My dad suggests that there’s a little irony in U.S. troops going into Fallujah, in sort of latter-day "Sands of Iwo Jima" style, 18 months after the president and friends declared "mission accomplished." But maybe the new battle is an excellent public-relations opportunity. We could stage a "Mission Accomplished! Again!" event. Maybe George "Two-Term" Bush could land a chopper in the middle of town, or whatever is left of it after all our precision-munitions work. Maybe someone could drape a big "Mission Accomplished! Again!" banner on the bridge from which those four American security contractors were hung after insurgents killed and burned them earlier this year. And maybe we can get out of Iraq before we need to accomplish the same mission again, in Fallujah or Najaf or some other town we have to blow to hell to liberate.
X Prize News: $10 Million Check
Just for the record: Yesterday in St. Louis, the X Prize Foundation awarded Paul Allen and Burt Rutan the $10 million check they won for their SpaceShipOne launches of Sept. 29 and Oct. 4. (Other significant X Prize booty: a 200-pound, 5-foot-tall trophy.) I thought about going, but what with the election and other little things nagging at me (plus the reluctance of what I’ll call my freelance sponsors to pick up expenses for out-of-town trips, meaning I would have gone on my own dime) I didn’t make it.
The stories I see (I’ve only read a couple of them) don’t answer my biggest point of curiosity about the award: How the cash is going to be split up. Rutan has been very upfront that all the investment for SpaceShipOne came from Allen (no one but the principals knows exactly how much money went into the project; but after the second successful X Prize flight in October, Rutan remarked that winning the $10 million prize recouped 40 percent of Allen’s outlay, which would put the investment figure at $25 million. Anyway, Allen said he’d be sharing the jackpot with Rutan’s company, Scaled Composites; and Rutan said, in turn, that everyone at Scaled would share in the cash. I just wonder how much everyone got.
Up, Around and About
I’ve been spending too much time inside lately. So I went out early this afternoon on a long, long walk. Up into the hills to the north of campus, then skirted the campus to the east, but below the top of the ridge. Then walked back down south of campus, near the Claremont Hotel, then walked back across town home. About 10 miles, in all, and I was back just as it was getting dark. There was a football game at Memorial Stadium. Cal continued its great season by coming back to win against Oregon. Wherever I was along the hike, I could hear at least the muffled roar of the crowd. I found one spot as I came down from the hills — must have been the fourth quarter by then — where I could hear so clearly that I could pick out individual voices. Also, wherever I went, a big red blimp with a Saturn logo was orbiting overhead. I think if I’d gone to the very top of the hills I might have gotten to a spot where I was higher than it was; didn’t quite make it that far, though. The blimp became my frequent photographic subject.
Also saw a natural phenomenon I’d never seen before: I happened to look up at a big pine tree that had the sun directly behind it. At the tips of several boughs, there was a very light veil of something — spider webs, maybe even a vapor of some kind — waving in the air. Another hiker came by and I asked whether she could see it to and whether she knew what it was. She said she hadn’t seen anything like it before, and wondered if the streamers were actually little clouds of insects (also, while we were standing there, a big red-tailed hawk came directly overhead, very low, and landed in a tree behind us; immediately, a little kestrel appeared and chased the hawk away, dive bombing the bigger bird as it sailed out over a canyon). I continued walking, and came to another line of trees silhouetted by the sun. Sure enough: the same little misty wisps of nearly nothing were dancing above some of the boughs. Looking closely, it did look like they were insects. I got a couple of bad pictures of what it looked like. The best I could do with my little camera, I think. Strange that in all my years walking around here I’ve never seen this before.
My Votes
The night before the election, I was feeling optimistic about a Kerry victory, but aware that because so much was unknown about what was really going on with voters in what the French call les états d’oscillation (Florida, Ohio, Michigan et al.), that I was talking myself into my optimism. That brought to mind my first presidential vote, in 1972; I had just turned 18, my participation was a gift of the 26th Amendment. The race, insofar as it was a race, was McGovern versus Nixon, an ultraliberal antiwar candidate who chose, then dropped, a mentally fragile running mate versus a paranoid lush who was not only making a historic diplomatic opening to China but also, it turned out, working overtime to entangle himself in Watergate.
I voted for McGovern, of course. I was in the midst of my first newspaper job, working as a copy boy for Chicago Today, and worked a double shift on election night. Despite what all the polls said — and though I haven’t gone back and read them, I’m sure they were saying McGovern was going to get his ass kicked — I was hopeful. I wore a McGovern button into the office. Despite that breach of unspoken newsroom etiquette, no one told me to take it off; the reporters and editors probably looked on with a mixture of amusement and pity at my delusion, long hair, and odd, sometimes bad-tempered idealism. Nixon, who had just squeaked through in 1968, won in a landslide. McGovern won Massashusetts, probably still in the thrall of the Kennedys, and the District of Columbia, whose electorate is charmingly immune from the world outside. He didn’t even win his home state. I only remember that it was a painfully long shift, with the outcome known pretty much as soon as the polls closed.
