We the People. . .were right

Way back in 2000, George Bush told reporters that he wasn't much interested in studying history, didn't care much about the past, didn't read any history books. Oh! how 8 disastrous years, and truly "historic" poll numbers will change a man.

There is no question that the orgy of exit interviews W has been giving over his last few weeks - equal parts self-congratulation and self-pity - are an appeal to Clio, that fickle muse of history. He wants history to remember him well, even if the rest of us who have lived through this nightmare are nothing but callow ingrates.

Nor is there any question that he needn't bother with all this. He already is, and will be for the rest of my natural days, the worst president in American history (not to mention a despicable human being). I can say this with a certain confidence. "History," after all, doesn't make judgments - historians do. And I am one of those who spends my time analyzing the past for a living. We professional historians - most of us anyway - need no further evidence, nor any more time to deliberate: worst ever.

But what strikes me about W's hail-mary pass to posterity is that he, and the press at whom he has been shoveling this manure, take as a given that the Bush presidency started on September 11, 2001. So, for example: He has kept us safe for 7 years, goes the official line, oblivious to the specious logic of that claim and to the fact that, therefore, he didn't keep us safe for those first 9 months of his presidency.

This post-dated Bush presidency has also made it easier to see his worst instincts and practices as somehow a response to the crisis of 9/11. In fact, there was plenty of evidence by September 10 that Bush would govern as a far right, bitterly partisan president who treated the Congress and the Constitution with contempt, and for whom ideological purity trumped all other considerations. Exhibit A: the appointment of John Ashcroft to be Attorney General. 'Nuf said. Exhibit B: Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont. In 2000, Jeffords was a Republican, but a dangerously moderate one. Bush staffers treated him so badly in those first days of 2001 that he left the party to become an independent. Exhibit C: a small trickle of senior military staff leaving the Pentagon because of their unhappiness with Donald Rumsfeld. That trickle would grow as Rumsfeld ran roughshod over the armed forces. Exhibit D: by August, 2001, Bush's poll numbers were already tanking. And on I could go.

These things are important to remember as we evaluate the full 8 years of Bush's presidency, but perhaps they don't rise to the level of major importance. What does, however, is the election of 2000 itself, which gets conveniently ignored by all those who pretend Bush moved into the White House on September 11.

As this administration comes at last to its end, let us never forget the foundational and fundamental facts of the Bush presidency:

He didn't win the election in 2000.

He was installed by what would be described if it had happened in any other country as a coup d'etat.

The will of the American people was deliberately subverted by partisans on the Supreme Court.

A majority of Americans voted for Al Gore; a majority of Floridians woke up on election day intending to vote for Al Gore, though we may never now exactly how many had their votes stolen or suppressed.

George W Bush was a squatter in the White House.

In this sense, 9/11 was the best thing that happened to George W. Bush, politically speaking, and Bush's White House never spoke any other language. Without 9/11 I have no doubt that Bush would have been a one-term squatter.

We need to say these things because they remind us that our system can be subverted by a carefully coordinated, well-funded cabal. The election of 2000 reminds us that our democracy really is fragile. And - perhaps because I am feeling good and expansive now that my Bush countdown clock really is approaching zero - I believe that we need to remind ourselves that in 2000, the American people were right.

Buckeye Blue(s)

Ohio was called early on Tuesday night! Most of us assumed we'd be waiting until midnight to figure out just how many ballots the state GOP had stolen. But the race turned out to be less close than some polls predicted - 4 points. A convincing and triumphant performance, and a relief to those of us who have felt like pariahs for the last four years, being personally blamed for the 2004 results.

That all said, a few other things to notice: Buckeyes bucked the national trend and turned out in lower numbers than they did last time. Strange because the weather was stunningly beautiful all across the state and in 2004 it was 48* and rainy all day.

In a post here some weeks ago I suggested that the turn-out key might be not how many Obama voters came out but how many Republicans stayed home. That seems to have been the case. Obama got about as many votes as Kerry did -roughly 2.5 million though this time that amount to 51% of the total. What that also means that McShame's 2.5 million was nearly 350,000 votes less than Bush got.

Obama clearly did well in the urban areas of Columbus, Toledo and Cleveland. Most stunning, he took Hamilton County in the southwest corner of the state. Hamilton includes Cincinnati, but is otherwise deeply conservative. Bush won the county with 52.5%; Obama won it with 52.1%. That may be the most dramatic percentage switch of any county. Likewise, Obama nibbled away at the margins in some rural areas as well. These counties are filled with Pavlov's Republicans - Heinrich Himmler could run as a Republican in these area and be guaranteed about 55%.

