Posted on 11/06/2004 5:50:32 PM PST by Pikamax
Those New York blues
In a city where 75 per cent of inhabitants may never have met a Republican, they're a little depressed
Gaby Wood in New York Sunday November 7, 2004 The Observer
On the night of 2 November, a well-connected man about town was at an election party in New York City. The room was full of writers, pundits, and urbane intellectuals. Things were looking good. Outside, it felt like Christmas - strangers were calling out to each other on Broadway, with exhortations to 'get on down to the polls and vote for Kerry'. The intellectuals sat around the TV and watched as Tim Russert, the esteemed presenter from Meet the Press, held a little whiteboard and worked out the sums: this many votes translated into so many votes in the electoral college; Kerry had won Pennsylvania, all he needed was Florida or Ohio... As the evening wore on, things began to look, unfathomably, less good. Florida fell to Bush. Some of the party guests wanted to change channels, and watch Jon Stewart's satirical 'fake news' programme, The Daily Show; others thought this obscene. 'It's not funny!' the man about town shouted to the assembled radicals in their armchairs. 'What's going on is not funny!' He cracked open another bottle of whisky. Tim Russert re-did his sums. Soon after midnight, Fox News called Ohio for Bush.
Hoping the call was premature, some guests stayed till the end. Cocaine put in an appearance around 6am. At seven or eight (but who cared any more what time it was - the whole goddamn country was a blur) our friend staggered off to his ex-girlfriend's house and keeled over on her doorstep. He awoke, several hours later, alone on a camp bed and full of regret. 'With another four years of Bush in the White House,' he later said, 'this is possibly the longest hangover I'll ever have.'
All week, New Yorkers who may quite feasibly never have met a Republican - 75 per cent of them voted for Kerry - have been steeped in the camaraderie of misery. 'I'm sick to my stomach,' a neighbour will say as she invites you in for coffee. 'I'm so depressed,' a man will emote on the street. 'I can't hear Fleetwood Mac without thinking of Clinton!' a shopper will mourn in response to some supermarket muzak.
There is a famous Saul Steinberg cartoon from 1976 - the year Jimmy Carter was elected President - that presents Manhattan as the centre of the universe. Beyond it, to the west, is New Jersey, and right after that, a receding expanse of otherness - Chicago, Japan, the USSR. Now the map would look a little different.
While New Yorkers pride themselves on a certain kind of local insularity ('I like your accent,' the postman once joked to me, 'where're you from - Brooklyn?'), since 11 September New Yorkers have also wanted to be informed about the rest of the world. But the most foreign land - now, they realise, more than ever - is the rest of their own country.
One popular guidebook is Thomas Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas?, which outlines how the conservatives captured the hearts of the very people they serve least. 'The country seems like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymus Bosch,' writes Frank, 'of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances.'
Certainly one of the most salient ironies of this election was the discovery of how selfless most Americans are. In great swathes across the country, people who would have been economically better off under Kerry have selflessly voted for Bush. With Bush in the White House, they might lose their jobs, they might die because they can't afford health insurance, but it's worth it in order to ensure the unhappiness of others: gay people who want to get married, for example, or women who need an abortion.
In states where these two issues were actually on the ballot, people didn't 'get their fundamental interests wrong', as Frank puts it - their fundamental interests were 'moral values', and these, they felt, needed protection.
Clearly, many Bush voters remembered all too well the last Democratic President's sexual proclivities, and a number of commentators have criticised Kerry for not having a moral stance strong enough to oppose that of Bush (as one Harvard political theorist put it, the Democrats 'will not recover as a party until they have candidates who can speak to those moral and spiritual yearnings').
Of course, as Democrats have said all week, Kerry could have offered more: a better articulated world view, a stronger attack on corporate scandals and the questionable morality of the invasion of Iraq. But more broadly speaking, the Democrats are fighting against unshakable belief in absolutes.
As long as subtlety looks like indecision to most Americans, equality and justice are a lost cause. The Daily Show writers put their finger on it when they drew diagrams of left- and right-wing brains: what is grey matter in a Democrat is 'black and white matter' in a Republican. The Democrats may be smarter, but to the majority, it's all so very unclear.
In a warehouse on the Hudson, thousands of hulking grey metal cabinets are lined up in rows. They take up three floors: ominous, surreal, each one with an American flag stuck to its front. These are voting machines; inside, they hold numbers that have changed the course of history, and this election may have been their last.
The man behind them is Benjamin, a technician with the New York Board of Elections, and an unlikely Wizard of Oz. Frankly, he looks a little tired. 'I got the first call at 5am,' he says of Tuesday's election, 'and I didn't stop till 11pm.' He spent the day haring around Manhattan, answering calls from polling stations where the machines had gone wrong. 'So much can happen,' he says. 'The machines get dropped in transit, or the operator forgets to push down the lever...' This year was particularly messy. 'There were so many new voters who didn't know how to use the machines,' Benjamin says wearily, 'and there were a lot of inexperienced staff at the polling stations.' Benjamin, who has been repairing these things for 10 years, spent most of the day fixing simple mistakes.
