the hunger games for real

            There is general agreement that the 2012 presidential election is enormously significant.  In the view of many, it is in fact more significant than any election in recent memory.

           

            The reason most frequently advanced in support of that proposition is that the election presents America with a stark choice between diametrically opposite visions of what government should be.  Romney, this argument goes, would give us a lean, minimalist federal government focused on reducing taxes, reducing or eliminating federal government regulation, demanding individual responsibility in lieu of collective care-giving, closing America’s borders—in effect, creating a government that, in Grover Norquist’s famous sobriquet, could be “drowned in a bathtub.”

            Obama, on the other hand, would give us a government that requires the wealthy to pay more in taxes, regulates business activities that might impinge the public welfare, strengthens the social safety net, fosters inclusiveness—in effect, a social democratic government or, as the GOP prefers to regard it, a “nanny” state.

            There is hyperbole in both those visions, and in fact, they aren’t mutually exclusive.  There is no question however that a Republican victory in November would put this country on a distinctly different course than would a Democratic victory.

            The John Galt-ian nature of the direction Republicans would take the country scares me, but that isn’t the biggest fear factor apropos a Republican win in my view.  Political winds shift and blow in different directions over periods of time, and if this turns out to be a good year for conservative winds, sunspots or a new el nino will over time turn those winds around and usher in a progressive spring.  Remember that the election of 2010 followed 2008 by only two years.

            What scares me about the possibility of a Republican victory in November is what it might portend for the future of politics in this country.  Here are a few reasons why.

NUMBER ONE

            Obama’s swearing in was barely complete when Mitch McConnell took to the floor of the Senate and announced that making Obama a “one-term president” was his party’s “number one goal.”  This at a time when we were fighting two wars that his party had literally put on the country’s credit card, the financial system was on the verge of collapse, we were at least several months into a very deep recession, unemployment had been rising steeply since the previous September, the housing bubble was about to fully burst and the American auto industry was on the verge of collapse.  In the face of all that, the number one Republican goal was to get rid of Obama.

            Only a few days after McConnell made that announcement, all the Republican leadership of the House and Senate convened at a retreat (I believe it was at a resort hotel in Maryland) at which Eric Cantor demanded of them a new set of marching orders—essentially that the party would attack and obstruct.  If Obama proposed anything, the party would attack it, and then simply say no.  The leadership left that meeting unanimously in support of that policy, and for the first time in the 50-odd years that I’ve been watching politics, we saw one of our two parties quite simply ignore, on a continuous basis, its responsibility to govern and pursue instead its self-aggrandizing goal—get rid of the President.

            So firmly behind that policy were the Republicans that they consistently found themselves now opposing policies and ideas they had previously supported.  Perhaps the most egregious example, an individual mandate to pay for universal health insurance was a policy idea originally floated by the Heritage Foundation and supported strongly by the Republican party.

NUMBER TWO

            I will be the first to admit that distortions, misrepresentations, judicious omissions and occasionally outright lies have come from both sides of the aisle during the presidential campaign.  I will further stipulate that because the Republican party had a primary campaign season to get through, it has had more opportunities to obfuscate and thus could be expected to have a higher total number of lies than Democrats.

            Here’s what concerns me.  With no exceptions I can think of, when a Democrat (like Joe Biden) has misrepresented something—or when the party has released an ad containing factually dubious content—at a minimum the Dems have stopped making the dubious statement or stopped running the misleading ad.  They’ve even occasionally issued a mea culpa.

            On the Republican side, not only have there been more lies and distortions, they have been aired absolutely unapologetically.  The most recent examples would include the ad charging that Obama took 716 billion medicare dollars from seniors to pay for Obamacare, the ad claiming that Obama was “gutting” the work requirement in the welfare program, and of course the ad that edited several sentences out of  an Obama speech to make it sound as though he were saying that small business owners didn’t build their own business.  That one has become the de facto theme of  their nominating convention.

            Romney’s top television advertising strategist, Ashley O’Connor, defended the welfare ad by saying simply, “It’s our most effective ad  . . .”  The most telling—one might even say chilling—summation of the new Republican approach to campaign advertising came from Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, who  declared calmly, “we’re not going let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”

            Newhouse’s comment is a polite way of saying that the Republican party’s official position on campaigning is that it can—and will—say whatever it thinks will best serve its interests regardless of whether it’s true.

NUMBER THREE

            The Republican party has the ability to spend upwards of a billion dollars on this campaign.  That’s with a B.  Way over half of that is coming directly from a group of 26 billionaires whose commonality is hatred of Obama, and from money raised anonymously by 501(c)(4)’s like Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS or funneled through non-profits like the Chamber of Commerce.  The Democrats are trying to put on a brave face and talk about how their superior grass-roots mobilization will balance the scales, but they know that’s fanciful thinking.  The amount of money that Republicans can pour into swing states over compressed two or three week periods of time is staggering—and frightening.

