Category: Political

A stalwart lefty colleague who lived in a red state for many years pointed to this New York Times article — an unselfconcious exporation of the offensive stereotypes New Yorkers hold for benighted out-of-towners.
This type of smug response won’t help build a majority to win elections.
On the other hand, the right-wing stereotype of a “liberal elite” — referring to people with college degrees — is toxic and chilling. The demonization of an educated population has a very long and dangerous history around the world — China and Cambodia made particularly practical use of this stereotype.

The Coyne post brought a damning statistic from another exit poll: 80% of Bush voters said they voted for their candidate, rather than against the other one. Barely a third of Kerry voters said the same.
A big problem with the election is that voters didn’t find Kerry to be a compelling candidate.

Andrew Coyne writes a useful critique of the CNN exit poll showing the predominance of “moral values” among Bush voters. The result may be an artifact of the way the question was asked. The poll separates national security issues: the Iraq war and the fight against terrorism, but hides wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage behind the code word “moral values”.

True, it found the largest single block of voters identified “moral values” as the “most important election issue” — a much cited factoid — and that 80% of these respondents voted for Bush. But that hardly makes this election a triumph of theocracy. In the first place, “largest single block” turns out to mean 22%, meaning 78% of voters — including two-thirds of Bush voters — named some other issue.

Second, the pollsters only managed to elevated “moral values” to number one by dividing up the other issues into subcategories. Thus “Iraq” and “Terrorism” are treated as separate issues, though grouped together as, say, “national security” they would have claimed the top spot, with 34% of the total. Likewise “taxes” and “economy” were named by a combined 25% of voters. Had “moral values” been split into “abortion” and “gay marriage,” the spin would have been rather different.

Still, the degree to which the Republican party is beholden to the Christian right is cause for concern. In Texas, the Republican party platform claims that the US is a Christian nation. Moderates who voted for Bush may find that the Republican administration acts against their interest, in favor of religious right interests.
To be fair, Bush’s post-election speech was remarkably free of Christian right proposals and military expansionism. We heard about social security reform and military offensives in Iraq, not about banning abortion, halting gay adoption, and declaring new wars on Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
A USA Today poll yesterday found that 63% of voters wanted Bush to advance programs both parties support, rather than advancing a Republican agenda.
Given evidence from Bush’s first term, I have very little trust that Bush will respect this public opinion, but would be happy to be proven wrong.

Hope.
There was strong voter turnout and more people were involved. Halley Suitt writes

Call me Pollyanna, but I compared it to being a person who was out of shape, decided to run the Boston Marathon, had never run any long distance and then didn’t manage the 26 miles but ran a very impressive 10 miles.

That’s how I feel about my experience. I started to be involved in politics and learn about being a net citizen and get right in at a grassroots level like I had NEVER done before.

Okay, I didn’t run the whole marathon. We didn’t win. But I can run 10 miles now! And I couldn’t do that before.

The election was close. 1% nationwide, a bit more ground organizing in Ohio. Youth polled for Kerry, but still had low voter turnout. Many Americans are not well informed. There are things to improve, that can be changed.
Fear. After four more years of mistaken war against nation-states, based on misunderstanding the nation of non-state terrorism, what damage will the US have created in the world? How much riskier will the world be? After four more years of reckless spending, how bad willl the US economy be?
Fear. 51% of voters voted for Bush. But 75% voted for the amendments restricting rights for gay people. The campaign’s gay-baiting has won the election overall on “moral issues.”
Two women friends of mine, a lesbian couple, are about to have a baby. These laws deny them rights to visit each other in the hospital and give parental custody to a parent who’s raised a child.
This is a moral issue, with good on the side of the loving family. The size of the opposition to this moral view is deeply chilling. It makes me worry about whether we’ll face a flood of pro-Christian fundamentalist legislation, and what constitutional protection will mean in four years.
(Interesting… this is the first election that I can remember in which Republicans abandoned Willie Horton/welfare queen race-baiting, and used gay-baiting to fill that rhetorical niche in the campaign.)

Exit polls show that the most important issue for Bush voters were “moral values”. 11 states voted to restrict civil liberties for gay people. The religious right won the election.

Young people favored Kerry, but they didn’t vote.

On the inverse of apathy, Austinites and out-of-towners might want to check out Grits for Breakfast, a new blog by Scott Henson.
It’s a good blog to read for personally-engaged reportage in the middle of a deep story. Scott is part of the ACLU-Texas team working to reform the criminal justice system. The latest post describes a Town Hall Meeting in Grand Prairie, halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth, where Latin American groups are allied with a conservative Republican politician to moderate the madness of criminal justice in Texas, where there are 1,941 separate felonies on the books, including ‘electrocuting fish,’ and in some cases, prostitution, graffiti, and stealing cable. One in 11 Texans is a felon, and one in 20 is currently in prison, on probation, or on parole.
In classic blog form, Scott discloses biases; he’s working for the conservative Republican representative’s reelection campaign, despite differences on abortion and other social issues because of Allen’s leadership on criminal justice reform.
With persistence and savvy, Scott and others on the ACLU-TX team are building alliances and changing minds, engaging in the kind of political conversation across traditional barriers that Lessig wants to revive.