Somewhere back there in my asthmatic and thick-lensed boyhood, I had gotten the idea that the Democrats owned the White House. My mom was a precinct captain in 1960, and we had a huge Kennedy poster in our front window. His victory was a big bright spot in a bleak year, and I remember watching his inauguration on our black-and-white TV. In 1964, Johnson won. A fifth-grade classmate, Ron Crouch, wrote me recently to remind me that we had made up LBJ signs to put up in our classroom; it seemed natural to me (though I remember I thought the Goldwater bumperstickers that used the chemical abbreviations for gold and water — AuH20 — were really clever), but Ron’s Republican parents were horrified. When I got old enough, I saw some history in the notion that Democrats won the White House: in the 10 elections before I first voted, the Democrats won seven (FDR in 1932, ’36, ’40, ’44; Truman in ’48; Kennedy; and Johnson). To me, Nixon’s victory in 1968 seemed an anomaly that could be explained by the tragic death of the most inspiring candidate in the race, Bobby Kennedy.
In 1972, I was appalled by the idea that Nixon would get four more years, but, boy, did the people speak. Then, of course, the Watergate conspiracy and Nixon’s role in it was laid bare, and he was out. So in 1976, the Democrats were up again and I got to vote (absentee, because I was in Japan) for a winner (though, despite having been crippled by the Nixon scandal and having a candidate who insisted on national television that the Iron Curtain didn’t exist where Poland was concerned, the Republicans nearly won; in retrospect, that narrow victory should have been a sign of what was to come for the Democrats).
So, my votes since then:
1980: Carter
1984: Mondale
1988: Dukakis
1992: Clinton
1996: Clinton
2000: Gore
2004: Kerry
I note that I have been nothing if not a faithful Democrat. And also that there’s only one winning candidate on that list. So after nine presidential elections, my record is three wins and six losses. Not exactly what my teen-age self expected when I cast my first vote. I know history isn’t this simple, or maybe it is but we’re in love with the notion it’s far more complex, but: I noted that in the 10 elections from 1932 through 1968, the Democrats won seven times. However, in the nine elections from 1896 through 1932, the Republicans won seven (McKinley in 1896 and 1900; Roosevelt in ’04; Taft in ’08; Harding in ’20; Coolidge in ’24, and Hoover in ’28). So maybe there’s a cycle at work here. The earlier Republican cycle was ended by a national calamity, the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression; the ensuing Democratic cycle ended with another national crisis, highlighted by the Vietnam War; and now we’re deep into a Republican cycle, with all the elements of a crisis on hand.
As I said, I believe history is more complex than this, and that the cycles I’m talking about might be only as meaningful and useful as a horoscope. Still, I think it’s apparent that the easy assumptions after a smashing electoral victory — for instance, that the Republicans and their values are supreme — can unravel with amazing speed.
Us and Them
Just a little post-election reading today:
Not a big fan of Thomas Friedman’s — I think he abdicated his duty as a skeptical and credible observer when Bush was pushing us toward war in favor of a rather thin hope that the Iraq adventure would turn out well. But letting bygones be for today, his column in Thursday’s Times (free registration required) asks some compelling questions, especially about the role of religion in the Bush party:
“… What troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don’t just favor different policies than I do – they favor a whole different kind of America. We don’t just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.
“Is it a country that does not intrude into people’s sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn’t trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us – instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?”
Another good read I happened across was a long entry on the blog Philocrates by a Unitarian Universalist minister (and Kerry supporter)) in Tennessee. It’s an interesting take on a subject a lot of liberals and progressives are talking about now, which is how to communicate across the divide to conservatives. The thrust is that liberals must reimagine how they frame their basic appeal:
So, we need to do two things. First, rather than heaping scorn upon conservatives who “just don’t understand,” as liberals, we need to understand that they mean it when they say they are voting their values. Understanding them, and taking them at their word, means living out our own value of empathy. It also means getting to know our neighbors, not holing up in some liberals-only enclave.
“Secondly, we need to learn how to articulate our own values in metaphors, and then learn how to reframe the debate. Using conservative terminology and frames—”tax relief,” “partial-birth abortion,” etc—we’ve already lost it.
“I don’t yet know the compelling metaphors that will give voice to our values the best. But the work is before us. This is where I find hope in the election. If it is true that people are thinking and acting morally—all of us, not just those who voted like us—then there is hope for persuasion, and change.”
I’m not saying I buy the guy’s whole argument. For one thing, I don’t thing the handwringing that’s going on now about how liberals look down on religious conservatives takes account of the raw contempt many conservatives and right-wing religious activists voice for liberals at the same time they’re talking about how important their Christian values are. But there’s a lot of interesting food for thought there.
