespectful,” the implication being that all good Negroes bowed, scraped, grinned and deferred to their white betters.
In what is probably a harbinger of things to come, the McCain campaign has already run a commercial that carries a similar intimation, accusing Mr. Obama of being “disrespectful” to Sarah Palin. The argument is muted, but its racial antecedents are very clear.
The throwback references that have surfaced in the campaign suggest that Republicans are fighting on racial grounds, even when express references to race are not evident. In a replay of elections past, the G.O.P. will try to leverage racial ghosts and fears without getting its hands visibly dirty. The Democrats try to parry in customary ways.
Mr. Obama seems to understand that he is always an utterance away from a statement — or a phrase — that could transform him in a campaign ad from the affable, rational and racially ambiguous candidate into the archetypical angry black man who scares off the white vote. His caution is evident from the way he sifts and searches the language as he speaks, stepping around words that might push him into the danger zone.
These maneuvers are often painful to watch. The troubling part is that they are necessary.
Protect This Election
This article point blank says that dirty voting tricks are a historical hallmark of the Republicans. It also makes the point that such mischief can make a difference in close elections, but because the winds are greatly favoring Obama and because people are more aware of these underhanded attempts at suppression, they will not work this year.
BY Andrew Gumbel
Not so long ago, when Karl Rove was still dreaming of a permanent Republican majority based on his "50 percent plus one" model for fighting and winning elections, 2008 was shaping up as possibly the dirtiest election season yet. Not so long ago, when Karl Rove was still dreaming of a permanent Republican majority based on his "50 percent plus one" model for fighting and winning elections, 2008 was shaping up as possibly the dirtiest election season yet.
The plan was straightforward: to use every legislative and executive lever available to the GOP to suppress the votes of minorities, students, the poor, the transient and the elderly; and to denounce any attempt by the other side to level the playing field as a monstrous exercise in systemic voter fraud.
A lot of pieces of that plan are still in place and could still pose a threat to the integrity of the November 4 elections if any one of them--a crucial Senate race, say, if not also the race for the presidency--turns out to be remotely close.
Voter ID laws passed by GOP-majority legislatures in Georgia, Indiana and elsewhere serve as thinly veiled mechanisms for suppressing opposition voters, because those without driver's licenses or other forms of government-issued identity cards are more likely to be Democrats.
In several states, the Republican Party has made plans to challenge the legitimacy of thousands of voters, in some cases using a notorious, legally dubious technique known as "caging," whereby the party sends out nonforwardable mail to low-income or minority households (the people likely to move frequently or to be victims of subprime mortgage foreclosures) and uses returned envelopes to question the eligibility of the addressees.
Some Republican-run states, most notably Florida, have introduced absurdly strict standards for the admission of new voters to the rolls, making it likely that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them will have to go to extraordinary lengths on election day to prove that they have the right to cast a ballot. History suggests many of these new voters will either give up when challenged or fail to show up at all.
Most serious, the Republicans have sought to use the Justice Department to legitimize these efforts and, in some cases, to extend them--by paying close attention to the (mostly nonexistent) problem of individual ballot fraud while showing little or no interest in protecting the rights of minority voters, as the Voting Rights Act mandates that the department do.
The GOP has been laying this groundwork over the past several election cycles--using each technique either as a means to squeak ahead in tight races or as a pretext for challenging results in the event of a narrow loss. We know, for example, that in 2004 the party investigated the eligibility of more than half a million voters across the country, challenged 74,000 of them directly on election day and had a plan in place to challenge tens of thousands more in such swing states as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania in the event that John Kerry came out ahead of George W. Bush in the race for the White House. (An e-mail trail setting out these plans was uncovered after the election by the PBS program Now.)
In 2008 the techniques for challenging voters this way--or for deterring or disenfranchising them in the first place--have become more widespread and sophisticated. Just look at the way the Republicans have demonized ACORN, the low-income advocacy group that works to register new minority voters.
In every election cycle since 2004, ACORN has been put through the wringer for supposedly aiding and abetting voter fraud--usually in ways designed to sway the public against the Democrats in the days before a key state vote. While ACORN has had well-advertised problems getting its low-wage workforce to produce reliable voter registration lists, those lists have not been shown to result in a single fraudulently cast ballot.
This year, that demonization has taken on vast new proportions, presumably connected to ACORN's claim to have registered 1.3 million new voters. The FBI has launched an investigation that smells, once again, of political interference in the electoral process by the Justice Department. Republican operatives have accused ACORN, absurdly, of perpetrating the subprime mortgage lending crisis [see Peter Dreier and John Atlas, "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," page 20] and of being a "quasi-criminal organization"--hinting darkly that ACORN-registered voters may not be eligible. One think tank that sees its mission as bashing ACORN on behalf of its big-business backers, the Employment Policies Institute, even calls it "a multi-million-dollar, multinational conglomerate."
The strange thing about this and the rest of the GOP attack machine is that somewhere along the way, the wheels started coming off. This is partly a result of straightforward political warfare: the groundwork laid by GOP operatives may be more extensive than in the past, but so are the campaigns to denounce their efforts, from the likes of Common Cause, the Century Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations that have issued report after report exposing the dirt and incompetence in the electoral system and calling the Republicans' bluff on the supposed scourge of individual voter fraud. It certainly helps that the denunciations are now coming from well-known groups with serious academic credentials and a commitment to accurate research--a welcome change from the days when hardworking but underqualified Internet campaigners were breathlessly denouncing nonexistent political plots cooked up by the Republicans and the makers of touch-screen voting machines.
The change of mood is also a reflection of broader political realities. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls, the public is of a mind to view Republican maneuvering of all kinds in a less than favorable light and attempts to deter or suppress Democratic voters are up against the remarkable surge in enthusiasm and voter registration behind the Obama ticket. The Republicans were reported to be thinking about mounting a vote-caging operation against the former owners of foreclosed homes in one Michigan county, only to deny any such intent when the plan became public. In Montana, an attempt to disenfranchise 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning districts has sparked similar outrage. Dirty electioneering, in other words, may boost a party headed toward a narrow victory, as it did for the Republicans in 2004, but it can sink a floundering party like a stone. Voters can smell the desperation, and they don't like it.
