Tomorrow, I’m taking the day off work. After a doctor’s appointment in the morning, I will be doing a four-hour stint at my local precinct as an official poll watcher technically from the Jim Eisenhower campaign. Eisenhower is the democratic candidate for attorney general here in Pennsylvania, although you might not know that there’s even a race if you lived here. Unlike California, where there is a mountain of detail available on every single candidate, plus the attraction of propositions, starting with a document prepared and sent by the State Registrar of Voters that is the size of a small phone book with detail on every candidate, including lists of those who signed the initial campaign documents to get him or her onto the ballot, Pennsylvania does nothing – zero, zip – to inform its citizens about the nature of the forthcoming election. They don’t event send a card when they move your polling place. Similarly, California makes it easy to vote absentee and a lot of people – seniors, especially – make great use of this. In Pennsylvania, it’s not impossible, but it’s quite a bit of work and you have go through the process each election.
Decades of a Republican-controlled state legislature have done what they can in Pennsylvania to depress the vote. As is increasingly self-evident, minimizing participation in elections is a basic Republican strategy to ensure their continued rule here. It may not be as crudely done as is the case in Florida or Ohio, but it’s still the basic dynamic.
Tomorrow also marks the 42nd anniversary of the first time I “worked a precinct” in an election. In 1962 – not a presidential year – I was working for the re-election of California’s Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown against former VP Dick Nixon. I wasn’t old enough to vote, yet, but at 16 I was old enough to help get the vote out, so I did.
I wasn’t all that terribly impressed with Pat Brown, but I thought that Nixon was outright dangerous. History, as it turns out, proved me right. Now all these decades later, I find myself living about six blocks from one of Nixon’s daughters – she’s active in the GOP out here, her husband (also an Eisenhower & a distant relation of my candidate tomorrow) works at Penn. And again I’m working primarily for a candidate – in this instance, John Kerry – about whom I’m not all that thrilled. And again, I think the opposition is positively dangerous.
George W. Bush has proven to be the worst president in the history of the United States. In 500 years, if America has ceased to exist as a major world power & even as a recognizable polity, historians will look at his administration as a significant hinge event from which this nation never recovered. That seems to me a very real possibility.
I don’t need to recite the various crimes which this man has committed. That this man has not been impeached – let alone prosecuted – where his predecessor was virtually placed into stocks over fibbing about a blowjob is an index of just how rabid & toxic the far-right’s control of the legislative branch of government has become.
What worries me most about the prospect of a second term is Bush’s potential for remaking the courts – a woman’s right to choose will simply not exist in four years if he’s re-elected – the long-term impact of having eight years of a justice department that is dedicated to eradicating the Bill of Rights in the name of national security, and the long-term devastation that the neocon lust to remake the Middle East is going to cause not just there, but across the entire planet. Sacrificing our national infrastructure and well-being to enrich a narrow group of billionaires is the least of our problems, frankly.
My greatest concern over John Kerry is that I’m not convinced that he will do what is necessary to extricate ourselves from Iraq before the body count goes from 1,000 to 5,000. We need to acknowledge up front what should be obvious to any neutral observer – that the center there will not hold, that there will eventually be a civil war and a division of that nation into at least three separate states, one Sunni, one Shiite & one Kurdish. What we need to accomplish is to prevent this devolution from turning into a general war, with Iran invading from the East, Turkey from the North. We could even help this transition from one state into three to occur in a relatively peaceful manner, but I’m hardly optimistic about that.
What I like most about Kerry is that he treats complexity as complex. At one very real level, this election pits those who can cope with complexity against those who would rather deny it. One sees these latter people at the cinema, they govern what gets watched on television, they’re even the heart of the professional book industry in this country. George W. Bush is their man because he refuses to admit mistakes or take in nuances. That’s what his base likes about him most.
It’s not that complexity is an inherently leftward leaning virtue. Michael Moore’s success is very much the result of his ability to demonstrate what a left version of simplicity politics could look like. But an awfully large part of the culture wars can be traced back to this exact divide. And, as the Bush administration has shown in appointing Dana Gioia to head up the NEA & naming the likes of Ted Kooser & Billy Collins as poet laureate, there’s a divide in poetry over the question as well. [One might argue, in fact, that the division between the post-avant world & that of the School o’ Quietude arises precisely because the former is far more comfortable with complexity – although even there we find exceptions, anti-intellectual post-avants, distressing as that is.]
So I think that tomorrow is a hinge election. All the rhetoric about this being “the most important election in our lifetime” turns out to be right. It’s my eleventh presidential campaign and vastly more critical than any of the previous ten.
My task at the polls tomorrow is to see to it that everyone who comes gets to vote & to make note of who comes. Later in the day, we’ll be doing get-out-the-vote work, calling, going door to door, offering to drive people, offering to watch the kids, whatever. I’ll be working tomorrow as if the very future of this country depends on the outcome. Because, in fact, it does.