And last, by way of my bro-han John, there’s a nice little piece on Boing Boing about a nice future arrangement for Blue America and Red America:
“… The new USAR (United States of America Red) can ban books, repeal civil rights, persecute gays and have all the wars they like. They want prayer in schools? More power to them. They can ban abortion and post the Ten Commandments in every federal building in their country. Bring back slavery, if they want. We’ll be free to live with our like-minded countrymen who believe in science, modernism, tolerance, religion as a personal choice, and truly want limited government intrusion in our personal lives. Why should each side be driven mad by the other any more, decade after decade? Call the Culture War a tie and everyone go home.”
“Ecotopia,” anyone?
Miles O’Brien, TV Dolt
A small moment of CNN anchor idiocy today: While Miles O’Brien, TV dolt extraordinaire, was filling time while the network waited for Kerry to show up for his concession speech at Faneuil Hall, he started jabbering about the hall’s history with fellow anchor-dolt Kyra Phillips:
O’Brien: Our affiliate, WCVB, giving us a live feed from inside Faneuil Hall where, really, the revolution was born. Patrick Henry, all the…
Phillips: I was waiting for the Bostonian history, because you lived there…
O’Brien: All the great orations of — the cradle of the revolution right there. And at this point, at that location, in that historic spot, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, of Beacon Hill, just a few minutes away, will offer up his concession speech. That is coming to us, we think within about 30 minutes time. They’re still plugging in all the cables and getting everything ready.”
Yes, dolt. They are still getting everything ready. And while they do, let’s remind you that Patrick Henry certainly did not — not — make one of those great orations there, since he was busy stirring up the Virginia legislature at the time.
Do you get the feeling I don’t like Miles? I don’t. He’s just a jot above the archetypal dumb TV news guy who’s on the air for his looks ‘n’ charm. Dolt. Miles O’Dolt.
Bush, Then and Now
So now that the election is over and our country is healed of its silly divisions, it’s interesting to compare Bush’s acceptance speech today with the one he gave after he finally got his way in 2000. Not that they’re identical, but there are a few familiar phrases. I’d say the 2000 speech had a couple moments of real grace — for instance, when mentioning Jefferson’s 1800 election. It’s odd to read his calls for courtesy and civility and bipartisanship now (especially when they were delivered from the Texas state house, the scene of his allies’ more recent attempt to cripple the Democrats by gerrymandering them to death). Today’s talk was brief and pragmatic, except for the sort of odd reference to Texas at the end. It’s a little early for him to be talking retirement.
In any case, if you’re looking for signs of reconciliation (yeah, he got a record number of votes, as Cheney said; he also had a record number votes against him) his words are less than convincing, ’cause we’ve heard this spiel before and we’ve seen where that led.
Today:
Earlier today, Senator Kerry called with his congratulations. We had a really good phone call. He was very gracious. Senator Kerry waged a spirited campaign, and he and his supporters can be proud of their efforts. Laura and I wish Senator Kerry and Teresa and their whole family all our best wishes.
2000:
This evening I received a gracious call from … Vice President [Gore]. We agreed to meet early next week in Washington and we agreed to do our best to heal our country after this hard-fought contest. Tonight I want to thank all the thousands of volunteers and campaign workers who worked so hard on my behalf. I also salute the vice president and his supports for waging a spirited campaign. And I thank him for a call that I know was difficult to make. Laura and I wish the vice president and Senator Lieberman and their families the very best. “
***
Today:
Today I want to speak to every person who voted for my opponent. To make this nation stronger and better, I will need your support and I will work to earn it. I will do all I can do to deserve your trust. A new term is a new opportunity to reach out to the whole nation. We have one country, one Constitution, and one future that binds us.
2000:
I was not elected to serve one party, but to serve one nation. The president of the United States is the president of every single American, of every race and every background. Whether you voted for me or not, I will do my best to serve your interests and I will work to earn your respect.
***
Today:
We will continue our economic progress. We’ll reform our outdated tax code. We’ll strengthen the Social Security for the next generation. We’ll make public schools all they can be. And we will uphold our deepest values of family and faith.
2000:
Together, we will work to make all our public schools excellent, teaching every student of every background and every accent, so that no child is left behind. Together we will save Social Security and renew its promise of a secure retirement for generations to come. Together we will strengthen Medicare and offer prescription drug coverage to all of our seniors. Together we will give Americans the broad, fair and fiscally responsible tax relief they deserve. Together we’ll have a bipartisan foreign policy true to our values and true to our friends, and we will have a military equal to every challenge and superior to every adversary. Together we will address some of society’s deepest problems one person at a time, by encouraging and empowering the good hearts and good works of the American people.