The Republicans also made the mistake, as they have in so many policy areas, of overreaching and alienating even their own supporters. The US Attorneys scandal was probably the starkest example, especially since at least two if not more of the fired federal prosecutors were given the boot for their failure to pursue individual voter fraud. David Iglesias, the New Mexico prosecutor at the eye of the storm, described in his memoir In Justice earlier this year how the White House first went after Todd Graves in Missouri, to see if there would be a backlash, and became emboldened when they didn't detect much of a reaction. Another eight fired Attorneys later, the new Democratic majority in Congress was alarmed enough to start investigating--and expose the Bush administration's gross political manipulations. Iglesias, interestingly, was a staunch Republican but refused to file unsubstantiated voter fraud charges when he knew any half-serious judge would throw them straight out.
More Republicans standing on principle have surfaced in the heat of the McCain-Obama battle. In October, Montana Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger declared publicly he was "appalled at the leadership of my political party" for vote suppression activities that have "no place in a democracy."
It would be a mistake, though, to count on other John Bohlingers coming forward to denounce every piece of skulduggery. In fact, for those with a mind to be alarmed, 2008 is already sounding several warning bells. Republicans in at least three states--Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin--have sued the electoral authorities to try to expand their power to challenge voters. (The Supreme Court thwarted those efforts in Ohio, but the other cases are still open.) In plenty of others they have telegraphed their intention to go after voter eligibility among certain choice demographic groups--students in Virginia, for example. Several swing states have tried to pass laws specifically outlawing caging and other vote-challenging techniques, but none, in the past couple of years, have successfully pushed them through their state legislatures and onto the desks of their governors.
Usually, vote suppression efforts come to light only in the last couple of weeks before election day. This time, though, the reports of foul play, or attempted foul play, started to pour in unnervingly early. "It's exhausting from this end," says one of the country's leading voter protection activists, Jonah Goldman of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "Every day we get another three or four things we need to investigate. From a political perspective, the campaigns understand the mechanisms of elections a lot better than they ever did before. At the same time, we have by far the most robust and sophisticated voter protection program we've ever had. We've matured very far, on both sides of the issue."
Goldman is no apologist for the Democrats. On the contrary, he sees plenty of flaws to go around in the two-party system and in this country's massively devolved, loophole-ridden electoral system. The only reason the Democrats aren't causing more trouble of their own this season, he feels, is that they aren't as scared of losing. That said, voter suppression is typically a Republican tactic, going back decades. (Democrats, when they cheat, prefer to pad the rolls with supporters rather than purge them of their adversaries.)
Some of the possible vote suppression stems as much from organizational chaos as from ill will. This year, several states have struggled with a federal mandate to streamline their voter databases, leading to wide concern that eligible voters are being purged. The New York Times has found that tens of thousands of names were being struck from lists or blocked from registering in six swing states--Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina--in apparent violation of federal law. In three states--Louisiana, Michigan and Colorado--the number of people who have died or moved out of state is far exceeded by the number of names taken off the voting rolls.
In a report on voter purges published earlier this year, the Brennan Center denounced a process it said was often "shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation." Sometimes a highly technocratic point, like Florida's insistence that every voter registration form should provide an exact match of the name on existing state records, can have profound political ramifications. If a lot of people are going to get disqualified, it is probably the wealthier, more comfortable voters who will have time to present the proper paperwork and get themselves reinstated on election day. More transient voters, or voters with inflexible low-wage jobs, are likelier to give up once they have been told they can vote by provisional ballot only.
We can expect similar chaos with the allocation of voting machines, especially in new battleground states like Virginia and North Carolina, where the turnout for the presidential election is likely to break records. The voter registration problem and the machine allocation problem can be related, since new registrations are often a guide to likely turnout on election day. Since Virginia has a backlog on processing its registration forms, its chances of finding enough machines to satisfy demand look even dimmer. "Virginia is not preparing well," Goldman said.
To the extent that the problems affect minority voters, one might expect some sort of oversight or intervention by the Justice Department. Under the Bush administration, of course, the department has taken the opposite tack--rushing to find individual voter fraud where it doesn't exist but filing no voter intimidation suits under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, except for one case in Mississippi where the aggrieved minority just happened to be whites. There's still a chance the department will clean up its act--for example, it could choose to deploy teams of lawyers to problem areas in the South, as opposed to sending staffers, as it did in 2004, to keep an eye on crucial battleground states like Ohio. Typically, the Justice Department doesn't announce its observation plans until two or three days before the election. "We'll have to wait and see whether there has been an improvement or not," says a cautious Kristen Clarke of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. We probably shouldn't hold our breath.
In the end, even the most insidious vote suppression technique makes just a marginal difference--one half-percentage point here, another there--and comes seriously into play only in a close race. Such tactics can't prevent an Obama landslide, if that is what we are about to see, or overturn a two- to three-point victory in any given state. Anyone who cares about fair elections, though, should be looking beyond just this presidential election. The Republicans who have dreamed up these techniques are thinking long-term strategy over many cycles, not just short-term advantage. The day may also come when Democrats are tempted to play dirty in their own ways--although they have never attempted anything on a national scale as Republicans have. It will take many years of work to repair America's tattered voting system. Keeping a close eye and exposing as much of the dirt as possible in this election, though, is a good place to start.
BY Andrew Gumbel
Not so long ago, when Karl Rove was still dreaming of a permanent Republican majority based on his "50 percent plus one" model for fighting and winning elections, 2008 was shaping up as possibly the dirtiest election season yet. Not so long ago, when Karl Rove was still dreaming of a permanent Republican majority based on his "50 percent plus one" model for fighting and winning elections, 2008 was shaping up as possibly the dirtiest election season yet.
The plan was straightforward: to use every legislative and executive lever available to the GOP to suppress the votes of minorities, students, the poor, the transient and the elderly; and to denounce any attempt by the other side to level the playing field as a monstrous exercise in systemic voter fraud.
A lot of pieces of that plan are still in place and could still pose a threat to the integrity of the November 4 elections if any one of them--a crucial Senate race, say, if not also the race for the presidency--turns out to be remotely close.
Voter ID laws passed by GOP-majority legislatures in Georgia, Indiana and elsewhere serve as thinly veiled mechanisms for suppressing opposition voters, because those without driver's licenses or other forms of government-issued identity cards are more likely to be Democrats.
