SixDaysLater Launch

Announcing the launch of my new and improved blog!

http://www.sixdayslater.com/

I have already posted a new article up there:

http://www.sixdayslater.com/index.php?page=Politics

but it also will include much more than the usual political essays.

Hope to see ya there!

Thanks, -Dan

Rambling Thoughts

Where does it leave us if it turns out Kerry wins Ohio after they’re done counting the votes?

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I have been thinking a lot about how to explain why deficits do matter ("Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" - VP Dick Cheney), and have whittled it down to the following three statements.

1. We cut taxes and then borrow the money back from the people we just gave it to - at interest. The supposed "trickle down" effect in fact only hits decades later, if then.

2. The amount of the interest payments matter when they are substantial enough to pay for (select your favorite cause)

2a. Funding our public schools at the same level as the best private ones

2b. Our continuing occupation of Iraq (with enough armored trucks, even)

2c. Universal health care and major investment in alternative energy sources

3. Either we cut Social Security and Medicaire or accept massive tax increases.

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W. seems to think he has this plan for creating these “accounts” where everybody can manage their own savings, and he talks like this makes the problem go away.

First, you still have to put money in those accounts somehow.

Second, people will inevitably do stupid things with those accounts and end up destitute, which is exactly what the entire program was set up to avoid.

It amounts to scrapping the program, but he has disguised so that those nice old folks in Florida will keep voting for him.

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How did we all miss the significance of the Jewish support for Bush? Well, maybe we all didn’t, but I sure did. I never saw much commentary on it in Big Media or Little Media.

And more to the point, how did the Democratic leadership miss it? Without Lieberman on the ticket, the Jewish vote naturally goes to W. for … well, don’t get me started, but generally our presence in Iraq is seen as supportive of Israel.

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I was talking to a friend of mine about how the English language sort of forces you to speak metaphorically about spiritual things. In Sanskrit, the language is so spiritually oriented that they actually have specific words and phrases that precisely describe certain concepts or experiences. For example, prana means (if I remember it correctly) “life force.”

The number of words a language has for something is revealing I think, because it reflects the degree to which a certain concept is central to a culture. For example, I read once that the Inuit (aka Eskimos) have thirty different words for “snow” (to describe the various kinds, I presume - having lived much of my life in Detroit, I can understand how you might get there, since there are indeed many different kinds of snowfall).

So Sanskrit has all these words for spiritual concepts, implying that it has become a very spiritually oriented culture. As for English, what we have is lots of words concepts relating to wealth and money ("C note", “Benjamins", “bling", etc.) Also, we have lots of ways of describing the state of a punch card ballot.

I’m not sure how to interpret the punch card thing, but I do think we are very focused on money. I’m not one of those people that sees that as tragic, though. One day that focus will evolve into a deep understanding of the spiritual journey associated with acquiring and using wealth. Wealth, in its purest form, is a form of love, frozen in time.

Aftermath

Well, it’s over. Kerry conceded this morning, despite what appeared to be legitimate doubts about the outcome. Dubya has been re-elected.

I think that’s fine. This is a president who entered the election with a less than 50% approval rating, usually a bad sign. And I suppose it was a bad sign - this election was as close as it gets. With 120 million folks voting, the election was decided by little more than 100,000 votes in Ohio, if that. Just a tenth of a perecent. A half-dozen other states were as close or closer.

Two straight elections have now been decided by such razor sharp margins, and much has been made by the split in this country. But I’m just not buying it.

Gore was uninspired and Kerry was uninspiring. For the most part, people were not voting for these candidates, but simply against Bush. And I think one thing we’ve discovered is that you cannot expect to win by merely not being someone else. Kerry was not Bush, which was his sole appeal.

Big Media, as usual, seems to find all this terribly confusing. With all the surveys and exit polls, they are awash in meaningless data, which isn’t necessary to make obvious conclusions anyway. (Well, it appears that white males who say that Phish is their favorite band favor Kerry 63% to 37%, which means ... yes, once again, it all comes down to Ohio.)

