HOW FAR WE’VE COME

I am listening to 1776 on my Nano, and it’s 2 degrees Fahrenheit (in Boston, in 1776) and people are dragging 120 tons of cannons from Ft. Ticonderoga 300 miles to General George Washington in Dorchester, and the suffering of the troops – civilians like you and me, who’ve left their families to fight the British – is astounding.  Sentries are literally freezing to death.  And all I can think about is how upset we get if we’re assigned a middle seat.

ETERNAL VIGILANCE

Because our democracy has always been here and we’ve always been the world’s economic superpower – at least as long as any of us has been alive, which is perhaps the most realistic definition of “always” – it’s easy to forget the sacrifices made to get here.  Or that more sacrifices may be needed.  (One friend of mine couldn’t honor his pledge to the DNC last year because the cost of maintaining five residences got the better of him.)

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and I’m beginning to wonder if we’re being vigilant enough. 

I know this leads quickly to criticism of war-time tax cuts (tax cuts? is that the sacrifice the wealthy are now called upon to make in wartime?) . . . and from there to carping about unwarranted wire taps (even though the law allowed the warrants to be obtained 72 hours after the tap, to keep from impeding critical intelligence work).

Next you’ll be suggesting that we didn’t really go into Iraq “as a last resort,” as we were promised.

. . . or that Iraq really was not involved in attacking us on 9/11, as so many were led to believe.

. . . or that “by far the vast majority” of candidate Bush’s proposed tax cuts didn’t “go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder,” as he insisted they would. 

Is there no end to your cynicism? 

Will you suggest, next, that a CIA agent’s cover was purposely blown?

Or that we actually do torture? 

Are you – while we’re at it – one of those nut jobs who believes that the 2000 election was stolen? 

Who believes the recent GAO Report that elections involving paperless ballots could easily be stolen? 

Who believes that democracy fails if election results can’t be trusted?

Well, then, this book review from the Christian Century is right up your alley . . . and an interesting follow-up to Friday’s interview with Professor deHaven-Smith.

To make my own position clear:  Yes, I have little doubt Al Gore won both the national and the Florida popular votes in 2000 . . . No, I don’t think John Kerry won in 2004 – but I agree with the GAO Report that we really have no way of knowing.

And thus my own bottom line is that – whether or not you buy what follows (it sounds strident to me) – one thing is clear: Republicans and Democrats alike ought to be insisting on election machines with auditable paper trails, and safeguards befitting our democracy.

One Amazon.com reviewer writes: “I came to this book with, I think, the usual preconceptions: it will present a paranoid conspiracy theory, it’s just a Democrat’s sour grapes, it will be the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter or Joe Scarborough rant – in other words, nothing new to say, shrieked at top volume. Instead . . . [I found it to be] a powerful and terrifying book. It is well documented and makes its case, if anything, too abundantly.”

So here’s the review:

January 6, 2006

Bad Faith: Media Silence and the Assault on Democracy

Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They'll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them)

By Mark Crispin Miller

Basic Books, 363 pp., $24.95

By Robert C. Koehler

In early 2004, Pat Robertson divined the outcome of the presidential election, then ten months away. “I think George Bush is going to win in a walk,” he said on a broadcast of “The 700 Club.” “I really believe I’m hearing from the Lord it’s going to be like a blowout election in 2004.”

God — or at least the fervent, all-justifying, “Christian soldier” belief in God, and of course God’s opposite, evil — is the real topic of Mark Crispin Miller’s new book, Fooled Again: How the Right Stole the 2004 Election and Why They’ll Steal the Next One Too (Unless We Stop Them). The volume is a primer for the many appalled students of the last presidential election, which was won by the incumbent not exactly “in a walk,” as Robertson predicted, but by a healthy enough margin that Bush could declare the next day, “America has spoken,” and claim, as though he needed one, a mandate. It is a meticulously researched explication of the case that there was serious fraud in that election, both blatant (myriad dirty tricks) and invisible (manipulation of electronic voting), and as such takes its place along several other recent books that examine the topic in gory detail. What Miller’s book does in addition is place election fraud — or election theft — in a psychological and religious context.

Referring to Robertson’s faith-based prediction, which he quotes at the beginning of Fooled Again, Miller comments, sardonically: “That the statement was a little crass does not make it wrong. Certainly no other worldly factor can account for that amazing win, which no human pollster could foresee, and which no mortal has been able to explain in rational terms.”

Miller, a professor of media studies at New York University and a frequent political commentator on radio and TV, makes a compelling case that virulent, anti-democratic forces fueled by religious fervor are making an all-out assault on American democracy, but to my mind the most troubling aspect of Fooled Again is his indictment of the media, democracy’s watchdog, which is letting it happen. This is the part of the story that hits home hardest for me and pushes the crisis into “oh my God” mode — the fact that the institutions that are supposed to be protecting us for the most part simply aren’t. On one hand we have what Miller calls the “Christo-fascist right,” a determined army of zealots who have nothing but contempt for secular, pluralistic, tolerant and democratic American society and feel called upon by a higher power to subvert it; on the other hand we have a meek and blandly “balanced” punditocracy that refuses to stand on principle or seriously challenge the right.

Speaking of the fight over the 2000 election and the cacophony of voices screaming that Al Gore — in fact the winner of the popular vote nationwide and, as it turned out, the winner in Florida as well — Miller writes: “The voices of sanity were few, and even fewer those sane voices that spoke with the requisite bluntness.”