In several states, the Republican Party has made plans to challenge the legitimacy of thousands of voters, in some cases using a notorious, legally dubious technique known as "caging," whereby the party sends out nonforwardable mail to low-income or minority households (the people likely to move frequently or to be victims of subprime mortgage foreclosures) and uses returned envelopes to question the eligibility of the addressees.
Some Republican-run states, most notably Florida, have introduced absurdly strict standards for the admission of new voters to the rolls, making it likely that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them will have to go to extraordinary lengths on election day to prove that they have the right to cast a ballot. History suggests many of these new voters will either give up when challenged or fail to show up at all.
Most serious, the Republicans have sought to use the Justice Department to legitimize these efforts and, in some cases, to extend them--by paying close attention to the (mostly nonexistent) problem of individual ballot fraud while showing little or no interest in protecting the rights of minority voters, as the Voting Rights Act mandates that the department do.
The GOP has been laying this groundwork over the past several election cycles--using each technique either as a means to squeak ahead in tight races or as a pretext for challenging results in the event of a narrow loss. We know, for example, that in 2004 the party investigated the eligibility of more than half a million voters across the country, challenged 74,000 of them directly on election day and had a plan in place to challenge tens of thousands more in such swing states as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania in the event that John Kerry came out ahead of George W. Bush in the race for the White House. (An e-mail trail setting out these plans was uncovered after the election by the PBS program Now.)
In 2008 the techniques for challenging voters this way--or for deterring or disenfranchising them in the first place--have become more widespread and sophisticated. Just look at the way the Republicans have demonized ACORN, the low-income advocacy group that works to register new minority voters.
In every election cycle since 2004, ACORN has been put through the wringer for supposedly aiding and abetting voter fraud--usually in ways designed to sway the public against the Democrats in the days before a key state vote. While ACORN has had well-advertised problems getting its low-wage workforce to produce reliable voter registration lists, those lists have not been shown to result in a single fraudulently cast ballot.
This year, that demonization has taken on vast new proportions, presumably connected to ACORN's claim to have registered 1.3 million new voters. The FBI has launched an investigation that smells, once again, of political interference in the electoral process by the Justice Department. Republican operatives have accused ACORN, absurdly, of perpetrating the subprime mortgage lending crisis [see Peter Dreier and John Atlas, "The GOP's Blame-ACORN Game," page 20] and of being a "quasi-criminal organization"--hinting darkly that ACORN-registered voters may not be eligible. One think tank that sees its mission as bashing ACORN on behalf of its big-business backers, the Employment Policies Institute, even calls it "a multi-million-dollar, multinational conglomerate."
The strange thing about this and the rest of the GOP attack machine is that somewhere along the way, the wheels started coming off. This is partly a result of straightforward political warfare: the groundwork laid by GOP operatives may be more extensive than in the past, but so are the campaigns to denounce their efforts, from the likes of Common Cause, the Century Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice and other organizations that have issued report after report exposing the dirt and incompetence in the electoral system and calling the Republicans' bluff on the supposed scourge of individual voter fraud. It certainly helps that the denunciations are now coming from well-known groups with serious academic credentials and a commitment to accurate research--a welcome change from the days when hardworking but underqualified Internet campaigners were breathlessly denouncing nonexistent political plots cooked up by the Republicans and the makers of touch-screen voting machines.
The change of mood is also a reflection of broader political realities. Barack Obama is ahead in the polls, the public is of a mind to view Republican maneuvering of all kinds in a less than favorable light and attempts to deter or suppress Democratic voters are up against the remarkable surge in enthusiasm and voter registration behind the Obama ticket. The Republicans were reported to be thinking about mounting a vote-caging operation against the former owners of foreclosed homes in one Michigan county, only to deny any such intent when the plan became public. In Montana, an attempt to disenfranchise 6,000 people in Democratic-leaning districts has sparked similar outrage. Dirty electioneering, in other words, may boost a party headed toward a narrow victory, as it did for the Republicans in 2004, but it can sink a floundering party like a stone. Voters can smell the desperation, and they don't like it.
The Republicans also made the mistake, as they have in so many policy areas, of overreaching and alienating even their own supporters. The US Attorneys scandal was probably the starkest example, especially since at least two if not more of the fired federal prosecutors were given the boot for their failure to pursue individual voter fraud. David Iglesias, the New Mexico prosecutor at the eye of the storm, described in his memoir In Justice earlier this year how the White House first went after Todd Graves in Missouri, to see if there would be a backlash, and became emboldened when they didn't detect much of a reaction. Another eight fired Attorneys later, the new Democratic majority in Congress was alarmed enough to start investigating--and expose the Bush administration's gross political manipulations. Iglesias, interestingly, was a staunch Republican but refused to file unsubstantiated voter fraud charges when he knew any half-serious judge would throw them straight out.
More Republicans standing on principle have surfaced in the heat of the McCain-Obama battle. In October, Montana Lieutenant Governor John Bohlinger declared publicly he was "appalled at the leadership of my political party" for vote suppression activities that have "no place in a democracy."
It would be a mistake, though, to count on other John Bohlingers coming forward to denounce every piece of skulduggery. In fact, for those with a mind to be alarmed, 2008 is already sounding several warning bells. Republicans in at least three states--Ohio, Florida and Wisconsin--have sued the electoral authorities to try to expand their power to challenge voters. (The Supreme Court thwarted those efforts in Ohio, but the other cases are still open.) In plenty of others they have telegraphed their intention to go after voter eligibility among certain choice demographic groups--students in Virginia, for example. Several swing states have tried to pass laws specifically outlawing caging and other vote-challenging techniques, but none, in the past couple of years, have successfully pushed them through their state legislatures and onto the desks of their governors.
Usually, vote suppression efforts come to light only in the last couple of weeks before election day. This time, though, the reports of foul play, or attempted foul play, started to pour in unnervingly early. "It's exhausting from this end," says one of the country's leading voter protection activists, Jonah Goldman of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "Every day we get another three or four things we need to investigate. From a political perspective, the campaigns understand the mechanisms of elections a lot better than they ever did before. At the same time, we have by far the most robust and sophisticated voter protection program we've ever had. We've matured very far, on both sides of the issue."