Yes, the Deep South has become solidly Republican. But that is not only old news, the truth is the Southern Democrats were never really the same breed as the New England or Hollywood strains. I’ve discussed this before in prior entries: mostly the current Electoral College map reflects the underlying reality of the America we live in.

Rural and southern states lean Republican. Urban and northeastern states lean Democratic. The midwestern states (and a handful of others that are not really rural nor urban) are torn between the two. The underlying values that create this split have been generations in the making.

The brilliant political strategist, Karl Rove, continues his remarkable career, or perhaps has capped it, reinventing politics as a form of mass marketing, and steering a relatively unpopular (as judged by his approval ratings) and mediocre candidate to a second term. His ability to weave together the themes of religion, war, and populism resonated with America, and was enough - barely - to hold off the wooden challenger, who apparently had no Merlin of his own, and never seemed to formulate a worthy response.

We have had two Americas (or three, or maybe dozens) for a long time, only now we have politicians who are expert enough at mass communication to lay it plain before our eyes every four years. We no longer need a Vietnam or an Iraq to show us who we are - we have Zogby and Gallup and friends for that. Never were there so many polls and never did they turn out to be less meaningful.

We need to take a step back from all numbers and all the spin and all the animosity and all the angst, and ask ourselves: are we not still America, all of us, no matter who is in the White House?

The quilted chaos that once shaped our political maps have sorted themselves into an striped rigor that startles us. We are learning that candidates and ideas can, in fact, be sold like toothpaste or bottled water. We are still trying to forumulate answers to age old questions, cheif among them the relationship between the individual, and our spiritual life, and the social spaces we must all share, one way or another. We are struggling with change and impatient for it all at once, needing to preserve our traditions while liberating ourselves from old predjudice.

This was all going to be true regardless of who won this election. I was surprised that it turned out as it did. I was surprised that the Republicans were able to get out their base as effectively as the Democrats. I was surprised that the undecideds didn’t break more decisively for Kerry. Surprised and, of course, disappointed. Dubya, in my reckoning, is doing considerable long-term damage to my country … but it is still my damn country. I ache for it, as do many of us this morning, because we care, because we believe, to be quite blunt, that George Bush is a con man.

But my country did not see enough in Kerry to send Bush back to Crawford, Texas. Even with the most optimistic interpretation of the Ohio results, at most we would have found ourselves in court, wrangling for weeks over how to count provisional ballots, whether to do a recount, and so on. Might Kerry have come out of that the winner? No, not really. That isn’t really a victory.

That is a recipe for resentment for years to come. That is how we end up with two Americas. Kerry seems to understand that, and for that, I give him props. Running for president is a helluva tough grind and I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for him to utter those words: “Congratulations, Mr.President.” He then reportedly went on to say that we had to do something about the divide in this country. Which is a fine sentiment, one he has given meaning to in the very act of conceding. But, again, I say, what divide? When I really look closely - and believe me I have - I don’t see a divide. I see a gently changing landscape.

Are we divided because we have the mighty Mississippi flowing through our heartlands? Are we divided because we have mountains in Oregon but swamps in Florida? Can you drive the highways and find the points where one ecosystem ends and another begins?

The Electoral College is a strange archaic system, and we have further burdened it with awkward snaking voting districts, like the one in my hometown in Austin, which separates me politically from my neighbors a few blocks east (yet ties me to rural ranchers living on the border of Mexico). These are the the things that paint our states blue and red on big colored charts. These are artifacts, illusions, and more dangerous than any candidate or idealogy.

When election comes down to a margin of a tenth of a percent of the voters, then you might as well flip a coin. Kerry did not win. Nor did Bush, really. But somebody has to be president. So here we are, half of us stuck with a presient we don’t want, because the other half of us really didn’t like the alternative. Does that make us two Americas? Is that the end or beginning of some grand epic in our history? Well, if it is, I suspect is has more to do with the marketing of politics than the politics itself.

