Reverend Lennox Yearwood, Jr. speaks about the motivation of young voters that inspired them to take to the streets and celebrate their democracy. (1:53)
The polls come in showing that the next President of the United States is Barack Obama. (0:59)
“We’re seeing more voter suppression efforts and sophisticated tactics than ever before,” said Wade Henderson, President of the Leadership Conference of Civil Rights. Henderson continued “we’ve seen legal challenges to register voters in Ohio, fear tactics threatening that mortgage foreclosures or unpaid bills will thwart your right to vote, and may even result in arrest. There have been massive attempts to confuse voters with ‘robo calls’ and official looking websites and e-mails, especially in communities of color.”
J. Gerald Hebert, Executive Director of the Campaign Legal Center, explained several incidences of voter intimidation, such as “no match, no vote” cases in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, and Nevada. “No match, not vote” entails states refusing to register valid voters or purging them from voter rolls if they can’t match their voter information to other state voter records.
Hebert brought up an incident at Drexel University of Philadelphia where flyers were publicized claiming there will be undercover police officers at the polls on election day searching for voters who have outstanding warrants or parking tickets. Hebert claims the college community has especially had obstacles put in their way for being absentee voters or if “their parents claim them as independent on their tax returns.”
Jonah H. Goldman, director of the National Campaign for Fair Elections, said his organization will have “over 10,000 legal volunteers on and around election day, and over 750 call stations at 1-800-866-OUR-VOTE” in an effort to target voters affected by intimidation and suppression tactics, especially communities of color, young people, and seniors in key swing states.
If you are a registered Republican or Independent voter in a swing state you most likely have received a robo call during the last couple of weeks. Robo calls are generated by recorded voice and delivered by a computer. Many campaigns and organizations have used them. In its “wisdom,” congressional officials have voted to exempt them from the “do-not-call list.”
However, this exemption does mean the calls are not regulated. The Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 outlines the rules for robo calls. They must include who is initiating the calls and a telephone number or address to reach the party who is paying for it. In addition, some states such as California mandate that a live person must get on the line before the message is played.
With two and a half weeks before Election Day, the McCain campaign has made ample use of these calls. The call that played most often this week began, “Hello, I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC.” Then it goes on to say “Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans.”
One of the robo call companies promotes its ability to achieve desired election results on its website. GOPcalls.com says it has the capacity to make 10 million calls a day and that systems can, “recognize an answering machine, a live person, a fax machine, busy, disconnected and unanswered calls with the highest accuracy in the industry.” Doesn’t that make you feel warm and fuzzy about these calls?
The reason I am predicting that John McCain is not going to win the election is that he has to resort to tactics like these. They turn voters off, not on. It is not the John McCain many people think they know and like. In fact, there are reports that the McCain campaign hired the exact same firm that delivered scurrilous lies about him in 2000. What are they thinking? Even people who are voting for Obama have great respect for McCain. They don’t expect him to run a campaign counter to his own values.
These calls have been so upsetting to some of the swing state voters that even Republicans running for election have asked the RNC and the McCain campaign to stop. The AP reported that two senators running in close elections have asked for the calls to cease. Susan Collin’s campaign spokesperson said, “These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics.” Even Norm Coleman, who is in a tough election campaign with Al Franken in Minnesota, has said that he wanted these attacks stopped.
Congress is also considering action against robo calls, and Shaun Dakin of Citizens for Civil Discourse called for a Voter Privacy Bill of Rights. Even if we could get Congress to pass such legislation, it is highly likely that the Supreme Court would strike it down because the law would limit “free speech.” However, there needs to be some relief for voters. Some people in swing states have had as many as 10 calls per week. There has got to be a legal way to limit the annoyance and danger of these calls. The candidates would not pay for them if there were not some evidence that this kind rancor works. But it turns some voters off to the election process. Democracy cannot afford a citizenry that is cynical and turned off to the main instrument of our republic, the individual voter.