Goldman is no apologist for the Democrats. On the contrary, he sees plenty of flaws to go around in the two-party system and in this country's massively devolved, loophole-ridden electoral system. The only reason the Democrats aren't causing more trouble of their own this season, he feels, is that they aren't as scared of losing. That said, voter suppression is typically a Republican tactic, going back decades. (Democrats, when they cheat, prefer to pad the rolls with supporters rather than purge them of their adversaries.)
Some of the possible vote suppression stems as much from organizational chaos as from ill will. This year, several states have struggled with a federal mandate to streamline their voter databases, leading to wide concern that eligible voters are being purged. The New York Times has found that tens of thousands of names were being struck from lists or blocked from registering in six swing states--Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina--in apparent violation of federal law. In three states--Louisiana, Michigan and Colorado--the number of people who have died or moved out of state is far exceeded by the number of names taken off the voting rolls.
In a report on voter purges published earlier this year, the Brennan Center denounced a process it said was often "shrouded in secrecy, prone to error, and vulnerable to manipulation." Sometimes a highly technocratic point, like Florida's insistence that every voter registration form should provide an exact match of the name on existing state records, can have profound political ramifications. If a lot of people are going to get disqualified, it is probably the wealthier, more comfortable voters who will have time to present the proper paperwork and get themselves reinstated on election day. More transient voters, or voters with inflexible low-wage jobs, are likelier to give up once they have been told they can vote by provisional ballot only.
We can expect similar chaos with the allocation of voting machines, especially in new battleground states like Virginia and North Carolina, where the turnout for the presidential election is likely to break records. The voter registration problem and the machine allocation problem can be related, since new registrations are often a guide to likely turnout on election day. Since Virginia has a backlog on processing its registration forms, its chances of finding enough machines to satisfy demand look even dimmer. "Virginia is not preparing well," Goldman said.
To the extent that the problems affect minority voters, one might expect some sort of oversight or intervention by the Justice Department. Under the Bush administration, of course, the department has taken the opposite tack--rushing to find individual voter fraud where it doesn't exist but filing no voter intimidation suits under Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, except for one case in Mississippi where the aggrieved minority just happened to be whites. There's still a chance the department will clean up its act--for example, it could choose to deploy teams of lawyers to problem areas in the South, as opposed to sending staffers, as it did in 2004, to keep an eye on crucial battleground states like Ohio. Typically, the Justice Department doesn't announce its observation plans until two or three days before the election. "We'll have to wait and see whether there has been an improvement or not," says a cautious Kristen Clarke of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. We probably shouldn't hold our breath.
In the end, even the most insidious vote suppression technique makes just a marginal difference--one half-percentage point here, another there--and comes seriously into play only in a close race. Such tactics can't prevent an Obama landslide, if that is what we are about to see, or overturn a two- to three-point victory in any given state. Anyone who cares about fair elections, though, should be looking beyond just this presidential election. The Republicans who have dreamed up these techniques are thinking long-term strategy over many cycles, not just short-term advantage. The day may also come when Democrats are tempted to play dirty in their own ways--although they have never attempted anything on a national scale as Republicans have. It will take many years of work to repair America's tattered voting system. Keeping a close eye and exposing as much of the dirt as possible in this election, though, is a good place to start.
The Republicans's Ace in the Hole is Always Race
All of my life of living in the South I've heard white people talk about the government taking from white folks and giving to blacks. All of my life of living in the South I've heard about blacks and welfare: Reagan loved to talk about the Welfare Queen driving a Cadillac. Wonder what color she was? The prejudice and lies are palpable. As the article below points out, McCain knows just what he's doing talking about "socialism" and "spreading the wealth." His base hears this and they're thinking "Obama wants to take from whites and give to blacks." The Republican trump card is always RACE. They are playing it as blatantly as ever here.
02.11.2008
McCain, Redistribution, and "Welfare"
Ross Douthat scratches his head wondering why the McCain campaign is "pinning their hopes on a working-class backlash against the progressive income tax" in Pennsylvania. Ross thinks the answer is incompetence. Maybe he's right, and the McCain campaign is unaware of, say, polls showing that Americans favor Obama's tax hike on the rigch or years of evidence showing that Americans by overwhelming margins believe that wealth should be distributed more evenly.
But the more likely possibility seems to be that the McCain campaign is not monumentally stupid, and is trying to play on fears that Obama will take money from whites and give it to blacks. Hence McCain's claims that Obama plans on "taking from one group of Americans and giving to another," that Obama would turn the IRS into "a giant welfare agency," and his television ads repeatedly flashing the word "welfare" to describe Obama's plans.
Certainly, Pennsylvanians seem to see McCain's argument here as something other than an attack on the principle of progressivity in taxation. The Boston Globe reports:
Still, there remains a deep distrust of big government programs here, and strong skepticism about Obama. A number of voters feared he would transfer wealth from the middle class to help people "who don't work" or who don't deserve it. ...
McCain's focus on casting Obama as the wealth "redistributor in chief" is hard to miss around here these days. In coffee shops and convenience stores, Republican radio ads repeatedly warn that "congressional liberals" want to raise taxes and increase spending by $1 trillion. "They call it taxing the rich; we call it out of touch with our values," the narrator says.
Chris Borick, a political science professor and director of Muhlenberg College's Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, said his tracking polls for the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown suggest that so far, McCain's argument is not working - voters believe McCain would help the rich while Obama would help the middle class.
The concept of wealth redistribution is as unpopular here as it is in most of America, Borick said, and the notion may play on racist fears of black welfare recipients siphoning money from working-class whites - fears that have special resonance since Obama is black.
Note that both the Gallup poll I cited and Borick say that "wealth redistribution" is historically unpopular. That's exactly because the phrase plays on fears of taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor, especially minorities. When the idea is phrased in terms of takign from the rich and giving to the middle class -- which happens to be exactly what Obama is proposing -- then it becomes extremely popular. McCain's line of attack here only makes sense as an attempt to misportray Obama's tax plan as redistribution from middle- and working-class whites. Again, maybe McCain is just doing something completely stupid, but that wouldn't be my bet.
McCain has been accused of playing upon racism many times where the accusation is a stretch. (Though conservatives are overly sensitive here, as what often happens is that one blogger or columnist makes an accusation that does not gain any broader traction among liberals or Democrats.) But this case seems pretty blatant, and in this instance, Ross's habit of taking Republican campaigns on topics like crime and welfare purely at face value is not serving him well.