The voter turnout was amazing. This is one of the unexpected benefits of the Rovification of politics. It turns out that when you press people’s emotional hot buttons, they get up off their butts and get down to the polls, even if they have to wait all night. Eventually, people will start developing an immunity to these hot buttons, the same way many of us tune out Tide commercials. (Am I really tuning them out if Tide is the first brand that springs to mind …?). Then the turnout rate will plummet and everyone will be complaining about voter apathy again.

I will say this. The Democratic party needs to get its shit together. They are to blame for Bush being in the White House as much as anybody because they failed to offer a real alternative to a doubtful and hesitant America (but one that cared enough to vote). That is, a helluva lot of people - over sixty million, a figure that might be important to mull over before blaming the electorate itself - decided Kerry wasn’t a real alternative. There will be endless headshaking, finger pointing, and tsk, tsking about this, but maybe - hey, I know I'm getting crazy here - just maybe, we could learn something.

And I don’t mean just in the sense of learning how to play politics better. Of course, we need to realize that we can’t keep nominating New Englanders and then expressing bewilderment when they don’t play so well in “Mizzurah” (that’s Missouri to you Yankees). But what I’m referring to is learning from the folks voting for Bush. Or at least try … what are they telling us? The left is often accused of being elitist, of thinking they know better and then ignoring the right in formulating policy. Isn’t that exactly what the left is complaining about now? That policy is being forumulated by the Bushies without any regard for the opposition party’s concerns or objections?

At times, I’ve felt that the left can’t afford to be real thoughtful about things because the right takes advantage of any doubt or hesitancy and exploits it. And, yes, they are good at that. But that is the difference between messaging - part of the Procter and Gamble world - and formulating a strategy. And when I take it all in and consider all the things that Bush supporters (or Kerry despisers) have said to me - yes, when I try to learn from them - a couple of things jump out, things that could be components of a winning strategy.

The first is that you cannot fool the American people with subtleties. If that sounds like sarcasm, it ain't. Let’s face facts: Kerry, along with most of the rest of Congress, voted to give War Powers to Bush prior to the invasion of Iraq. Like it or not, that makes them all culpable. Could Bush have done things differently. Sure. Did Kerry really think he would? Not a chance, and even if he did, he didn't say a word about it until Dean came along and loaned him some cojones.

Another lesson is that you must stand for something. Bush’s presidency is clearly defined by one thing: the alleged war on terror. We were attacked and that terrified a lot of people; we can say the Bushies fanned the flames, manipulated people, etc., all of which I think is true, but I also believe that none of that would have mattered if Kerry had picked one major issue and stuck with it and made it his equivalent of the war on terror.

Is this all spin and marketing? Yes and no. Yes: a lot of this is a matter of pushing people’s buttons. No: you cannot expect to communicate effectively to sixty million plus people unless the message is simple.

Remember the telephone game? This is the same game with lots and lots of "operators" plus a twist: some of them purposely distort the message. By the time Rove was through with Kerry, the medaled Vietnam veteran was a big wimp and the draft dodging silver spoon Yalie was a rough and ready cowboy. How could that happen? There was no clear message from Kerry.

Intellectuals seem to have disproportionate weight on the left and they disdain marketing as mere spin and simplicity as willful ignorance. Well, here’s the newsflash: all those self-appointed leaders of the American Mind are wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, and their stubborn arrogance, albeit wrapped in good intentions, has much to do with why this country is being led down the road to hell.

Brevity, remember is the soul of wit. And it is also the key to the heart of America. Kerry was obviously still ad libbing his speeches to the very end. Global test? Did he really say that in the most widely watched presidential debate in history? Even an intern on his campaign could have told him that was a losing phrase. And it probably cost him election, right there because it may well have been worth that one-tenth of one percent he needed to "win." A year of campaigning and that's the best phrase he had to describe his foreign policy?