“It’s probably going to be the election of a lifetime for me,” said Don Rehill, Deputy Director of election tabulations at the Associated Press, at a panelist discussion, hosted by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) focusing on the key issues to examine the upcoming election on November 4th when it comes to reporting results, especially in competitive states. Rehill highlights the difficulties with lack of voting equipment being one of many problems encountered throughout past elections.
Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, highlighted previous elections dilemmas with lost voting machines in floods and failing memory cards. “There’ll probably be at least one lawsuit to try to keep the polls open past 7:30 and we’ll have to deal with that,” Brunner said. According to Brunner, in Ohio they have given out a quick reference guide for the co-workers across the state to help conduct the correct voting procedures.
All you have to do is to look at blogs and listener/viewer e-mail to know how angry Americans are right now. It is not just your usual every-four-years, pre-election anger. This anger is deep and will likely determine the next president.
I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to have some idea about where the rage is coming from. Carol Checkbook and Wally Worker are having a tough time paying the family bills. It isn’t just the mortgage and stock market crises. You can open the paper on any given day and find someone who has taken horrible advantage of someone else. Even a casual glance at the newspapers can spill out stories of amazing greed. One that really got me was the story of two executives of Duane Reade drug stores allegedly cooking the books so they could take big bonuses home at the end of the year. If you have ever shopped in a Duane Reade it is obvious that the cashiers and other help in the store are not getting rich off of their employment. To cook the books and enrich themselves while workers are paid close to minimum wage is just plain immoral. I am not saying that this kind of greed is limited to the year 2008; it has been around since the beginning of time. What is new is that the moral discussion of such greed seems to be off the table.
President Bush and others have talked about moral issues, but they have focused on vote-getting issues such as banning gay marriage rather than issues that impact every one of us. Gay marriage has not negatively changed the fabric of Massachusetts, which now has the lowest divorce rate of any state in the union. But our culture of greed has impacted every citizen of our country. Has gay marriage made the crime rate increase? Has gay marriage decreased a family’s ability to put bread on the table? The answer is clearly no. But, greed and the lack of discussion and societal sanctions on greed have changed the life of every person in America. Talking about greed has not been a wedge issue to get more votes so many politicians haven’t talked about it. The Democrats have, however, started to make it an issue, and it is catching on and accounts for the women’s formerly “undecideds” moving quickly to Sen. Obama. He was the first one to talk about what is happening in corporate America.
A Fox News Poll on Friday showed Obama increased his edge among women to 16 percentage points, up from a four-point edge only a month ago. This is a shocking swing considering many women were very supportive of Sen. McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin. How much a month can change things. But what a month it has been. Women in this country pay the bills. They might stay home or work part time but they are often the bill payers, and they are usually the grocery shoppers even if they also work full time. If they go to Duane Reade to pick up Johnny or Jane’s cough medicine, they see how hard the clerks in the store work and how long they stand on their feet. Then they read the newspaper and the stories of corporate greed hit home. No wonder they have decided to cast their vote for Obama.
The Fox News Poll also points out that the Obama-Biden ticket has a clear advantage on “having better judgment” by seven points, “bringing the right change to Washington” by 15 points and “better understands American families and their problems” by a whooping 24 points. Twenty-four points?! That is an amazing lead. The vote in a few weeks is not going to be based on a Bill Clinton “I feel your pain” identification, but instead based on real concern and, unfortunately, real anger. This anger will dissipate only when politicians get back to values that are not trumped up to get votes but that made this country strong.
When I taught a college-level course on human development, I used to give the example of a child with a big red toy truck at the playground. Other kids would see it, want to play with it and, yes, even covet it. Most of the time the parent of the child with the red toy truck would encourage the child to share his toys. The problem is that we have had too many people with those toy trucks playing by themselves, and that has left the voters seeing red.
Political correspondent for the National Journal James Barnes speaks about the particular challenges facing the Democrats this election and that have faced them in the past. (2:05)
Political scientist Ruy Teixeira discusses the multiple demographics that are trending democratically for the 2008 election. (1:10)
Last week was a truly Washington week to remember.