--Jonathan Chait
Posted: Sunday, November
02.11.2008
McCain, Redistribution, and "Welfare"
Ross Douthat scratches his head wondering why the McCain campaign is "pinning their hopes on a working-class backlash against the progressive income tax" in Pennsylvania. Ross thinks the answer is incompetence. Maybe he's right, and the McCain campaign is unaware of, say, polls showing that Americans favor Obama's tax hike on the rigch or years of evidence showing that Americans by overwhelming margins believe that wealth should be distributed more evenly.
But the more likely possibility seems to be that the McCain campaign is not monumentally stupid, and is trying to play on fears that Obama will take money from whites and give it to blacks. Hence McCain's claims that Obama plans on "taking from one group of Americans and giving to another," that Obama would turn the IRS into "a giant welfare agency," and his television ads repeatedly flashing the word "welfare" to describe Obama's plans.
Certainly, Pennsylvanians seem to see McCain's argument here as something other than an attack on the principle of progressivity in taxation. The Boston Globe reports:
Still, there remains a deep distrust of big government programs here, and strong skepticism about Obama. A number of voters feared he would transfer wealth from the middle class to help people "who don't work" or who don't deserve it. ...
McCain's focus on casting Obama as the wealth "redistributor in chief" is hard to miss around here these days. In coffee shops and convenience stores, Republican radio ads repeatedly warn that "congressional liberals" want to raise taxes and increase spending by $1 trillion. "They call it taxing the rich; we call it out of touch with our values," the narrator says.
Chris Borick, a political science professor and director of Muhlenberg College's Institute of Public Opinion in Allentown, said his tracking polls for the Morning Call newspaper of Allentown suggest that so far, McCain's argument is not working - voters believe McCain would help the rich while Obama would help the middle class.
The concept of wealth redistribution is as unpopular here as it is in most of America, Borick said, and the notion may play on racist fears of black welfare recipients siphoning money from working-class whites - fears that have special resonance since Obama is black.
Note that both the Gallup poll I cited and Borick say that "wealth redistribution" is historically unpopular. That's exactly because the phrase plays on fears of taking money from the middle class and giving it to the poor, especially minorities. When the idea is phrased in terms of takign from the rich and giving to the middle class -- which happens to be exactly what Obama is proposing -- then it becomes extremely popular. McCain's line of attack here only makes sense as an attempt to misportray Obama's tax plan as redistribution from middle- and working-class whites. Again, maybe McCain is just doing something completely stupid, but that wouldn't be my bet.
McCain has been accused of playing upon racism many times where the accusation is a stretch. (Though conservatives are overly sensitive here, as what often happens is that one blogger or columnist makes an accusation that does not gain any broader traction among liberals or Democrats.) But this case seems pretty blatant, and in this instance, Ross's habit of taking Republican campaigns on topics like crime and welfare purely at face value is not serving him well.
--Jonathan Chait
Posted: Sunday, November
Do "Liberal" Professors Indoctrinate their Students?
It is a cardinal tenet of the ignorant Right Wing in this country that wild "liberal" college professors indoctrinate their students. This is pure, unadulterated bunk. Here is an indication of what I mean.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: November 2, 2008
An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students. This conviction not only fueled the culture wars but has also led state lawmakers to consider requiring colleges to submit reports to the government detailing their progress in ensuring “intellectual diversity,” prompted universities to establish faculty positions devoted to conservatism and spurred the creation of a network of volunteer watchdogs to monitor “political correctness” on campuses.
Skip to next paragraph
RelatedA Link to the study "Investigating the Impact of Politics in the Classroom: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics"
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Just a few weeks ago Michael Barone, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned in The Washington Times against “the liberal thugocracy,” arguing that today’s liberals seem to be taking “marching orders” from “college and university campuses.”
But a handful of new studies have found such worries to be overwrought. Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.
If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).
The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.
“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”
A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.
“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study.
Their work is often cited by people on both sides of the debate, not least because Mr. Woessner describes himself as politically conservative.
No one disputes that American academia is decidedly more liberal than the rest of the population, or that there is a detectable shift to the left among students during their college years. Still, both studies in the peer-reviewed PS, for example, found that changes in political ideology could not be attributed to proselytizing professors but rather to general trends among that age group. As Mack D. Mariani at Xavier University and Gordon J. Hewitt at Hamilton College write in the current issue, “Student political orientation does not change for a majority of students while in college, and for those that do change there is evidence that other factors have an effect on that change, such as gender and socioeconomic status.”
That may be, said Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason, but those results don’t necessarily mean there isn’t a problem. Mr. Klein, whose research has shown that registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans among faculty in the humanities and social sciences at American colleges and universities, maintains that the focus on the liberal-conservative split is misdirected. Such terms are vague and can be used to describe everything from attitudes about religion and family to the arts and lifestyles, he said.
The real issue, said Mr. Klein, who calls himself a libertarian, is that social democratic ideas dominate universities — ideas that play down the importance of the individual and promote government intervention.
Such “academic groupthink” means that the works of such thinkers are not offered enough, he argues. “A major tragedy is that they’re not getting exposed to the good stuff,” he said, citing the works of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
“Even if we had hard, definite evidence that students weren’t influenced by their professors, there is still reason for great concern about the composition of the faculty,” Mr. Klein added.
K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”
“The conservative critics are inventing a straw man that doesn’t exist and are missing the real problem that does,” he added.
Anne Neal, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which closely follows this issue, agrees that “it is not about left and right.”
Many researchers and critics also agree that a better grounding in American history and politics is important. “It wasn’t too long ago that schools and universities required civic education and American history,” Mr. Fritschler noted. “Almost all of those requirements have evaporated.”
A number of organizations that have a large base of conservative supporters, like Ms. Neal’s council and the National Association of Scholars, have been promoting a return to traditional courses in western civilization and American history.
Mr. Fritschler said that perhaps the most insidious side effect of assumptions about liberal influence has been an overall disengagement on campus from civic and political affairs, and a reluctance to promote serious debate of political issues. If anything, he added, the problem is not too much politics, but too little.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: November 2, 2008
An article of faith among conservative critics of American universities has been that liberal professors politically indoctrinate their students. This conviction not only fueled the culture wars but has also led state lawmakers to consider requiring colleges to submit reports to the government detailing their progress in ensuring “intellectual diversity,” prompted universities to establish faculty positions devoted to conservatism and spurred the creation of a network of volunteer watchdogs to monitor “political correctness” on campuses.
