The strange death of Republican America

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It’s 2.30am and I’m turning in, convinced that the nightmare of Bush/Cheney is nearly over. But before heading for bed, I came on this nice piece by Sidney Blumenthal in openDemocracy…

In 29 July 2008, President George W Bush appeared at the Lincoln Electric Company in Euclid, Ohio, where he spoke about energy and then asked the audience for questions. The opportunity for people in a small town in the midwest to pose a question directly to the president of the United States is a rare one, possibly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “And now I’d like to answer some questions, if you have any”, said Bush. But his request was returned with silence. Bush filled the air with an awkward joke: “After seven-and-a-half years, if I can’t figure out how to dodge them, I shouldn’t…” The audience tittered nervously. Bush continued, “If you don’t have any questions, I can tell you a lot of interesting stories.” The crowd laughed again, but no one raised a hand. “Okay”, said Bush, “I’ll tell you a story.”

Suspended animation

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It’s been an extraordinary day. I’ve been awake since 6am, and although I’ve been busy there hasn’t been a moment when the presidential election has been out of my thoughts. This really is a hinge of history. The hopes of countless millions of people — in the US and across the world — rest on what happens in the voting booths of the US today. Of all the elections I can remember, the only two that come close in significance are the presidential election of 1960 when JFK won by a whisker, and the British General Election of 1997 when the stranglehold of Tory rule was finally broken. I have vivid memories of both contests.

In 1960 I was a precocious 14-year-old living in rural Ireland. Our household was strictly non-political, there was no television, and the radio news service was pretty rackety. But Kennedy’s run for president was big news because he was (a) Catholic and (b) Irish. (We didn’t know about his loathsome old man then. But we knew that his election would represent a radical break with the past. And on that count at least we were right.)

In 1997 I walked to the village hall near where we live in the UK and voted after dropping the kids at school. It was a glorious early summer day, and as I walked back I remember marvelling at the thought that all over the country millions of people were making the same fateful imprints on their ballot papers. And I remember feeling thankful that I lived in a democracy, however imperfect.

Elections like the one taking place today — which are about very stark choices — highlight how strange and intractable values are. I’ve been shocked to find that some people whom I have hitherto regard as civilised and intelligent are vociferous McCain supporters. I’m reminded of something Ken Tynan said many years ago after he’d been to see John Osborne’s groundbreaking play Look Back in Anger. “I doubt”, he wrote in the Observer, “if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.” I have similar feelings about McCain/Palin enthusiasts.

I’ve been awestruck by the passion and commitment that the US election has generated on the Obama side. A good friend of mine has been working for the campaign as a volunteer for ages. This week she flew from her home in Seattle to Cincinatti in Ohio. Here’s an excerpt from an email she sent the other day:

For the first three days, most of our canvassers were volunteers who had come from out of town to help. A delightful couple from Los Angeles, a Senate staffer from DC, a carload of 50 year old women from Kentucky. Pam, my wonderful and unflappable co-worker from San Antonio, and I canvassed with them and still had plenty of time to tally our results and report data to our Field Organizer. That all changed on Saturday. Packet pandemonium! Was 23BB still out? Who took 23N-1? We forgot to get his cell phone number! How do I record the data for Pass 2 when it looks just like Pass 1? We learned a lot. My Field Organizer (25 and tireless) told me Election Day reporting would have to be better. Words to that effect.

Today we are putting door hangers on all the doors on our walk lists. No knocking, no talking. Each door hanger has the precinct polling place printed on it. The challenge of the day will be to make sure the walk packet for 23H gets the right bundle of door hangers. A and E [my friend’s daughters] got here late Saturday afternoon. They’ve decided I need a personal assistant and they’re right. I’ll take two. How lucky I am.

I got out for an hour or so of canvassing yesterday afternoon. It was summer with red and gold trees. These kids were playing football in the street. They followed me on their bikes, telling me where the doorbell was, who lived where. They asked for Obama buttons. There are none left. They said they talk about the election in school. They asked me if I work for Obama. I said I do. But really, I’m working for them.

And she attached this picture:

Impossible to imagine a British politician or party generating this kind of commitment. More’s the pity.

The choice

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I’ve just read an extraordinary blog post. This is how it begins:

I have a confession to make.

I did not vote for Barack Obama today.

I’ve openly supported Obama since March. But I didn’t vote for him today.

Read it in full. It’s not what you think.

Thanks to Nicci and Sean for finding it.

Palin: last of the culture warriors?

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Intriguing Peter Beinart piece in the Washington Post, speculating on why Palin’s rhetoric hasn’t worked this time.

The relationship between prosperity and cultural conflict isn’t exact, of course, but it is significant that during this era’s culture war we’ve gone a quarter-century without a serious recession. Economic issues have mattered in presidential elections, of course, but not until today have we faced an economic crisis so grave that it made cultural questions seem downright trivial. In 2000, in the wake of an economic boom and a sex scandal that led to a president’s impeachment, 22 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that “moral values” were their biggest concern, compared with only 19 percent who cited the economy.