I read Dan Gillmor’s We the Media a few weekends ago. Good coverage of weblogs and the rise of peer media. If you’ve been reading Gillmor and watching the evolution of peer media daily, the book won’t be new. If you’re interested in the topic, it’s an excellent introduction.
A few local data points: Scott Henson’s telling stories about drug war injustice, and Mike Dahmus covers the commuter rail issue.

The response to Kerry’s mention of Dick Cheney’s daughter is a Rorschach test that diagnoses three different attitudes toward gay people.
1) Gay is normal. among the young, libertarian, and socially tolerant, gay identity is like height and hair color – a neutral identifying characteristic. Mentioning Mary Cheney highlights the hypocrisy of Republicans who advocate laws to restrict the rights of people in their own families.
2) Gay is embarrassing. Among ordinary older folk, being gay is still embarrassing. People who are socially prejudiced may not be in favor of laws restricting the rights of gay people, but they consider it rude to identify a gay relative in public. Lynne Cheney’s reaction is an example of this attitude.
3) Gay is evil. Among Christian right wingers, being gay is evil. People who didn’t know that Mary Cheney is lesbian might not vote for her dad because he didn’t successfully protect her from Satan and forbid her sinful lifestyle.
It’s clear from the reaction that Kerry miscalculated. If Kerry spoke naively, as a New Englander who takes a level of social tolerance for granted, he underestimated the strength of garden-variety social prejudice. If Kerry meant to speak simultaneously to groups #1 and #3, then the tactic backfired badly by not taking #2 into account. The Rove Machine won the spin by building an alliance between groups #2 and #3, the prejudiced and the fundamentalists.
To those who watched the debates, Kerry clearly won, according to surveys of debate-watchers. He came across as competent and compassionate, stronger on international and domestic issues. But to the larger population who only see snippets of spin on TV, Kerry comes off as a bad guy.
Political speech is difficult because of the need to communicate to people with different worldviews and vocabularies. Great political speech builds common ground. Ordinary political speech is slippery and calculating — it is intended to mean different things to different people. Ineffective political speech fails both ways — it doesn’t build common ground, and it doesn’t assemble a majority by meaning different things to different people.

Demonstrations were among the main reasons why I was politically agnostic in high school and college. The student bodies were fairly liberal, and there were episodic demonstrations on a series of issues: anti-nuclear, anti-apartheid, against US Central American policy, pro-clerical-workers strike, busing to Washington for pro-abortion rallies.
The demonstrators had slogans but didn’t have particularly cogent explanations. I have stronger opinions on the issues now, having learned how to research, and having more perspective to weigh conflicting evidence. Students seemed to go to demonstrations the same way they went to parties — word spread about the cool place to mingle with friends. Instead of alcohol, slogan-chanting made people feel good and lowered inhibitions.
What was worse, it wasn’t clear to me how gathering in a sports field was going to have the least bit of difference on the policy issue. Ronald Reagan and international arms control negotiators weren’t going to pay any attention to a group of young people standing on the grass and chanting slogans.
Only on apartheid divestment did a group of students — with wealthy alumni parents and allies — have a direct impact on the people making decisions.
Demonstrations still puzzle me most of the time. When the faithful rally on the issue of the day, what are they trying to achieve?
The classic civil rights demonstrations revealed that there were massive numbers of people who cared about racial equality — enough people to effect elections. The demonstrations made it impossible to ignore segregation. Massive demonstrations provided confidence and unity to people who were isolated and downtrodden.
But it’s really hard to see what most demonstrations and rallies achieve these days, other than making the demonstrators feel good. Politicians pay attention to money and voters. Demonstrators want to get on TV. But television-watchers will just see a bunch of yelling people. Does that actually persuade any of the TV-watchers to change their minds?
The attempts in Boston and New York to pen up and stifle demonstrators were disturbing. The constitution protects the right to peaceably assemble. People should be free to gather and speak.
Most demonstrations and rallies seem like ritual re-enactments of forty-year old battles, with as much political impact as a Society for Creative Anachronism gathering.
Please let me know what I’m missing.

Rick deplores “astroturfing” — the political practice of seeding identical “letters to the editor” that purport to be original citizen comments, but are copied from message propoganda instead.
I don’t think the issue is simple. Being politically informed is good, but doing primary research and original analysis on every subject you care about isn’t humanly possible.
I appreciate groups that employ people to research subjects, stay on top of changing political activity, and provide the opportunity to act. Providing sample letters is a great head start. In areas where I do activism, we provide background information, action alerts, and sample letters. I think it’s good to lower the barrier to participation, so long as more people are doing some thinking.
And decentralized fast action isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When we were working on the SDMCA in Texas, a state senator’s staffer explained that industry lobbyists of course had more influence, because they were able to be at the capitol 24/7. It’s a good if someone who’s on location can tell others what’s going on, so people with day jobs can act almost as fast as the lobbyists on the floor.
On the other hand, twitch-response political action is disturbing. Some people fire off the latest missive without thinking, like a gamer shoots a monster on sight.
Verbatim-copies of letters to the editor, which one expects to be original, seem worse then letters and calls to a Congressperson using a standard template.
Perhaps the difference is that letters to the editor are expected to reflect deliberation, whereas a letter to a congressperson is often about action — encouraging a vote for an against a subject.
After all, our vote for a representative is a one-word response — yes or no. A citizen form letter on a specific issue is a more finely grained response than a blunt vote for a candidate.