Skip to next paragraph
RelatedA Link to the study "Investigating the Impact of Politics in the Classroom: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics"
Readers' Comments
How much influence do you think professors have over their students' political views?
Post a Comment »
Read All Comments (126) »
Just a few weeks ago Michael Barone, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, warned in The Washington Times against “the liberal thugocracy,” arguing that today’s liberals seem to be taking “marching orders” from “college and university campuses.”
But a handful of new studies have found such worries to be overwrought. Three sets of researchers recently concluded that professors have virtually no impact on the political views and ideology of their students.
If there has been a conspiracy among liberal faculty members to influence students, “they’ve done a pretty bad job,” said A. Lee Fritschler, a professor of public policy at George Mason University and an author of the new book “Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities” (Brookings Institution Press).
The notion that students are induced to move leftward “is a fantasy,” said Jeremy D. Mayer, another of the book’s authors. When it comes to shaping a young person’s political views, “it is really hard to change the mind of anyone over 15,” said Mr. Mayer, who did extensive research on faculty and students.
“Parents and family are the most important influence,” followed by the news media and peers, he said. “Professors are among the least influential.”
A study of nearly 7,000 students at 38 institutions published in the current PS: Political Science and Politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association, as well as a second study that has been accepted by the journal to run in April 2009, both reach similar conclusions.
“There is no evidence that an instructor’s views instigate political change among students,” Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner, a husband-and-wife team of political scientists who have frequently conducted research on politics in higher education, write in that second study.
Their work is often cited by people on both sides of the debate, not least because Mr. Woessner describes himself as politically conservative.
No one disputes that American academia is decidedly more liberal than the rest of the population, or that there is a detectable shift to the left among students during their college years. Still, both studies in the peer-reviewed PS, for example, found that changes in political ideology could not be attributed to proselytizing professors but rather to general trends among that age group. As Mack D. Mariani at Xavier University and Gordon J. Hewitt at Hamilton College write in the current issue, “Student political orientation does not change for a majority of students while in college, and for those that do change there is evidence that other factors have an effect on that change, such as gender and socioeconomic status.”
That may be, said Daniel Klein, an economist at George Mason, but those results don’t necessarily mean there isn’t a problem. Mr. Klein, whose research has shown that registered Democrats vastly outnumber Republicans among faculty in the humanities and social sciences at American colleges and universities, maintains that the focus on the liberal-conservative split is misdirected. Such terms are vague and can be used to describe everything from attitudes about religion and family to the arts and lifestyles, he said.
The real issue, said Mr. Klein, who calls himself a libertarian, is that social democratic ideas dominate universities — ideas that play down the importance of the individual and promote government intervention.
Such “academic groupthink” means that the works of such thinkers are not offered enough, he argues. “A major tragedy is that they’re not getting exposed to the good stuff,” he said, citing the works of John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
“Even if we had hard, definite evidence that students weren’t influenced by their professors, there is still reason for great concern about the composition of the faculty,” Mr. Klein added.
K. C. Johnson, a historian at the City University of New York, characterizes the problem as pedagogical, not political. Entire fields of study, from traditional literary analysis to political and military history, are simply not widely taught anymore, Mr. Johnson contended: “Even students who want to learn don’t have the opportunity because there are no specialists on the faculty to take courses from.”
“The conservative critics are inventing a straw man that doesn’t exist and are missing the real problem that does,” he added.
Anne Neal, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which closely follows this issue, agrees that “it is not about left and right.”
Many researchers and critics also agree that a better grounding in American history and politics is important. “It wasn’t too long ago that schools and universities required civic education and American history,” Mr. Fritschler noted. “Almost all of those requirements have evaporated.”
A number of organizations that have a large base of conservative supporters, like Ms. Neal’s council and the National Association of Scholars, have been promoting a return to traditional courses in western civilization and American history.
Mr. Fritschler said that perhaps the most insidious side effect of assumptions about liberal influence has been an overall disengagement on campus from civic and political affairs, and a reluctance to promote serious debate of political issues. If anything, he added, the problem is not too much politics, but too little.
Voting Trouble Tomorrow?
The Republicans are up to their usual dirty tricks, now more than ever. This is nothing new for those scoundrels. There is likely to be trouble tomorrow---court challenges that could throw this election into the courts just like 2000. Let us hope not.
In Final Days, Dirty Tricks Rear Ugly Head
Efforts To Confuse Or Scare Voters Once Again Appear As Election Day Nears
Guadalupe Bojorquez (outside her mother's home in Albuquerque, N.M., Oct. 29, 2008) says her 67-year-old mother was harassed by a private investigator who came to her house and questioned her right to vote and even her legality, frightening her and driving her to tears. (AP)
CBS Poll: Obama Maintains 13 Point Lead
Obama Discusses Aunt Reportedly Living In U.S. Illegally
Cheney Stars In New Obama Ad
Just before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks - confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night. The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent. Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions. Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections - one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats. (See the flyer here.) In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens. "He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter," said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. "He totally, totally scared the heck out of her." In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. "Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4," said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake." Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen "an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities." The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards. Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic. Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday. "Oh, there's plenty of time for things to get ugly," said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan. Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses. In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany. "It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night," Stalberg said. "Why couldn't someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it's very smartly done. The message gets through. It's done carefully enough that people might read it." Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category. In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone. The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them. "The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters," said McDonald. "If you can find out who's doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it's just difficult to know who's doing what. Some of it's just anonymous." Trying to mislead voters is nothing new. "We see this every year," said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "It all happens around this time when there's too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn't get investigated." In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote. The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people "if you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the presidential election." In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3. E-mail assaults have become increasingly popular this year, keeping pace with the proliferation of blogging and Obama's massive online campaign efforts, according to voting activists. "It is newer and more furious than it ever has been before," Goldman said. And Republicans are not exempt. "Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before," said Goldman. "During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites." New York City's former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured "quotes" from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.
