Slouching towards Bethlehem

Lately, the newspapers are full of frank foreboding about how and when Election 2004 is going to be decided this year. Litigiousness looms as the incalculable determining factor in the election.

Among the pundit class, conservatives seem to be the most worried about a close election and the possibility of a run-off in the courts. For MSNBC today, George Will writes about the Dooomsday Scenario that could seriously damage the legitimacy of whoever wins Election 2004. Interestingly, Will sees the 2000 Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore as the "ticking bomb" at the heart of Election 2004, and he seems to have decided that Election 2000 should have been allowed to play itself out in the Florida courts and legislature (it probably eases the swallowing of this bitter pill for Republicans that Will believes Bush would have won anyway).

What then is the "rough beast" slouching its way towards Bethlehem to be born, this campaign season? A President who might not be inaugurated before all the litigation is finished, sometime in May 2005. A terrible precedent indeed.

Of course it's all those evil Democrats' fault, with their teams of lawyers. Never mind the Republicans are preparing their legal teams, too. I'm sure they view it as only a necessary response to Democratic maneuvering. Neal Boortz today on his radio program said that he thinks John Kerry will win by a slim margin in two weeks for two reasons: voter turnout and vote rigging. Conservative talkers like to point to the recent case of a man arrested for filling out multiple phony voter registration forms for the NAACP in exchange for crack(Officials allege crack-for-registration) as a sign of just how determined the Democrats are to win this election by hook or by crook, preferably by crook. Democrats, meanwhile, have their own concerns over whether provisional and absentee ballots will be counted fairly, or even whether Kerry's name will appear on them at all. In Ohio, John Kerry's name was mistakenly left off absentee ballots sent out to two counties.

This has to be one of the strangest campaigns for the Presidency in history. The "early voting" is something that totally caught me by surprise. I had no clue people were going to be able to vote early, and I am not quite sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, I think Republicans are far too restrictive of who can vote. Boortz likes to spout off about how no one has the right to vote, and one of his pet topics is how the voter rolls need to be culled (he would prevent welfare recipients from voting, for example; "If you depend on government handouts for your survival, at least have the decency to sit back and let the people who are paying your bills make the decisions," he said on his blog today). He would also limit voting to those who can name the people representing them in their state legislatures and in Washington. These are good, homespun ideas that appeal to people who don't think through the consequences. I can name a state legislator, but I have no clue if he is the legislator from my district or not, I am sorry to say. I am much better informed on the national level. Still, I probably would not be able to pass Boortz' voter test to make it into the polls, and how many others would be disenfranchised as well? I regret bringing up Boortz so frequently, but I think it's a good idea to have one eye on the talkers. They speak to millions of Americans. Limbaugh, I think, has lost his touch, so I read Boortz's blog quickly in the morning before work; Boortz is a growing force in this part of the media.

To return to the early voting issue, I try to live up to democratic ideals, to the point that I don't think even convicted felons should forfeit their right to vote. I also think election day ought to be on a Saturday. Yet I like the idea of voting on one day in November, and only on that day. It seems to me early voting leaves open too much time for fraud to occur between the time it begins and "election day," if that phrase has any meaning now. Some articles I have read raise the idea that voting early is like hiring someone without doing a complete background check. A lot can happen in two weeks that could change one's mind. That analogy seems fundamentally flawed, to my mind, because there is no essential difference between voting early and voting absentee, and no one believes voting absentee is some kind of threat to our democracy. Anyway, there are all kinds of situation in which citizens make decisions without knowing all the facts. Good Lord, according to recent studies of voter knowledge, even on election day, fully 70% of voters are so ignorant of basic facts they essentially vote blind, on the basis of appearance or other intangibles. The following disturbing passage comes, once again, from a New Yorker article I read not long ago ("The Unpolitical Animal," Louis Menand, August 30, 2004).

Seventy per cent of Americans cannot name their senators or their congressman. Forty-nine per cent believe that the President has the power to suspend the Constitution. Only about thirty per cent name an issue when they explain why they voted the way they did, and only a fifth hold consistent opinions on issues over time. Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don't understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor. And voters apparently do punish politicians for acts of God. In a paper written in 2004, the Princeton political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels estimate that "2.8 million people voted against Al Gore in 2000 because their states were too dry or too wet" as a consequence of that year's weather patterns. Achen and Bartels think that these voters cost Gore seven states, any one of which would have given him the election.

I am embarrassed to say, I am in the forty-nine percent who believe the President has the ability to suspend the constitution. Luckily, however, I do not vote for President on the basis of whether my state is too wet or too dry. Ah Ignorance, thou art bliss!

In the midst of all the apocalyptic rhetoric that accompanies the end of a campaign cycle, I would remind my fellow Kerry supporters of one essential fact this campaign season, paraphrasing another all-suffering donkey (from Orwell's Animal Farm): win or lose, the world goes on, much as it always has, that is, badly. I think it will go better if Kerry wins, but if it doesn't happen, go get drunk on November 3rd and then get back to work on November 4th. Don't let an election determine whether you are happy or bitter for more than a few hours.

My wife, she's worried sick about the election. She won't let me talk to her about the news unless I have something good to report. She won't even watch the news herself now. She's just crossing her fingers, closing her eyes, and waiting for election day. She believes in this vast "Silent Majority" of conservative Christians who are going to rise up on election day and provide Bush with a clear victory. She sees the lack of Bush/Cheney signage in our neighborhood, compared to the plethora of Kerry/Edwards signage, as an ominous symbol of this conspiracy of silence. "Republicans are quiet, brooding, backstabbers," she says; "They let you get your hopes up, then they tear you down and say, 'See, I told ya so.'"

I've tried to convince her it's all in her imagination. Not that the polls which say the race is a dead heat can be trusted (I happen to think the margin will in the end be more in Kerry's favor, and he will win decisively, because of voter turnout as Boortz suggests), but there is also no underground swell of support for Bush that is not registering at the polls. This Evangelical voting bloc that Bush is courting in these final days—hell, he's been courting them throughout the campaign— are much like my Grandmother. She's as socially conservative as they come, a regular "gone to church on Wednesday and Sunday" Fundamentalist who watches Benny Henn and sometimes even donates. She told me in a conversation last weekend that she considers herself a Democrat and hasn't voted in an election since the nineteen fifties. If this is the base of support Bush is counting on, the base he lost in 2000 by some four million votes, I think the "silent majority" is going to remain silent this election season, too.