This is no social crisis. This is a crisis for the Democratic party. They are too full of themselves and they are getting spanked by Republican strategists who aren’t too proud to talk directly to a complex and varied electorate in simple terms. This was the general in the war on terror versus … who really knew? This was marketing 101 versus a PhD in public policy. This was ... well, shit, it was Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. This was the Republicans making their case - picking up more House and Senate seats as well as the Presidency - while the Democrats dissembled.

We are one America. My America. Your America. She demands that you speak loudly and clearly and not waste her time, because she’s very busy making money, taking care of her family, and so on. Sometimes she’s petulant, sometimes fearful, sometimes strident and self-righteous. But she’s also sometimes remarkably generous, stunningly heroic, and, when taken in the context of her lonely place in the world, even humble.

This year, she took the time to vote, and here’s what I think she said:

Give me the devil I know, rather than the one I don’t. And stop talking to me like I’m an idiot.

Final Prediction: Kerry Wins

Okay, kids, this is it. It is 12:49 AM. Tomorrow will be the most significant election in the last quarter century, if not longer.

Taking everything into account, from the pundits to the polls to the professor-types doing their statistical thing, it appears that Kerry is a virtual lock.

But it also looks to be a sure thing that at least two or three states will be close enough to warrant court challenges, so that we still may end up in court. And, unfortunately, 88 electoral votes are in just three hotly contested states (Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania), so it will again be one of those situations where the results rides on the court challenges.

That said, I won't take the easy route. My belief is that Kerry will take both Ohio and Pennsylvania, leaving Bush with somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 or 250 electoral votes before court challenges, meaning that he would have to overturn results in at least two different states. At that point, I think there will be a lot of pressure on Bush to pack it in, especially since the Dems are likely to have grounds for a challenge or two themselves.

Final result: Kerry 297 EV - Bush 242 EV.

Seven Signs

Seven signs that Election 2004 will be a disaster, ranking it among the most significant in our history:

1. The turnout. Regardless of the outcome, if, as it now appears, this election sees a turnout some 10-20% greater than the last one, it will mark a watershed moment in election history: a dramatic reversal of the apathy and steadily dwindling voter turnout that characterized past elections.
2. The margin of victory. This election is as close, if not closer, than the one in 2000. As many as a dozen states appear to be still "in play." And it's possible it may even be more than that, since the polling numbers are unreliable given the number of unregistered voters.
3. The voting machines. After the fiasco in 2000, many districts have switched to electronic voting machines. There have been myriad complaints already, ranging from design flaws (such as the machines in Austin, Texas automatically defaulting to Bush / Cheney) to technical problems (a power outage in Florida wiped the memory of a machine during a trial - remarkably, some machines apparently don't even have a power backup ...) to verification problems (how will we know if they worked correctly?) to political problems (the CEO of one of the leading e-voting firms is a major GOP contributor).
4. The volunteer shortage. Because of the number of newly registered voters, it is possible that there will be a massive shortage of volunteers to work the election. That will mean that many people who want to vote may find it difficult. That is sure to lead to complaints that some people did not really have an equal opportunity to vote. Meanwhile, many polls will be unable to close on schedule, meaning the results won't come in until late.
5. The precedent. The Supreme Court set in a precedent in resolving the disputes in the 2000 election that suggests that voting comes under the "equality under the law" clause of the Constitution. Given the long lines and unproven voting apparatus, this precedent could be difficult to satisfy.
6. The lawyers. Meanwhile, having learned from the 2000 election and staring an even closer election in the face this year, both parties have prepared thousands of briefs ready to be filed at a moment's notice all over the country, anywhere it seems their votes are not be fairly counted.
7. The passion. This is not just a close election, but a passionately contested one, possibly the most heated since the Civil War, when the pro-War Lincoln defeated McLellan. No one is likely to be conciliatory or give any ground; it will be a fight in the trenches until both sides are exhausted.