In Final Days, Dirty Tricks Rear Ugly Head
Efforts To Confuse Or Scare Voters Once Again Appear As Election Day Nears
Guadalupe Bojorquez (outside her mother's home in Albuquerque, N.M., Oct. 29, 2008) says her 67-year-old mother was harassed by a private investigator who came to her house and questioned her right to vote and even her legality, frightening her and driving her to tears. (AP)
CBS Poll: Obama Maintains 13 Point Lead
Obama Discusses Aunt Reportedly Living In U.S. Illegally
Cheney Stars In New Obama Ad
Just before Election Day, as inevitable as winter, comes an onslaught of dirty tricks - confusing e-mails, disturbing phone calls and insinuating fliers left on doorsteps during the night. The intent, almost always, is to keep folks from voting or to confuse them, usually through intimidation or misinformation. But in this presidential race, in which a black man leads most polls, some of the deceit has a decidedly racist bent. Complaints have surfaced in predominantly African-American neighborhoods of Philadelphia where fliers have circulated, warning voters they could be arrested at the polls if they had unpaid parking tickets or if they had criminal convictions. Over the weekend in Virginia, bogus fliers with an authentic-looking commonwealth seal said fears of high voter turnout had prompted election officials to hold two elections - one on Tuesday for Republicans and another on Wednesday for Democrats. (See the flyer here.) In New Mexico, two Hispanic women filed a lawsuit last week claiming they were harassed by a private investigator working for a Republican lawyer who came to their homes and threatened to call immigration authorities, even though they are U.S. citizens. "He was questioning her status, saying that he needed to see her papers and documents to show that she was a U.S. citizen and was a legitimate voter," said Guadalupe Bojorquez, speaking on behalf of her mother, Dora Escobedo, a 67-year-old Albuquerque resident who speaks only Spanish. "He totally, totally scared the heck out of her." In Pennsylvania, e-mails appeared linking Democrat Barack Obama to the Holocaust. "Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, Nov. 4," said the electronic message, paid for by an entity calling itself the Republican Federal Committee. "Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake." Laughlin McDonald, who leads the ACLU's Voting Rights Project, said he has never seen "an election where there was more interest and more voter turnout, and more efforts to suppress registration and turnout. And that has a real impact on minorities." The Obama campaign and civil rights advocacy groups have signed up millions of new voters for this presidential race. In Ohio alone, some 600,000 have submitted new voter registration cards. Across the country, many of these first-time voters are young and strong Obama supporters. Many are also black and Hispanic. Activist groups say it is this fresh crop of ballot-minded citizens that makes some Republicans very nervous. And they say they expect the dirty tricks to get dirtier in final hours before Tuesday. "Oh, there's plenty of time for things to get ugly," said Zachary Stalberg, president of The Committee of Seventy, a Philadelphia-based government watchdog group that is nonpartisan. Other reports of intimidation efforts in the hotly contested state of Pennsylvania include leaflets taped to picnic benches at Drexel University, warning students that police would be at the polls on Tuesday to arrest would-be voters with prior criminal offenses. In his Jewish neighborhood, Stalberg said, fliers were recently left claiming Obama was more sympathetic to Palestinians than to Israel, and showed a photograph of him speaking in Germany. "It shows up between the screen door and the front door in the middle of the night," Stalberg said. "Why couldn't someone knock on the door and hand that to me in the middle of the day? In a sense, it's very smartly done. The message gets through. It's done carefully enough that people might read it." Such tactics are common, and are often impossible to trace. Robo-calls, in which automated, bogus phone messages are sent over and over, are very hard to trace to their source, say voting advocates. E-mails fall into the same category. In Nevada, for example, Latino voters said they had received calls from people describing themselves as Obama volunteers, urging them to cast their ballot over the phone. The calls were reported to Election Protection, a nonprofit advocacy group that runs a hot line for election troubles. The organization does not know who orchestrated them. "The Voting Rights Act makes it a crime to misled and intimidate voters," said McDonald. "If you can find out who's doing it, those people should be prosecuted. But sometimes it's just difficult to know who's doing what. Some of it's just anonymous." Trying to mislead voters is nothing new. "We see this every year," said Jonah Goldman of the advocacy group Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. "It all happens around this time when there's too much other stuff going on in the campaigns, and it doesn't get investigated." In 2006, automated phone calls in the final days leading to the federal election wrongly warned voters they would not be allowed to vote without a photo ID. In Colorado and Virginia, people reported receiving calls that told them their registrations had expired and they would be arrested if they showed up to vote. The White House contest of 2004 was marked by similar deceptions. In Milwaukee, fliers went up advising people "if you've already voted in any election this year, you can't vote in the presidential election." In Pennsylvania, a letter bearing what appeared to be the McCandless Township seal falsely proclaimed that in order to cut long voting lines, Republicans would cast ballots on Nov. 2 and Democrats would vote on Nov. 3. E-mail assaults have become increasingly popular this year, keeping pace with the proliferation of blogging and Obama's massive online campaign efforts, according to voting activists. "It is newer and more furious than it ever has been before," Goldman said. And Republicans are not exempt. "Part of it is that election campaigns are more online than ever before," said Goldman. "During the primaries, a lot of Web sites went up that seemed to be for (GOP candidate Rudy) Giuliani, but actually were attack sites." New York City's former mayor and his high-profile colleagues Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney were also targeted in fake Internet sites that featured "quotes" from the candidates espousing support for extreme positions they never endorsed.
Sunday, November 2, 2008
What Our Presidential Candidates Have Read
Jon Meacham, editor of Newsweek, writes about the reading habits of our two presidential candidates.
The current nominees for president also offer revealing choices when asked which books have been most important to them. John McCain has long spoken of his affection for, and identification with, Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” After I interviewed McCain this past summer — a conversation in which we discussed Jordan at some length — I reread the conclusion of the novel. The lingering image of the final scene is not one of death but of Jordan, the college professor who has come to Spain to fight the fascists, wounded yet still alive, taking aim at the enemy, his heart still beating against the forest floor. Hemingway does not kill Jordan but leaves him there, engaged to the end in the battles of his time.
McCain sees himself in the same way: as a warrior who never gives in, and never gives up, no matter how hopeless the cause. “Oh, I reread it all the time,” McCain told me. “Robert Jordan is what I always thought a man ought to be.” Jordan’s essential creed is encapsulated in a sentence that gave McCain the title of one of the books he has written with his aide Mark Salter: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” It’s not hard to see how the line would resonate with a romantic fatalist like McCain.