First up was the bailout package: failed the House on Monday, stuffed with pork and then passed by the Senate on Wednesday. As the House does not keep kosher, this stuffed pork chop passed through intact on Friday. In the meantime, billions in value melted away or rematerialized in minutes in the securities markets.
It was like picking petals off a daisy – “yes” we need a bailout, “no” we don’t. Like first time investors and other suckers, Congress took the bait – hook, line and sinker. And after the bailout was passed on Friday? The market dropped 157 points. Congress just learned its first lesson about markets: You can love stocks, but they don’t love you back.
But the week’s biggest loser (other than the taxpayers) was probably Sen. John McCain. Forget his “come let us reason together” rhetoric – he could have proved his self-appointment as the nation’s First Maverick by opposing the bailout. As the House found out, the public hates this bill, and McCain could have picked up some swing state voters had he opposed the plan. Instead he demonstrated bad economic electoral
strategy by letting Sen. Obama take this economic prize.
Now, the McCain- Palin advisers have decided to go negative on Obama’s background and colorful associates rather than fighting him on the economy. But had McCain stood with House Republicans and rallied against this Fat Cat Welfare Act and Pork for Dorks Act, he might have been able to something that has eluded Republicans for a generation: make the economy a Republican issue.
Now the campaign will amount to a contest between whose friends are worse, rather than the one thing the public needs above all: a real debate about exactly what it is Congress just did and why, under some new administration, this will never happen again.
Some Washington insiders have suggested that McCain can’t change his plan as it’s already been written. But the earth moved after this week, and he should remember something he must have learned in the military: “adapt, improvise and overcome.”
And I say let McCain argue his plan – it’s a flawed one. He’s basically running on a pledge to stop earmarks, pork-barrel spending and waste. It’s like running against sin: Who could be against it? So, why did McCain vote for a pork-chopped bill with tons of earmarks for everything from wooden arrows to tax breaks for alcohol in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands?
While the rest of the herd was planning the next disaster, where was their maverick this week? If I were Obama, I’d ask him outright: How is he going to get a bill passed in Congress without all those earmarks he says he doesn’t like?
McCain’s plan declares, “[T]he United States will be telling oil producing countries and oil speculators that our dependence on foreign oil will come to an end.” Once again, who could disagree?
The tricky little question is, How? McCain touts his “Lexington Project” as an answer. This project has set a goal of building 45 new nuclear plants by 2030 and creating 700,000 jobs. Even if Americans have come around on the issue of nuclear power, this is totally unrealistic because we can get no agreement on what to do with all that waste. And there’s the NIMBY (not in my backyard) local zoning and planning boards that are going to prevent the construction of these plants. I would like McCain to tell us where he plans to put the 45 nuclear plants.
What about McCain’s plan to develop green technologies? He’s offering a $300 million prize to improve battery technology. He also will issue a Clean Car Challenge to the automakers via a tax credit. That may have worked five years ago, but we just gave the automakers $25 billion in the most recent budget bill. How are you going to take a tax credit if you are not making money? Obama proposes taking real money and supporting American industry to develop these green jobs. That is the only way to do it. Why McCain does not revise his economic plan and do the same is beyond me.
Perhaps the biggest evidence that McCain got his economics degree on “Fantasy Island” is his plan to pay for the deficit by applying the savings from winning the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The memo this week from Afghanistan commander Gen. David McKiernan must not have reached him. McKiernan said the situation there will get a whole lot worse before it gets better. Unless McCain decides on day one to declare victory and then withdraw, we’ve only begun to “invest” in this war.
Maybe the senator and his staff should go back to school and take an economics course – because right now, the only school he’s graduated from boasts only two other graduates: Ms. Fannie Mae and Mr. Freddie Mac.
Gov. Martin O’Malley kicked off his new campaign at press conference in the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters. His campaign, called “Exxon-McCain ‘08,” mockingly refers to big oil companies as Senator John McCain’s (R-Az.) running mate in the 2008 presidential election, and O’Malley plans to take the campaign through cities across America. (more…)