Put these three factors together and you have what most scares me about this election.  A Republican victory would in essence say three things:  first, the surest way to return to power is to make certain the incumbent accomplishes as little as possible, even if doing so causes the country to suffer; second, say whatever it takes to make your opponent look bad (or yourself look good) regardless of the truth; third, any election, even one for the most powerful office in the world, can be bought.

Those three things in combination, and what they portend for the future is what scares me most.  If the Republicans lose, that loss would to some extent indicate the country’s rejection of the path the GOP has marched on over the past four years—the three things enumerated above. If the Republicans win, the Democrats will have a choice starting in January of 2013.  Do they want to be minority partners in the governing of the country, or do they want to begin a 4 year, no-holds barred, scorched earth campaign to reclaim the presidency in 2016? 

If they choose the former, the country will shift course radically, and, in my view, for the worse, but its fundamental institutions will remain intact.  If they choose the latter, well, sometimes it’s good to be old enough to not have to look very far into the future. 

Because that future could well be a hateful, or at least hate-filled place where American politics becomes the hunger games.

           

           

            

a permanent majority

In the halcyon days of George W. Bush's first term, you may remember Karl Rove's prediction that W's election (actually, his appointment by the Supreme Court) heralded the beginning of a "permanent Republican majority."  For a number of reasons, W's patent incompetence being a major one, that didn't happen.

Or rather, it didn't happen when Rove said it would.  Back then, Democrats still controlled enough statehouses and congressional districts and state legislatures to keep the worst instincts of the Republican party at bay.

Fast forward to 2010 when a huge influx of corporate money, Tea Party populism and, not insignificantly, an incredible tone deafness and political maladroitness on the part of Barack Obama and the Democratic party, left more than half the states completely red (statehouse and both houses of legislature) and the Democrats hamstrung even in blue states by sufficient numbers of Republicans in one or both houses, or by a Republican in the statehouse.

2010 was also of course the year that the Citizens United decision made possible unlimited corporate donations to political action committees and to candidates.  What that decision less famously did was sanction the creation of 501(c)(4) groups.  Ostensibly, 501(c)(4)'s are non-profit organizations designed to engage in "social welfare" advancement programs.  Not surprisingly, Rove was one of the first to recognize that "public policy" advocacy could be deemed "social welfare" promotion.  That led him to spin off an entity called Crossroads GPS from his already existing Crossroads Super Pac.  The great advantage to a 501(c)(4) of course is that such groups don't have to identify their donors.

Add to that, 2010 was a census year, meaning that all state and national congressional districts needed to be adjusted to reflect changes in population and demography.  Since, in virtually all states, legislative districts are drawn by the legislature, the opportunity for Republican legislatures to gerrymander districts into Republican strongholds was obvious.

In combination, the Republican "shellacking" of 2010 and the almost limitless supply of money from PAC's and 501(c)(4)'s, emboldened Republicans to begin the creation of that "permanent Republican majority" that Rove dreamed about 10 years earlier.  Sadly, they may very well succeed.

If you look at one of those color-coded maps of the country, the mid-west, which includes both the farm states and the old industrial Rust Belt states like Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the deep south, including Florida, and the southwest, including Texas and Arizona, are red.  Many of them, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin, Texas especially, are completely red.  In all of them, right hands had scarcely been lifted from bibles on swearing in day when the gerrymandering process described above began (to be fair, it would have if Democrats had won big as well), but more importantly, Republican legislatures and governors began looking for ways to insure that voting in future elections would be as difficult as possible for segments of the population that had traditionally not supported the GOP.

State after state began pushing voter ID laws through the legislative process in order, their supporters insisted, to prevent voter fraud.  There is no question that fraudulent votes have been cast in previous
elections, nor that in a few cases (not many actually) those fraudulent votes may have tipped the outcome in a direction it would not otherwise have gone.

Virtually without exception however, those cases have involved fraudulent use of absentee ballots.  In most states, little more than a request for an absentee ballot through an on-line site is required to get one, and while there are some safeguards in place governing the actual filing of an absentee ballot, there are clear opportunities for fraud.

The two demographics most likely to use absentee voting are men and women in the military and voting age students.  It's interesting to look at the voting rights statutes that have been proposed (and passed) in the red states.  Most of them don't address absentee voting at all, but the ones that do are very specific in the demographic they target: voting age students.  In some some states, absentee voting by students is simply outlawed.  In others, the process is made so restrictive as to be effectively outlawed.

In all the states that have enacted legislation relating to absentee voting, active duty military are specifically excluded.  In other words, it's perfectly OK for a Lance Corporal from Mississippi who is stationed in, say, Texas to vote by absentee ballot.  A 19 year old student from Mississippi attending college however at, say, Notre Dame, would have to arrange a return to Mississippi on election day in order to cast a ballot.

The difference of course has nothing to do with logic or fairness.  It has to do with the fact that people in the military are much more likely to vote Republican than people in college.