What's it all mean? We'll find out Tuesday, but I'd say there is a pretty good chance that the Supremes will, once again, have the only votes that really count. And then maybe we can finally get around to reforming the electoral system.

Major League Bamboozled

I am generally a sports fan. But there are some sports, nonetheless, that I don't particularly enjoy. Car racing and bowling, for example.

But I hate baseball.

Like all hate, this one is a perverse remnant of what was once a great love. And I did love baseball, once upon time. I used to daydream incessantly that I was a famous baseball player making a run at Babe Ruth's record or hitting a heroic game-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth.

But those days are gone.

It isn't that I'm cynical about the money today's athletes are paid. After all, if they didn't get paid so much, the money would mostly just go to the owners anyway. After all, the ticket prices are driven more by demand than by player's salaries. And besides, salaries have skyrocketed in every major sport.

But in baseball, they cancelled the World Series over money. Two world wars and the Great Depression had come and gone since the last time the Series had been cancelled, way back in its second year, 1904.

That was strike one.

Then came the steroids, and it was suddenly routine to break - no, not just break, smash - the the sixty homer barrier, a barrier that had only been breached twice in nearly a century, and then only barely. Three different players surpassed sixty homers in three out of four seasons. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire each broke seventy homers.

That was strike two.

Well, it's one thing to have a problem, and another thing to deal with it forthrightly. Major League Baseball might have stood up and properly put asterisks on those obviously bloated numbers. At the very least, they could have instituted firm steroid testing policies.

But instead, baseball cashed in. They turned a blind eye to steroid use while fans that had been driven away by the strike came came back to watch this new sport that involved home runs every other inning. And Barry Bonds, the lean agile line-drive hitter turned homerun hitting Hulk, is the "greatest ever."

Please. Strike three.

And now comes the great news! The Red Sox have reversed the curse! They have beaten the fabled Yankees at last! The great storied rivalry continues!

Funny that nobody seems to find it suspicious that the Yankees have won the division seven straight times. That their payroll is two to three times that of most other baseball teams. And that the Red Sox aren't far behind, having finished second seven straight times.

Aren't we really celebrating the complete inability of Major League Baseball to join with its sister leagues the NFL and the NBA to come up with some equitable way of sharing revenue, so that teams in smaller markets can compete? Of course, there are the exceptions to the rule - the last three World Series winners were small market teams. But two of them played the Yankees.

Not to mention the fact that the Red Sox may still lose the Series.

Election Day Chaos?

George Will is at it again with another interesting, if typically annoying, column contemplating the effect that the Supreme Court's 2000 decision to halt the recount could have on this year's election.

I have come to believe that the Supreme Court intervened in 2000 not because they were trying to do the Bush family a favor but because the alternative was too risky.

Imagine if the recount had proceeded and Gore had ended up winning. The Florida state legislature would have voted its electoral votes to Bush anyway. And, yes, they can do that. It's in the Constitution.

Rather than allow that questionable precedent to be set, the Supremes decided to set another one, which is arguably worse, which is exactly what Will garrously argues in his column.

In a remarkable demonstration of the virtue of minding your own business, the Justices may have inadvertantly guaranteed that we will not definitively know who is our next president until next spring.

The problem is that the 2000 ruling opens the door to all kinds of litigious fantasies. It suggests that all voting systems - from punchcards to electronic ballots - must be equally accurate and fair.

Given both parties' increasing penchant for winning at all costs, the loser is sure to grasp any straw, however pathetic the means, that give them victory in the end. The redistricting battle here in Texas comes to mind ...

Rationalizations In Politics

W's record as president is so bad that it is confounding to hear people ardently defend his presidency. And disappointing.

You have to go back some ways before you can find an election where one side felt so strongly about the other. Well, except for Bill Clinton, who inspired similar enmity.

But, for the most part, it wasn't really that awful if the other side won. It wasn't great, but it wasn't a national crisis.