It’s Over
It’s over. Kerry’s conceding. Bush will address the nation. Maybe he’ll announce a draft. Or that he’s appointing Clarence Thomas to succeed Rehnquist as chief justice. Or that he wants to kick some Iranian booty.
Scattered, random observations the morning after:
–The New York Times (and everyone else) is calling the result a cliffhanger. Yes, it was close. But a cliffhanger? Really, after what we went through in 2000, this was nothing. Nothing! It was apparent early on that Florida was going to Bush. Depending on whose Ohio tally you were following — the Ohio Secretary of State’s Web site lagged oddly behind the reporting available through the C-Span site (thanks, Pete!) or The New York Times — things only looked like they were really tightening up at one point very late. One bundle of precincts came in and narrowed Bush’s lead to fewer than 100,000 votes; but the old lead of 125,000-plus was soon restored. You would have had to believe that Kerry would win a fantasy share of all the unreported absentees and provisional ballots to see him winning the state. Meantime, Iowa, Nevada and New Mexico were all sliding toward Bush. True, if Ohio went Kerry’s way, Bush would have been denied. But Ohio didn’t move, and Ohio was the election (and no Florida 2000 or Illinois 1960 by a long shot).
–Let the conpiracy-mongering begin: Somewhere out there online, I’ll bet the conspiracy theories about the role voting machines played in Bush’s victory are already boiling. For instance, that the results varied so much from what exit polls showed in states like Florida that the fix just had to be in; and of course, there’s nothing to do about it, because there’s no paper trail for most of the touch-screen machines. Hmmm. Well, the pollsters are gonna have quite a post mortem on their hands. They were all over the map, and everyone who was watching the numbers knew something was off, and whatever it was had nothing to do with a screwy, poorly designed voting system. It will be interesting to see if we get a good objective report card on how the systems did, though.
–The mandate. So, Bush will claim a mandate. To make tax cuts permanent, appoint Clarence Thomas chief justice, and kick some Iranian booty. Noted: Thanks to the lack of a national third-party choice this year, Bush is the first to win a majority of the national popular vote for the first time since Poppy put it to famed tank driver and Williie Horton lover Michael Dukakis back in 1988. But: 51 percent a mandate? Well, of course, seeing that he won his last mandate with half a million fewer votes than his opponent.
–The popular vote: With 98.7 percent of the precincts in, Bush 58.6 million, Kerry 55.1 million. That margin of 3.5 million probably looks thrilling to Bush after what happened last time. Interesting that the margin was built up in the eastern states and has stayed steady as the western states reported. For the second time in a row, Bush lost California by 1 million votes.
–Illinois has 102 counties. Barack Obama won 96 of them. Alan Keyes triumphed in six of the state’s smallest counties, including picturesque Calhoun County, the land between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers.
While We’re Waiting …
… a few choice election-related readings:
–Redoubtable Illinois Democrat Archpundit goes off on Alan Keyes and his suggestion that he intends to stay in Illinois after his electoral thrashing to help remake the Republican Party in his own (ultra-right, ultra-fundamentalist, ultra-Christian, ultra-zealot) image.
–Voters tell Kottke.org about their polling-place experiences today.
–A June 2003 talk by Bill Moyers on the battle to keep a progressive agenda alive in the United States:
“Ideas have power – as long as they are not frozen in doctrine. But ideas need legs. The eight-hour day, the minimum wage, the conservation of natural resources and the protection of our air, water, and land, women’s rights and civil rights, free trade unions, Social Security and a civil service based on merit – all these were launched as citizen’s movements and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles and in the face of bitter opposition and sneering attacks. It’s just a fact: Democracy doesn’t work without citizen activism and participation, starting at the community. Trickle down politics doesn’t work much better than trickle down economics. It’s also a fact that civilization happens because we don’t leave things to other people. What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it – as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit – to believe that the flame of democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.”
–And last, while we contemplate the electoral mess many fear could come out of today, Smithsonian magazine has a good piece on the election of 1800, decided by a single man who decided not to vote.
In Diebold We Trust
I’ve sort of resisted the whole hysteria over the Diebold voting machines. I don’t call it hysteria because I think the concerns are baseless; I believe the security concerns are real and that the lack of some sort of receipt to reassure you that the machine recorded the vote you cast is a problem that ought to be fixed ASAP; but I also think the concerns have been blown up by a lot of people into an assumption that computerized vote systems will be hacked and votes or whole elections will be stolen this time around. Sure, it’s possible. But the fact is that the legitimacy of elections relies not on the technology employed but on the good faith and trust and upstanding conduct of the people running them and participating in them. Make sure the election systems are secure, by all means — I agree with the notion that the standard should be the automatic teller systems almost all of us use and for which the standard and expectations of accuracy and reliability are set extremely high. Let’s just not exaggerate the threat really posed by the technology we’re using now; that just creates another level of fear and cynicism about the way elections work just at the time we need to get more people involved.