You may recall the election debacle in Ohio in 2004 when insufficient staffing at polling places, faulty machines, election day chicanery by both parties and a variety of other factors resulted in literally thousands of people either just giving up and not voting or standing in line for hours to cast a ballot that would ultimately not get counted.  To insure that would not happen again, Ohio and many other states enacted "early voting" periods ranging from as few as several days prior to election day to as much as three weeks before.  Many states also instituted weekend voting.  The idea was to spread the process out over a longer period of time so that everyone who wanted to vote could find a time that was convenient for them to do so.

The people early voting especially helped were working class individuals, seniors, and students.  In 2008, all those demographics went, in varying degrees, for Obama.  Not surprisingly then, red state legislatures also are going after early voting.  Virtually all of the red states that had it in 2010 will either not have it at all in 2012, or have it in severely limited form.

Perhaps the most egregiously partisan attack on early voting has come in, of all places, Ohio.  If you live in the largely Republican suburbs of Cincinnati--Butler or Warren county--you can cast your presidential ballot beginning in October by going to a polling place in the evening or on a weekend.
If you live within the city limits of Cincinnati, which has traditionally voted Democratic, you can still vote beginning in October, but your polling places will close promptly at 5 PM and will not be open on the weekends.  The same situation exists in the urban areas of every other major Ohio city.

In Ohio, county election boards are, by law, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats.  In counties likely to vote Democratic, the Republicans on the election board have voted against weekends and extended weekday hours.  The Republican secretary of state, Jon Husted, consistently breaks the tie in favor of the Republicans.  In counties likely to vote Republican, the Republicans naturally vote for extended hours, and Husted again breaks the tie in their favor.

What has been banished in practically every red state is Sunday voting.  It did not escape Republican notice in 2008, and again in 2010, that many churches promoted "voting Sundays," providing transportation to any who needed it after church services and encouraging everyone in the congregation to vote.

Sunday voting is gone now in virtually every red state.

What every red state attack on voting rights has included is a voter ID requirement; specifically, a requirement that each voter present an approved photo ID at the polling place before being allowed to vote.  Exactly what constitutes an approved photo ID varies some from state to state, but most of them require a valid driver's license, a passport, or a state issued ID card, all of which require documenation that many poor, minority, immigrant or senior citizens do not have and in many cases cannot get, either because of the cost involved or lack of mobility or because the document simply doesn't exist.

The Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan think tank, has estimated that, because of new voter ID laws, as many as 11% of potential voters in 2012 will be denied the right to vote.  It also estimates that nearly 80% of that group will be members of one of the demographics noted above.  Not surprisingly, all of those are demographics that have traditionally voted more Democrat than Republican.

Still, the argument goes, fraudulent voting should be curtailed as much as possible.  The fact that someone may be elected by fraudulently cast votes is a pretty good reason to safeguard against it.

The problem here of course is that none of the voter ID proponents have been able to offer any evidence that the kind of voter fraud a photo ID might prevent actually occurs in any number that could even remotely be considered significant.  A photo ID would have no effect on absentee ballots, nor would it prevent ballot box stuffing, nor would it prevent deliberately inaccurate vote counts--all of which there is evidence of.  A photo ID is only useful in preventing what is called voter impersonation, and there is virtually no evidence of that being a problem.

Early in his first term, Bush ordered his Justice Department to conduct a national investigation into voter fraud.  After 5 years and an investigation that included every state in the Union, the Bush Justice Department released a report saying that it could find less than 100 cases of voter impersonation fraud, and most of those involved immigrant voters who didn't really understand what they were doing.

Photo ID requirements have been characterized by Democrats as a solution seeking a problem.  There is a wry cheekiness to that description, but what shouldn't be lost sight of is that the result of that solution will very likely be  disenfranchisement that applies in a grotesquely disproportionate degree to minorities, poor people, immigrants and senior citizens--all demographics that generally benefit Democratic candidates.

To their credit, the Justice Department and the courts have already struck down all or significant parts of voter ID laws in several, mostly southern states.  In general, the basis for the strike down has been the Civil Rights Act requirement that those states do nothing with election laws that would unreasonably affect minorities.

What should worry every one who genuinely values American participatory democracy is that the red states in the mid-west, the rust belt and the southwest aren't subject to those requirements.  The constitutional difficulty of federal intervention into state legislative actions has just been demonstrated by the recent upholding of Pennsylvania's voter ID law, which, many will recall, was hailed by a Pennsylvania legislator as a guarantor that Mitt Romney would carry the state.

It's hard to argue that there wouldn't be so many red states if the majority of the people in those states didn't support Republican values and ambitions.  What the rest of us have to decide is whether we want to be part of a country governed by those values and ambitions.  If the answer is no, the place to start resisting is at the local level.  If Republicans remain in total control of states for much longer, Rove's permanent majority may well be a reality.