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Election Day 2004 Journal
Press Action
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/hand11022004/

4:45 p.m.

What happened when Bush “stole” the election in 2000? Did the people rise up when the Supreme Court selected Bush as the winner? No. They accepted it.

What happened when the U.S. government carried out the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq? Did the U.S. public rise up and demand the ouster of all government officials who supported these crimes against humanity? No. Many decided to endorse war supporter John Kerry.

What happened when the Democratic Party devoted significant resources to wage a dirty tricks campaign against Ralph Nader, thereby preventing his name from appearing on the presidential ballot in several states, including California, Pennsylvania and Virginia? Did the people rise up against this assault on our democratic freedoms? No. Most John Kerry supporters and ABBers applauded the effort.

What will the people do if it’s determined that the Republicans, borrowing from the Democrats’ dirty tricks playbook, successfully prevented enough voters, through intimidation and various nefarious legal tactics, from participating in this year’s presidential election to ensure a Bush victory? Will the people rise up against the institutions in this country that allow political officials to get away with such assaults on individuals’ democratic rights? I doubt it.

During lunch, I walked by the Bush-Cheney campaign national headquarters, located down the street from my office here in Arlington. I saw three or four satellite television trucks parked outside the office complex that houses the Bush-Cheney campaign. But I didn’t see any crowds of people demonstrating against the junta. If Bush is declared the winner tonight or in the coming days, will the people who have deemed the Bush regime the worst in a hundred years attempt to shut down Bush-Cheney campaign offices here in Arlington and across the country and demand an end to business as usual? Based on the fact that the other major party candidate in the race supported the bulk of the incumbent’s most repulsive policies, I doubt it. But we shall see.

2:30 p.m.

Earlier this morning, I noted my decision not to publish Stephen Conn’s latest article on the Kerry campaign’s efforts to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot in Pennsylvania and other states. I was prepared to post Professor Conn’s article until I spotted the “votenader.org” email address and the “Paid for by Nader for President 2004 General Election Committee” notice at the bottom of his email. That notice scared me off, given that his piece offered some hard-hitting criticism of the Kerry campaign.

Perhaps I was too sensitive to the Nader affiliation. And perhaps I simply could have published the piece, with an editor’s note of Professor Conn’s involvement with the Nader campaign.

Below is Professor Conn’s response to my earlier post:

I am sorry you or your readers felt deceived. The research I did on the financial and political underpinnings of the campaign against Ralph Nader was my own as a trained and now retired academic. As with the election day piece, I saw it more as material for those who would study this election and its tactics after the fact. The first piece was to encourage intelligent people to do their own research before they signed on to open letters. I am indeed based in Alaska and became an active Nader person there when I gathered signatures to put him on the Alaska ballot. A quick google would have revealed this, but I should have included that for your benefit and for your readers. I was motivated by the precise tactic that I described in both pieces I wrote—the preemptive attack on voters’ rights. This movement against the civil rights of voters goes beyond dirty tricks. It harkens back to days when political, racial and sexual minorities had overt curbs on their political rights. That—more than anything else—or anything done or said about Nader—was the tactic I found to be very dangerous. Frankly, in the case of Nader, it worked to remove him from states safe for one major party candidate or the other where he received many votes in 2000-like California. The motivation there could only be to preclude debate. Why civil liberties groups did not intervene is for them to say, but it puts in question their reliability if one happens to be the “wrong person.” Once again, I am sorry you felt deceived.

Stephen Conn, Retired Professor of Justice, University of Alaska

I appreciate Professor Conn’s response as well as the detailed research he has conducted into the campaign against Nader. In response to my earlier post, my friend and long-time contributor to Press Action, Abu Spinoza, pointed out that I should put together some guidelines for contributors in order to avoid any future misunderstanding over the submission of articles. (My use of the modifier “long-time” is relative given that PA is only two-years-old, but Abu was one of PA’s first outside contributors soon after its launch.) I agree with his suggestion and will work on putting together some guidelines in the coming weeks.

1 p.m.

In case anybody thinks this exercise we’re going through today—especially our participation in the presidential and congressional elections—really will change anything, Mickey Z. provides a sobering assessment of the value of voting.

Mickey highlights two quotes:

“Voting is not an act of political freedom. It is an act of political conformity.” -Wendy McElroy

“Voting is not an expression of power, but an admission of powerlessness.” -Fred Woodworth

11:50 a.m.

Check out Daniel Patrick Welch’s excellent analysis of the November 3 Movement. He writes: “What the world needs is a sustained, vigorous, coherent and unyielding opposition to the policies that have brought us to this point. None of that will come from any new administration. It will be forced on it by challenge from below and from without.”

My wife Nancy, who went to vote at our precinct at about 10:30 a.m., has informed me that she also had to wait about an hour to vote. Looks like the long lines are going to last all day, not just during the peak morning, lunchtime and evening periods. She said one of the precinct’s six electronic voting machines went down while she was there, which helped to make the wait longer.