The machines used in New York are the old mechanical Shoup design, made in 1962 and based on a century-old invention by Thomas Edison. Each one consists of a large board covered with an array of labels and levers so complex it would have made the Enigma code breaker, Alan Turing, blanch. It's not surprising people can't understand them. But these are being phased out in favour of a far more controversial electronic voting system.
Every state, every county, gets to opt for its own system - some use punch cards, some use levers, others use computers that leave paper trails, still more use touch-screens that don't. In Oregon only postal votes are accepted. If the 2000 election became famous for Florida's hanging chads, this one has a sinister vote-rigging intrigue to match.
The first inkling that the Diebold electronic system was malfunctioning came during the 2000 elections, and the signs were unmistakable: a poll worker in Florida noticed that more than 9,000 votes had been cast for the Socialist Party candidate.
Since then, Bev Harris, the woman behind the election reform website blackboxvoting.org, has been travelling the country showing people how 'astonishingly easy' it is to hack into the Diebold system - the most commonly used of the electronic devices (one of her demos includes a film of a chimpanzee hacking an election).
The machines leave no paper trail and allow for no audit. In the past few days, Black Box have demanded nationwide computer logs and launched what they describe as 'the largest Freedom of Information action in history'.
Why the suspicion? Walden O'Dell, the chief executive of Diebold, lives in Ohio, the make-or-break state. He is a Republican fundraiser who has been a guest at George Bush's ranch. Last year, he pledged his commitment to 'helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President'. Also last year, days after a trade fair in which his TruVote system was highly praised for its ability to produce paper receipts, an Ohio accountant named Athan Gibbs was killed in a car crash. Since Gibbs was Diebold's only significant competitor, a far-fetched theory is afloat that his death may not have been entirely accidental.
While Democratic speech writers and columnists kick themselves over the idea that the entire country is somehow impenetrably Republican, the conspiracy theorists have a point. In the states that went to Bush, 43 per cent of people voted for Kerry. Bush has been busy gloating over his 'political capital', but has he really got such a mandate? The race was, in fact, incredibly close - close enough to make partisans believe it was stolen. Call it denial or call it optimism; at least some crazy people out there think there may be a future.
· Nick Cohen is away
What many New Yorkers don't realize is that a good portion of the country looks upon New York, and the other large cities, as being foreign lands that they'd just as soon avoid.
(Birds of a feather flock together.)
Yup, many New Yorkers are sick ~ time for them to see their shrink!
Those of us out here in Red America who they consider their cultural and intellectual inferiors are the people who visit their city by the millions each year dropping tens of millions of dollars into their economy thus providing them their existance. Also, following 9/11 we uneducated rednecks sent millions and millions of our hard earned money for relief and rebuilding their precious city.
I will say one thing, though. A larger group of ingrates never lived on this earth than New York liberals.
What's smarter about failed Liberal-Socialist dogma-nure.
Oh, the gloating has been so dam much fun! It's also been great hearing over and over how smart they (Kerry voters) are, and how dumb we (Bush voters) are! This supposedly dumb president has wiped up the floor with the other side in the last three elections!
Gloat on, everyone!
'I can't hear Fleetwood Mac without thinking of Clinton!'
You know, every time I hear Tell Me Lies, I am reminded of the 'toon, also.
And those New Yorkers are so self-assured of their on superiority that they don't even realize it. They simply cannot fathom that EVERYBODY in the country does not want to come within 100 miles of NYC.
These fools can't even write a headline correctly. Just because NYC has a 3-to-1 RAT/GOP registration ratio doesn't mean that all the Republican live in some gated enclave. They are intermingled 24/7/365.
"which outlines how the conservatives captured the hearts of the very people they serve least."
Every so often by accident a liberal stumbles across the truth, but they pick themselves up and hurry off like nothing ever happened. - To paraphrase Winston Churchill.
"the Democrats are fighting against unshakable belief in absolutes"
This is such a loaded statement. It's the flyover country's "core values" which the democrats do not have and do not understand. If the dems run with Hillary .. it will prove to me they still have not figured it out.
I found this article amusing. It started out okay .. but digressed into conspiracy theories.
However, the comment about Wisconsin absentee ballots trending toward Bush and it may end up being in Bush's column is interesting. Looks like the democrats missed the 2004 "Florida" by a few miles.
Absolutely correct. I ran into a guy the other day who is moving to Italy -- Tuscany, actually -- for four years. The only reason he's able to do this is because of his tax break.
Ever since 2000, when the Gore's came out at the convention to "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow", I have to turn to another station.
So.....you'd think the Soviet tanks were rolling through the streets of Prague all over again! These liberal folks are totally in their own world. They'd vote for Toonses the Driving Cat instead of Bush.
EFFUM!
It's perfectly clear to me. If they're so smart why were they outsmarted by Bush, again? They're just so smart they can't bring themselves to the level of the common man. Just like Kerry who ran such an inept campaign for such a smart guy.
"As long as subtlety looks like indecision to most Americans, equality and justice are a lost cause."
BIG SIGH!!! As long as faith in G-d and strong moral resolve are misunderstood by these people, the Republicans shouldn't have trouble staying in the majority.
WHAT?!
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