I stayed up long after midnight on election day, listening to Dan Rather's awful faux-homespun quips ("Let's hit these biscuits with a touch of gravy", "Nasty enough to choke a buzzard") and watching the progression of states turning red in the nation's midsection. It looked as though my beloved USA was hemorrhaging badly from some terrible abdominal wound, and I wasn't feeling too good myself. The hardest part to swallow is that this injury is entirely self-afflicted: We the people took dead aim at our destiny with malice aforethought and fired away. But that's life in a democracy, so we just have to get out the Bacitracin and the bandaids and move on.
Now that the smoke has cleared a bit, I thought I'd share some musings about a few conundrums from the election.
IF YA CAN'T WIN IT, SPIN IT...
Okay, fellow liberals, let's have a little huddle here. We blue-staters are all a little upset, discouraged, maybe a tad irritable (Hillary, will you put that gun down?!?!). But did we really lose? Oh, sure, our guy lost the election, Bush got a ton more votes than Kerry, our feelings are bruised because the rest of the country doesn't seem to like us very much, and we have to put up with our red-state relatives smirking and saying "I told you so." It's annoying, to be sure, and we didn't want it to turn out this way.
But would we Democrats really have been better off with a Kerry presidency? Think about it. The Senate and the House are completely, totally, unalterably Republican. Republicans made gains in the statehouses and governorships and that means even more of a tilt as they gerrymander congressional districts into demonic Rorschach patterns guaranteeing even more House seats going to the Republicans. Hell, these days, even Democrats are Republicans. Don't believe me? I give you Zell Miller.
So what would Kerry have been able to accomplish besides get in a four-year pissing match with the entire Congress and leave everybody exhausted and irritable (like we liberals are now, come to think of it). No legislation of any consequence would get passed. No respectably liberal Supreme Court justices would be confirmed. Nothing much good would happen, and then Kerry would get the blame and lose in 2008 and we'd be in even deeper doo-doo, with eight years of some other God-awful Republican.
And then there's that little unpleasantness in Iraq. Did we really want to watch John Kerry deal with that abortion? Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, getting worse by the day, and despite all the requisite tough talk, I don't think Kerry had the first clue what to do about it. This situation would clearly seem to fall under the rule of "You break it, you fix it." And Bush doesn't have a prayer (pardon the expression) of resolving things, so if it's going to go to hell in a hand basket, better on his watch than Kerry's.
In a way, the Iraq situation reminds me of my college days. In my fraternity house, the tradition was to throw a humongous all-night party the last night before summer break, stay up till dawn, trash your room completely, and then just pack up and go home for the summer, leaving an ungodly mess for whoever moved in next fall. Only occasionally the joke would be on you and next fall they'd assign you to the same room. Bummer. I imagine that's what George Bush is thinking right now. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion HE voted for Kerry for precisely that reason, he wasn't looking forward to four more years of Iraq. Too bad, George. You won. Now go clean up Iraq or no dinner for you. And where's Bin Laden, dude?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU "CONCEDE"?
Let me see if I have this straight: The guy (and it's usually a guy) who is ahead in the early returns decides at some point that he's going to win and "claims" victory. The other guy (Hillary, put the gun down NOW!!) comes out in front of his adoring supporters and bravely vows to fight on. The hours crawl by, various operatives from each side spin the situation this way and that, news anchors wax eloquent, supporters wait with baited breath. Finally, in the wee hours, the loser reemerges, disheveled, disheartened, and "concedes" the election.
This little dance makes absolutely no sense to me. For starters, what happens if they're wrong? Suppose a flurry of late absentee ballots unexpectedly put the conceder over the top. Does the claimer get to say, Well, that's too bad, but you conceded, so I'm still the winner, nyah-nyah-nyah? Then the conceder responds that he had his fingers crossed when he said it and so it doesn't count? Now what? They settle it with rock-scissors-paper?
Uh, guys, excuse me. Did it ever occur to either of you that the election is neither yours to claim nor to concede? WE decide, not you. You don't get to concede, Jack, the one with the most votes wins, period. This isn't some back-alley game of craps where you two macho up on each other and see whose cajones are bigger. It's the vote count, stupid.
How about we do it like this: We the people vote, our elected officials (remember them?) count the votes and certify the result, and then they announce the winner to all of us at the same time. Meanwhile, you two hang out in some smoke-filled bar like good little lawyers waiting for a jury verdict and nurse your scotch-and-sodas. You already know the way to the bar, right?
And keep it down in there, will you, we're counting over here.
WHY ARE RED STATES RED?
Who decided that Democratic states are blue and Republican states are red? Such boring, corporate-America colors! And aren't they reversed? I think of red as the universal color for liberals, leftists, communists, anarchists, Castro, Che Guevara, Lenin,... you know, the good guys. On the other hand, blue is definitely a military color, as in battleship blue, gun-barrel blue, navy blue, and thus would seem better suited to the conservative, pro-war, shoot-em-all-and-let-God-sort-em-out wackos currently running the show. So if we're going to use red and blue, we should at least switch them around.
But we can do a lot better. States won by those buffed gun-toting Republicans would be utterly dashing in an olive drab with camouflage-fatigue patterning. On the other hand, Democratic states would look fetching in softer hues, maybe a pastel more in tune with their limp-wristed, gay-marriage, best-friends-with-Saddam agenda. A nice chartreuse, perhaps? Mauve? Puce? Ecru? So many colors, so few states.
And for dear Ralph Nader: I'm thinking basic black, a dark, funereal, undertaker black. You're done for, Ralphie baby, and good riddance. Do you understand me? Catch my drift? Or am I being obtuse? (all-time great line from Shawshank Redemption)
ELECTRONIC VOTING: AND YOU THOUGHT YOUR PC WAS BUGGY
I can hardly bear to read these Internet stories claiming huge irregularities in the electronic voting, it literally makes my head hurt. For one thing, I despise conspiracy theories, primarily on the grounds that I've never seen any three people keep anything secret for longer than it takes for one of them to dial their best friend's phone number. Also, it's impossible to judge sources these days, when so much "information" is flying around on the Internet with no or phony attributions.
And then the thought of dragging the election out for days, weeks, or months is appalling. I came close to flinging myself off the Golden Gate Bridge in 2000 because of that incessant drivel about hanging chads and such. Look, people, Bush won. I don't like it either, but let's get on with our lives. All this whining isn't going to change it. Even our stalwart bastion of truth, NPR's "All Things Considered," has taken a fairly close look at assertions of improprieties and basically says there's nothing there. So please, please, please, those of you who are keeping this issue alive, just get over yourselves, okay?
All that said, there is clearly something terribly, terribly wrong with electronic voting as it is now conceived. We just can't have a system where you cast your vote electronically on a touchscreen and it whistles off into the silicon bowels of some microchip, never to be seen again. Consider that county in North Carolina where a voting machine lost 4,530 votes because it ran out of memory. Where did those votes go? Are they wandering aimlessly in the halls of the local courthouse, dejectedly looking for someone to free them, haunting city council meetings like Hamlet's ghost? Or maybe they've been spirited away to that hangar in Roswell where the government keeps the alien cadavers (I know about them because my best friend works there and he called me his first day on the job, right after they told him everything and swore him to secrecy. He says you can't imagine the stink from a 50-year-old alien cadaver...)
Then again, can I have a show of hands of those who CARE that votes got lost in North Carolina? Hmmm, just as I suspected. Never mind.
CLUELESS IN BLOGLAND
November 13, 2004
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