Yet, even in this I suspect that Obama ate into these margins largely because Republicans stayed home. Here in Greene County Bush won with 61%; McShame with 58%. That's three points. But Bush got about 45,000 votes here; McShame got 39,000. Kerry got 29,000; Obama 27,000. I haven't looked at too many other counties yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if this pattern repeated itself in several other places. The punch line, I think, is that we have a rare instance when a lower voter turn-out helped the Democrat.

I bring all this up because I think it raises an interesting question about campaign organization. There is no question that Obama built an amazing machine even in these parts of the state. I was a part of it and it was truly inspiring. We also know that Kerry built very little and relied on a slap-dash effort by Move-On. Yet, at least in Greene County Kerry got more votes. I'm not sure what to conclude from this except perhaps to say that Ohio may still be an essentially Republican state, despite the 2006 elections and the triumph of Tuesday night. They just didn't want to vote for McShame.

In other news, the state flipped 2 House seats, which is a major accomplishment given the near-perfect gerrymandering engineered by the GOP in the last round. In a previous post I suggested people watch the OH-7 where I thought Sharen Neuhardt had a chance to win a seat vacated by a long-time Republican incumbent. David Hobson was sent to Washington for 18 years and made absolutely no impression there at all. Neuhardt lost - big - to a Steve Austria who had been term-limited out of the State Senate. He was described by a local paper as never having had an idea that didn't come straight from the GOP headquarters. He is now Congressman Austria. Ah well.

So perhaps the most interesting news of the election here is that the Democrats took control, just barely, of the State House. The districts get re-drawn in 2 years with a Democratic governor and a Democratic House. It's gerrymandering time!!

Voting and American Decline

It has become an increasingly common topic of conversation: Are we watching the end of the American Century? Is this what the collapse of empire feels like? Several recent books address this notion directly or indirectly -- Alan Ryan reviewed five of them in the October 23 issue of the New York Review of Books (good essay). A colleague of mine who specializes in Roman history nods his head sagely and says: Yes, this is Rome in the late days, complete with the beer and circus that has characterized so much of our politics over the last generation.

These conversations tend to focus on The Big Picture: American geo-military position after the Iraq debacle; the rise of emerging economies; the consequences of borrowing so much money from China; the failure of the United States to respond to the climate crisis.

As the election enters its final (thank god) week, however, I'm struck by a smaller but no less dispiriting symptom of American decline. More and more of us, to judge by what I'm reading, hearing on the streets, and watching on the internet, simply assume that our elections are corrupt and dishonest. When early voting in Florida began, one late-night comedian quipped: "Early voting has begun in Florida. You know what that means? Florida has probably already screwed up the election and we won't know it until November 4." Scroll down here and you'll see that Tom posted a funny Simpson's clip. When Homer tries to vote for Obama and he registers six votes for McCain instead. Funny stuff.

And as Homer said once, in another cartoon context: It's funny because its true. Or true enough. There is no question that the 2000 election was stolen; there is compelling evidence that the 2004 election in Ohio - at least - was also swiped. And by god if there aren't reports of voting problems already in Florida.

This all went under-reported in the press, and Americans largely shrugged their collective shoulders and took it for granted. It is a sorry commentary on the state of The Greatest Democracy on Earth that we are largely resigned to stolen elections.

We should be clear. American elections have always been two parts democratic process and one part three-card monte game. The wonderful painting by George Caleb Bingham of the "County Election" from the 1850s is enough to dispel the idea that our elections were once pure. (The painting features drunkenness, debauchery and voter intimidation.) For several generations black Americans had their votes taken from them for the crime of being black; women couldn't vote at all until 1920. American elections have never been models of democratic probity.

Still, rather than cracking jokes, we should be demanding better. The first responsibility of any real democracy - before invading other countries, or bailing out its investment banks - is to make sure the democratic process works. That citizens are permitted to vote, and that each and every vote is counted honestly. It is a fundamental failure of our democracy, therefore, that we can't provide enough ballots or machines that work, that we can't keep polling places open so that working people can vote, that people wait in lines so long that they look like the third world simply to exercise their most basic right in our society.

It has become the stuff of jokes of the sort we used to make about banana republics. Now, however, we are laughing at ourselves.