Lack of requisite bluntness is certainly one way of describing how the media covered the heart-stopping news that Gore did indeed win Florida, and hence the presidency, in 2000, according to a recount commissioned by the media itself, or a consortium of its most prominent names, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and CNN. The New York Times, for instance, in a story headlined “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” published on Nov. 12, 2001, not only buried the news in paragraph 14, but phrased it with such glib dismissiveness a reader needs several passes through the verbiage to grasp what’s being said:

“In a finding rich with irony,” the Times informs us, “the results show that even if Mr. Gore had succeeded in his effort to force recounts of undervotes in the four Democratic counties, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia, he still would have lost, although by 225 votes rather than 537. An approach Mr. Gore and his lawyers rejected as impractical — a statewide recount — could have produced enough votes to tilt the election his way, no matter what standard was chosen to judge voter intent.” (italics added)

Come again? If Gore had recounted all the votes he would have won? What’s telling about this sentence, aside from the mockery, is that the point of view seems almost extraterrestrial in its indifference to these findings. Psst, Gore blew it! There’s not the least awareness that the voters who cast their ballots for him, not to mention the American public at large and the democratic process itself, are also interested parties, who, according to the apparent rules of this preposterous game, are hostage to the candidate’s choice of legal strategies. This story was not written on their behalf.

What we have in this country are media that believe in nothing, and are therefore ripe for manipulation by zealots who believe utterly in themselves. Miller puts their movement into historical context: “If the Soviet threat was dangerous to this country, so too were the consequences of its disappearance. When that occurred, surprisingly, in 1991, that old crusading animus, all stoked up but with no place to go, exploded here, affecting U.S. politics and culture with a kind of blowback not envisioned by the CIA. The disaster started with the evangelical crusade against Bill Clinton and continues with the full complicity of Bush & Co., whose soldiers now crusade against their fellow citizens, and against democracy itself.”

Most of the book is sheer documentation of this phenomenon. Miller collected news accounts from all over the country of the irregularities and wholesale disenfranchisement that occurred on Nov. 2, 2004, culminating in the re-election of George W. Bush. Though foreseen by Pat Robertson, Bush’s victory was at statistically outrageous variance with state-of-the-art poll results, especially in such swing states as Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Mexico. How did this happen? Fooled Again is a mosaic of isolated answers gathered together to reveal the larger pattern. It’s an exercise in dot-connecting. For instance:

• “In South Carolina, a posse of Republicans converged on Benedict College, a black institution in Columbia, demanding to see drivers’ licenses and challenging the right of several dozen people, mostly students, to cast votes. … Some of the students left in tears, according to … the college president, who also noted that the operation slowed things down so much — there was a four-hour wait at one point — that would-be voters had to call it quits.”

• “The Republicans were especially active in South Florida, doing all they could to frighten Kerry voters into going home, or staying home. This sort of intimidation was already going on throughout the early-voting period. The early voters (in a predominantly black section of Jacksonville) … found themselves under surveillance as they came to cast their ballots, a private detective filming everyone from behind a car with blacked-out windows.”

• “Forty-three percent of expatriate voters, or would-be voters, never received their ballots or received them too late, according to the Overseas Voting Foundation. … While thousands of expatriates had no way to vote for president, the military had a great surplus of write-in ballots — enough to give each service member two. … According to (a high-ranking officer in the military), the Pentagon is uninterested in helping ‘non-propagandized people’ vote.”

The point is that these are not isolated incidents. Many, many precincts around the country — especially in minority and student areas — were plagued with troubles: “epidemic dysfunction” … “statistically impossible bad luck” … “reminiscent less of democratic process than of martial law.” There were too few voting machines; the machines broke down. Republican challengers and poll watchers were rude and intimidating. Voters were directed to the wrong polling places, the wrong lines. People tried to vote for Kerry and their machines registered Bush. This happened over and over and over.

These anti-democratic machinations are not a “conspiracy” in the normally understood, easily dismissed sense, anymore than the Jim Crow South of yesteryear was a “conspiracy.” Most of the tactics are out in the open or, at best, thinly veiled. They have the enthusiastic participation of ordinary, everyday Americans who happen to believe they’re doing what they must.

“The project here is ultimately pathological and essentially anti-political, albeit Machiavellian on a scale, and to a degree, that would have staggered Machiavelli,” writers Miller. “The aim is not to master politics but to annihilate it. Bush, Rove, DeLay, Ralph Reed, et al. believe in ‘politics’ in the same way that they and their corporate beneficiaries believe in ‘competition.’ In both cases the intention is not to play the game but to end it — because the game requires some tolerance of the Other, and tolerance is what these bitter-enders most despise.”

Fooled Again is a wakeup call. Just because the mainstream media — and the mainstream Democratic Party — refuse to be appalled and can at best summon an occasional and perfunctory defense of our democratic principles, doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. If we want our children to inherit a free, democratic and open society, the time to start rebuilding it is now.

This article appears in Christian Century, January 10, 2006 edition.

Robert Koehler, an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer. You can reach him at bob@commonwonders.com.  Author’s Website: CountEveryVote.BlogSpot.com.

F I’ve not yet read the book – but I’ve ordered a copy.