In captivity, McCain used to act out scenes from books and movies to keep his mind sharp. In addition to Hemingway, he loves the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, “The Great Gatsby,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, especially “The Last of the Mohicans” (he remembers the N. C. Wyeth illustrations). He likes William Faulkner in, as he told me, “small doses,” especially “The Bear” and “Turnabout.” McCain speaks of nonfiction less often but told me he has read — twice — Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Most interesting, though, was McCain’s reaction when I suggested that his father, a career naval officer who rose to be commander in chief of the Pacific forces during the Vietnam War, was rather like Victor (Pug) Henry, the hero of Herman Wouk’s “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.” Exactly, McCain said: his father was exactly like Pug Henry. Later, I reread the last pages of “The Winds of War.” In them, Henry watches his son set sail from Pearl Harbor aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise: “He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world.”
McCain and Obama are so different in so many ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they cite as most important, they embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes. They mention Shakespeare’s tragedies, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and David Halberstam’s “Best and the Brightest.” Like Robert Jordan, they want to make things better and are willing to put themselves in the arena, but they know that nothing is perfectible and that progress is provisional. Things fall apart; plans fail; planes are shot out of the sky. Their attraction to Hemingway suggests a willingness to acknowledge unpleasant facts not always found in those who enter elective politics.
When I asked him by e-mail to send a list of books and writers that were most significant to him, Obama offered American standards: The Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk,” King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Among writers from abroad, he singles out Graham Greene (“The Power and the Glory” and “The Quiet American”), Doris Lessing (“The Golden Notebook”), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” and Gandhi’s autobiography. In theology and philosophy Obama mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich — writers consistent with his acknowledgment that while life is bleak, it is not hopeless.
Obama, unsurprisingly, appears to be more drawn to stories sympathetic to the working classes than is McCain. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle,” about a labor dispute; Robert Caro’s “Power Broker,” about Robert Moses; and Studs Terkel’s “Working.” But he also includes Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” on his list.
Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” a novel about a corrupt Southern governor modeled on Huey Long, though he is also a kind of Jacksonian figure. The last line of the novel reads, “Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” Either John McCain or Barack Obama is about to make that same journey. “I was born for the storm,” Andrew Jackson once said, “and a calm does not suit me.” Born for it or not, the 44th president, whoever he is, is in for rough weather.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of the forthcoming “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”
The current nominees for president also offer revealing choices when asked which books have been most important to them. John McCain has long spoken of his affection for, and identification with, Robert Jordan, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” After I interviewed McCain this past summer — a conversation in which we discussed Jordan at some length — I reread the conclusion of the novel. The lingering image of the final scene is not one of death but of Jordan, the college professor who has come to Spain to fight the fascists, wounded yet still alive, taking aim at the enemy, his heart still beating against the forest floor. Hemingway does not kill Jordan but leaves him there, engaged to the end in the battles of his time.
McCain sees himself in the same way: as a warrior who never gives in, and never gives up, no matter how hopeless the cause. “Oh, I reread it all the time,” McCain told me. “Robert Jordan is what I always thought a man ought to be.” Jordan’s essential creed is encapsulated in a sentence that gave McCain the title of one of the books he has written with his aide Mark Salter: “The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” It’s not hard to see how the line would resonate with a romantic fatalist like McCain.
In captivity, McCain used to act out scenes from books and movies to keep his mind sharp. In addition to Hemingway, he loves the stories of W. Somerset Maugham, “The Great Gatsby,” “All Quiet on the Western Front” and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, especially “The Last of the Mohicans” (he remembers the N. C. Wyeth illustrations). He likes William Faulkner in, as he told me, “small doses,” especially “The Bear” and “Turnabout.” McCain speaks of nonfiction less often but told me he has read — twice — Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
Most interesting, though, was McCain’s reaction when I suggested that his father, a career naval officer who rose to be commander in chief of the Pacific forces during the Vietnam War, was rather like Victor (Pug) Henry, the hero of Herman Wouk’s “Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.” Exactly, McCain said: his father was exactly like Pug Henry. Later, I reread the last pages of “The Winds of War.” In them, Henry watches his son set sail from Pearl Harbor aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise: “He could almost picture God the Father looking down with sad wonder at this mischief. In a world so rich and lovely, could his children find nothing better to do than to dig iron from the ground and work it into vast grotesque engines for blowing each other up? Yet this madness was the way of the world.”
McCain and Obama are so different in so many ways, but they do share one thing: a kind of tragic sensibility. Judging from the books they cite as most important, they embrace hope but recognize the reality that life is unlikely to conform to our wishes. They mention Shakespeare’s tragedies, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and David Halberstam’s “Best and the Brightest.” Like Robert Jordan, they want to make things better and are willing to put themselves in the arena, but they know that nothing is perfectible and that progress is provisional. Things fall apart; plans fail; planes are shot out of the sky. Their attraction to Hemingway suggests a willingness to acknowledge unpleasant facts not always found in those who enter elective politics.
When I asked him by e-mail to send a list of books and writers that were most significant to him, Obama offered American standards: The Federalist, Jefferson, Emerson, Lincoln, Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk,” King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.” Among writers from abroad, he singles out Graham Greene (“The Power and the Glory” and “The Quiet American”), Doris Lessing (“The Golden Notebook”), Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward” and Gandhi’s autobiography. In theology and philosophy Obama mentioned Nietzsche, Niebuhr and Tillich — writers consistent with his acknowledgment that while life is bleak, it is not hopeless.
Obama, unsurprisingly, appears to be more drawn to stories sympathetic to the working classes than is McCain. Obama cites John Steinbeck’s “In Dubious Battle,” about a labor dispute; Robert Caro’s “Power Broker,” about Robert Moses; and Studs Terkel’s “Working.” But he also includes Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and “Theory of Moral Sentiments” on his list.
Both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” a novel about a corrupt Southern governor modeled on Huey Long, though he is also a kind of Jacksonian figure. The last line of the novel reads, “Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” Either John McCain or Barack Obama is about to make that same journey. “I was born for the storm,” Andrew Jackson once said, “and a calm does not suit me.” Born for it or not, the 44th president, whoever he is, is in for rough weather.
Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, is the author of the forthcoming “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.”
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