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and “issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage” down to only 6 percent. It’s no coincidence that Palin’s popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She’s depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin’s attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn’t that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites — even in bright-red states — don’t view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

The economic challenges of the coming era are complicated, fascinating and terrifying, while the cultural battles of the 1960s feel increasingly stale. If John McCain loses tomorrow, the GOP will probably choose someone like Mitt Romney or Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to lead it back from the wilderness, someone who — although socially conservative — speaks fluently about the nation’s economic plight and doesn’t try to substitute identity for policy. Although she seems like a fresh face, Sarah Palin actually represents the end of an era. She may be the last culture warrior on a national ticket for a very long time.

Hmmm… we’ll see.

What might go wrong tomorrow

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From Ed Felten…

Long lines to vote: Polling places will be strained by the number of voters. In some places the wait will be long – especially where voting requires the use of machines. Many voters will be willing and able to wait, but some will have to leave without casting votes. Polls will be kept open late, and results will be reported later than expected, because of long lines.

Registration problems: Quite a few voters will arrive at the polling place to find that they are not on the voter rolls, because of official error, or problems with voter registration databases, or simply because the voter went to the wrong polling place. New voters will be especially likely to have such problems. Voters who think they should be on the rolls in a polling place can file provisional ballots there. Afterward, officials must judge whether each provisional voter was in fact eligible, a time-consuming process which, given the relative flood of provisional ballots, will strain official resources.

Voting machine problems: Electronic voting machines will fail somewhere. This is virtually inevitable, given the sheer number of machines and polling places, the variety of voting machines, and the often poor reliability and security engineering of the machines. If we’re lucky, the problems can be addressed using a paper trail or other records. If not, we’ll have a mess on our hands.

How serious the mess might be depends on how close the election is. If the margin of victory is large, as some polls suggest it may be, then it will be easy to write off problems as “minor” and move on to the next stage in our collective political life. If the election is close, we could see a big fight. The worse case is an ultra-close election like in 2000, with long lines, provisional ballots, or voting machine failures putting the outcome in doubt.

Let’s hope the opinion polls are right. The omens are not good on the voting machine front.

Drop the CiC cliche

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Terrific Glenn Greenwald piece in Salon.com arguing that the modern craze for preferring to the US President as “Commander in Chief” is not only unconstitutional but dangerous.

If I could be granted one small political wish, it would be the permanent elimination of this widespread, execrable Orwellian fetish of reverently referring to the President as “our commander in chief.” And Biden’s formulation here is a particularly creepy rendition, since he’s taunting opponents of Obama that, come Tuesday, they will be forced to refer to him as “our commander in chief Barack Obama” (Sarah Palin, in the very first speech she delivered after being unveiled as the Vice Presidential candidate, said of John McCain: “that’s the kind of man I want as our commander in chief,” and she’s been delivering that same line in her stump speech ever since).

The CiC usage has been assiduously promoted by George W Bush as a way of boosting his view of untramelled presidential power (the so-called ‘unitary executive’ doctrine). After all, in the military, the CiC is someone who must be obeyed. And that’s fine in the armed forces. But the president is a civilian who happens to have been elected to the highest office in the land. His authority is constitutional, not military. If George Bush ordered me to do anything I would tell him to get stuffed — unless I worked for the executive branch of the US government (where he really is the ultimate Boss of Bosses). And so should every American citizen.

Rip van Winklies

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I’m astonished by the vox pops that journalists are doing in the US as they interview ‘undecided’ voters. Time and time again one hears people whining about Obama that they “don’t really know anything about him”. On what planet have these people been living for the past year? I know that most voters aren’t terribly interested in politics, but this is ludicrous. Does it mean that they can’t think of a respectable way of explaining why they’re not going to vote for a black candidate?

Crashed and burned

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Robert Winder has a lovely essay in the Guardian about Tom Wolfe’s book, The Right Stuff. How does it read now, in the light of Bush, Iraq and thWall Street maelstrom? He concludes that

The Right Stuff is now best read as an elegy – a remembrance of vanished times. It describes a place and a mood that have crashed and burned. The seeds of this melancholy may already have been in place when the book was published – Wolfe was describing the early 60s from the vantage point of the late 70s, after all. But he was still able to work in an optimistic, fizzing spirit that has now quite dissolved: no one writes pop songs about astronauts the way that Bowie/Elton John/Pink Floyd and company once did. A book that once juddered with thoughts of the future now comes suffused with the past. Nostalgia for the 60s usually involves thoughts of free love, raw music and ditzy drugs, not the panic attacks inspired by Sputnik and the missile testing in Arizona and Florida. Wolfe was thrilled to find such subjects, and had superb, pyrotechnic fun with them. Who would have thought, only a generation later, that his eager, loop-the-loop prose would seem so sad?

He’s right. Sigh.