With Clinton, that seemed to change. This partly reflects the split of the electorate along primarily religious lines. But I think it partly has to do with Bill Clinton himself.

You can't talk about this election without taking into account the effect that Slick Willie had on the right. The left discounts this, either because they believe Clinton was too moderate or because they believe he was a great president.

But the fact is that he did lie under oath. That is an incontrovertible fact. Ultimately, his affairs and his dishonesty seriously impaired his ability to lead. Clinton's wanton behavior - in the Oval Office no less - came to personify the Democrats' seemingly Godless morally relative universe, with no firmly defined notions of family or community.

This was compounded by the inability of the left to ever 'fess up, to say, yes, this lying under oath thing is bad news. That was wrong and it is important. Perhaps not enough to warrant impeachment, but certainly a major mark against the Clinton presidency.

Suffice to say that I think some of the current support for Bush has its origins with Bill Clinton. I think a lot of people resented Clinton, to the point where any GOP candidate with a pulse was going to be propped up and given unconditional support. Enter George W. Bush.

Now here are some facts about W. These are carefully selected to be, like Clinton lying under oath, to be a matter of record. You can agree or disagree about their significance, but you can't argue about the facts themselves.

Under W's leadership, we have been running record budget deficits, to the tune of a half-trillion dollars a year. This comes at a time when we are also facing staggering unfunded liabilities in Social Security and Medicare (and really, given the rising costs, healthcare generally).

We don't hear from the GOP leadership (with a few exceptions) or rank-and-file Republicans that there is anything problematic about this. Instead, we hear that "deficits don't matter," or that it isn't his fault because he was hit with the infamous "trifecta" (recession, terrorist attacks, and war). Hardly any hint at all that such huge, unprecedented deficits might be a problem.

Another fact: the Bush administration either lied or was consistently wrong about everything important in Iraq, and they completely ignored significant objections that turned out to be right. Whether it was WMDs, the total cost of the war, or the liklihood of Iraq turning into a quagmire, they were dead wrong on every count.

Again, we don't hear from Bush supporters that this is even a concern. Being wrong about the reason for the invasion, the cost, and the likely outcome amounts to one of the largest (certainly in purely economic terms) foreign policy miscalculations in history. And that's the positive spin, because it assumes that W wasn't intentionally misleading the public.

Instead we hear justifications: we had to do something; we had bad intelligence; etc. All that is fine, except that it ignores the simple fact that lots of people raised these concerns before the war, and were ignored. Yes, we had to do something (and we had - we invaded Afghanistan), but we didn't have to do that, and there were lots of smart people saying so at the time.

So here are two incontravertible facts about the Bush administration. These suggest that he has put both our economic and military security at risk. Yet no one on the right is willing to address them, I think because the consequences are too grave. Namely, no one can right own up to these failures and still feel good about supporting Dubya.

I brought up Clinton, partly because he is a big part of the reason that embracing Kerry is unacceptable to a lot of people, but partly because Democrats did the same thing with the lying under oath business. A president willing to break the laws of his own country over such a trivial matter should be suspect. Period. Perhaps if Democrats had been a little more demanding of Clinton, Republicans would be more demanding of Bush.

That is not to say there is any justification for rationalizing the support of bad leaders. We have to become more discerning and demanding as a electorate. Otherwise, the cream will never rise to the top - instead it's all piss and vinegar because that's what wins elections.

Or maybe what we are facing now is simply the fact that we are a nation torn by religion, by our views of family and community, and by our understanding of our place in the world. And so it has gotten to the point where it is better to have someone who is, at best, incompetent (which I highly doubt), and, at worst, one of the greatest liars in history; than to give over the reigns to someone on the "other side," someone who certainly doesn't share your worldview.

I am a little sad at that realization ... that we have to come to this. Even if Bush loses this election, we will still be living in a country whose soul is torn in two. I hope (obviously) that Kerry wins; and I hope that he is truly a uniter, not a divider, as Bush falsely promised us.