She said a woman was walking with a limp and a cane. The polling station officers brought her to the front of the line, but she opted to wait in a chair. Nancy heard her tell someone she wanted to wait like everyone else. So she sat at the registration table for about 20 minutes, then got up and signed in.

There was also a woman behind Nancy who asked one of the poll workers which line she should she stand in—A-K or L-Z—since she had a hyphenated last name. They asked her where she usually stood when she voted. She said she didn’t know. They asked her if she had ever voted here. She said, yes, for 15 years, but adding that it’s different each place. The poll worker asked, did you move? She said no. “She has supposedly been voting at the same place for 15 years, but doesn’t know how they have her name on the roster,” Nancy said.

In front of Nancy was “a nice, older Indian woman” and her 18-year-old daughter. “One of the workers, rather condecendlingly, I thought, came up to her and asked her if she needed any help,” Nancy reports. “The daughter said, I am taking a government class, so I have talked with her. We know what we are doing.”

10 a.m.

On my way to work, I drove by a couple polling stations where the lines to vote snaked far outside the doors. I noticed a Red Top Cab dropping off two elderly female voters at one of the polling stations. The two women, with canes in hand, had a look of determination on their faces, that no one was going to stop them from voting this year. Luckily, a beautiful day is upon us here in the Washington, D.C., area, making it more bearable to stand in the long lines.

When I got to work, one of those annoying MoveOn.org letters was sitting in my email box. Somehow—I’m not exactly sure—I got placed on MoveOn.org’s email list. I’ve decided not to unsubscribe myself because many of their email alerts are amusing and perfectly illuminate the Kerrycrat and ABB mindset.

Take today’s letter from MoveOn.org, for example. The fifth paragraph reads:

"If you’re working all day today to get folks out to vote, as part of our Leave No Voter Behind program or otherwise, bless you. Across the nation, millions of us are working around the clock to remove the worst American administration in the last hundred years."

Here we go again. Anti-Bushies calling his administration the worst in the last hundred years. If you’re going to employ hyperbole, why not just go for it all and call Bush the worst president ever? Why just in the last hundred years? I’m curious about which president from George Washington through Teddy Roosevelt does MoveOn.org think was a worse president than Bush.

Of course, all American presidents have been scoundrels and criminals. But if we’re going to rank, I’d vote for Woodrow Wilson as the worst president of the last hundred years. I agree with Michael K. Smith who wrote on this site last week:

I’m not sure there’s much point in comparing presidents, but if there is it’s not clear to me that Bush is the worst ever. Maybe Woodrow Wilson is. He imposed segregation on federal offices, let a suffrage bill languish in Congress through two terms, and plunged the U.S. into the bloodiest war in human history. While speaking piously of self-determination for all he invaded Mexico (twice), Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and the Soviet Union (twice), with Haiti and the Dominican Republic remaining under brutal U.S. occupation for years. He simply ignored the Spanish flu epidemic, which appears to have started in Southwestern Kansas and spread to Europe with U.S. troops. Current estimates are that 50-100 million people ultimately died from that virus. Wilson was too busy obsessing over the Kaiser to do anything about it.

8:30 a.m.

Woke up at 5:30 a.m., posted Micah Holmquist’s touching and poignant homage to President Al Gore on Press Action. I opted not to publish Stephen Conn’s submission titled “An Election Day Look at Kerry’s Undemocratic War Against the Nader Campaign” after I saw at the bottom of his email a notice that read:

Steve Conn |

http://www.votenader.org/

Paid for by Nader for President 2004 General Election Committee

I then went back to check the email Conn had sent back in mid-October that included a submission for a piece titled “Progressives as Pawns: Cannon Fodder for Kerry’s War on Nader” that I did publish on Press Action. He used a Hotmail email account for the submission of that article.

I don’t know how long he’s been working/volunteering for the Nader campaign, but I would have appreciated an explanation attached to his latest submission whether or not he was involved in the Nader campaign when he submitted the previous piece. There should be full disclosure of one’s political work, I think, especially when one is propagandizing for a particular candidate and targeting the dirty tricks of another campaign.

I put on my running clothes and ran to the polls at 5:55 a.m., expecting to be in and out of my Arlington polling place in 15 or 20 minutes and out on my morning run in time to be home by 7 a.m. It didn’t work out as planned. About 150 other people in front of me had the same idea to get to the polls as soon as they opened. I heard someone say the first person had arrived at 4:45 a.m. I stood in line for about an hour.

Standing behind me in the A-K line was a couple discussing the choice. The man said he didn’t particularly care for either candidate (I assume he meant Bush or Kerry and not Nader or Badnarik). The woman responded that she might have shared his sentiment in previous elections, but she wasn’t as idealistic as she was 30 years ago. I assumed that meant she probably voted for a non-major party candidate back in the 70s. Nope. She then fondly remembered how she had voted for Jimmy Carter back in her idealistic youth of 1976. Carter=idealism while Kerry=pragmatism? Interesting concept.

I voted. And I still had time to get a nice run in before having to prepare for work.

-Mark Hand