Wow.
Posted on 11/06/2004 7:44:52 PM PST by ambrose
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.
Delusional garbage, start to finish.
Pathetic
I'm actually sad the Democratic Party has sunk this low.( My grandparents and the generations before them were proud to be a members of this party. Working class, but my grandparents would have NEVER sacrificed their Christian moral beliefs so their party would have power.
They must be rolling in their graves. (Glad they're not here to witness this) Here's hoping the Democrats will come back to some semblance of sanity!
We don't send them to concentration camps. We just encourage them to emigrate/ tongue in cheek! (to any lurking DU's)
What's amazing (and telling) is, it's reported as nothing shocking or unexpected.
Wow.
You lost, loser. It's Saturday night; why not get out of Mommy's basement, and attempt to talk to a living, breathing woman for once in your life. Pathetic.
They can't. "We had fun, fun, fun till her daddy took the T-Bird away."
*sarcasm*
and i might throw up if i read any more of this trash....
This BS about Bush voters having voted against their better economic interests needs to stop. Bush will give us a far better economy than Kerry could have.
This guy was snorting the powdered Kool-Aide!
It isn't the party that seeks to appoint "judges" who up-end constitutional law to replace it with the latest hair brained ideas of the Manhattan parlor or the Marxist college campus.
It isn't the party that wants to devolve the institution of marriage into an unrecognizable mush to pander to a self loathing group of people desperate for society to bless their unnatural unions.
It isn't the party that would tax me at ever increasing rates, given half a chance.
It isn't the party that treats terrorist attacks on this country as the equivalent of parking violations.
It isn't the party that keeps us dependent on middle east oil by blocking all attempts to increase the amount of energy we produce ourselves.
It isn't the party that loathes me, hates my religion, and despises my ideas.
Dear elitist left-wing snots: we know all about you. We can't escape your corrosive influence. But you know nothing about us.
You all know the rules. He's on to our right wing conspiracy and now he will have to eliminated. Meet at the usual location, and make sure you aren't followed. This could get messy.
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