Half Changed World

24 hours from now, the polls will be closed in several states and we’ll be starting to have a sense of how the election played out.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up early to volunteer at the polls, helping people find parking spots in the dark and helping with the lines.  Then I’ll take a break for a few hours to run the bake sale for the PTA (since the school is a polling site) and to vote myself.  And then I’ll head out to the local organizing site to do whatever they need me to do until the last voters on line get their chance to vote.  I’ll bring folding chairs for those who need a place to sit, and magazines for parents to read to their children.

I’m feeling tired and drained and elated all at once, and I’ve only
been on the margins of the campaign.  One of the things that’s special about this campaign is how many people feel like they own a piece of it.  I can’t imagine how the folks who
have been working 24/7 on this feel, let alone Obama himself, what with
his grandmother dying this morning.

I don’t know if I’ll have a chance to report in, but I’d love to hear from the rest of you.  What are you doing?  Have you voted already?  What sort of lines are you seeing?

And don’t forget, if you see any voting problems, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

This post is part of the Write to Marry blog carnival, organized by Dana at Mombian and Mike at PageOneQ.

I’ve been listening to the podcast of the Writer’s Almanac on my way to and from work and today I heard that last Thursday was the 7th anniversary of the iPod.  It made me gape, because they’ve become such a ubiquitous part of our lives that it seems unimaginable that they didn’t exist that recently.

Five years ago, the idea that same-sex marriages would be be legally recognized in the United States would have seemed unimaginable to me, such a far off possibility that it didn’t seem like a fight that was worth taking on.  And then Massachusetts opened the doors, and San Francisco followed and I couldn’t stop looking at the pictures of all the happy couples.  And the world shifted.

There’s been some bumps in the road since then.  Four years ago, I was worrying about the referenda against same sex marriage and their impacts on the presidential election, and trying to remember that February warmth.  Two years ago, I was knocking on doors trying (unsuccessfully) to stop a hateful amendment to Virginia’s constitution.  This blog carnival is focused on stopping California’s Proposition 8 which would take away same-sex couples right to marry.

But I truly think the world has changed.  People have seen the couples lining up to marry in California and Massachusetts.  And they’ve seen that the sky hasn’t fallen down.

I’ve posted this poem before, but it seems appropriate again:

Why marry at all?

By Marge Piercy, from My Mother’s Body

Why mar what has grown up between the cracks
and flourished like a weed
that discovers itself to bear rugged
spikes of magneta blossoms in August,
ironweed sturdy and bold,
a perennial that endures winters to persist?

Why register with the state?
Why enlist in the legions of the respectable?
Why risk the whole apparatus of roles
and rules, of laws and liabilities?
Why license our bed at the foot
like our Datsun truck: will the mileage improve?

Why encumber our love with patriarchal
word stones, with the old armor
of husband and the corset stays
and the chains of wife? Marriage
meant buying a breeding womb
and sole claim to enforced sexual service.

Marriage has built boxes in which women
have burst their hearts sooner
than those walls; boxes of private
slow murder and the fading of the bloom
in the blood; boxes in which secret
bruises appear like toadstools in the morning.

But we cannot invent a language
of new grunts. We start where we find
ourselves, at this time and place.

Which is always the crossing of roads
that began beyond the earth’s curve
but whose destination we can now alter.

This is a public saying to all our friends
that we want to stay together. We want
to share our lives. We mean to pledge
ourselves through times of broken stone
and seasons of rose and ripe plum;
we have found out, we know, we want to continue.

I usually don’t do book reviews of books that I read a long time ago, but since we’ve been talking about Paul Robeson, I though I’d make a plug for Martin Duberman’s wonderful biography of Robeson.  It’s a long book, but it illuminates a fascinating and complicated man, as well as what it meant to be a successful black man in pre-civil rights America  (he was born in 1898 and was the third African-American man ever to attend Rutgers), and the Red scare.

The anti-communist hysteria of the 50s certainly caught up many people who weren’t really communists, but Robeson wasn’t in that category.  He may or may not have ever been a formal member of the Community Party USA (he always denied it; Gus Hall claimed he was), but there’s no doubt that he was a communist sympathizer.  To his credit, he truly believed in the universal brotherhood of man; to his shame, as Dave noted, he continued to insist that Stalinist Russia was an exemplar of that ideal, even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.  Duberman doesn’t shy away from that failing in Robeson, but he makes a convincing argument for how a proud and idealistic man could avoid confronting a truth that would give aid and comfort to those who had persecuted him for years, and embarrass the people who had stood up for him.

If you didn’t listen to the song I posted last week, go back and listen.  His voice is awesome.  This is the CD of Robeson singing that I have.  It’s an eclectic album that doesn’t quite hold together, but shows off the range of his repertoire.  It has his version of Ol’ Man River, as well as the House I Live In, and Joe Hill.  It also has him singing Motherless Child, Ode to Joy (in German), a Yiddish folksong, a song from The Magic Flute, discussing how "hello" sounds the same in many languages, and reciting the final speech from Othello. 

Because I felt needed to wash my ears out (and maybe my brain) after listening to Michelle Bachmanns ranting about "anti-Americans" in Congress, let me offer another vision of America, Paul Robeson singing "The House I Live In."

(Also available at Remix America, which has some other interesting stuff.)

Here’s a link to donate to El Tinklenberg, who is running against Bachmann.

And I join with Cecily in saying: "Do you hear me? I am a pro-choice East Coast liberal elitist and I am PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN. Stop saying I’m not.
"

update:  My mother asked me whether my readers know who Paul Robeson was.  I said I’d ask.  Do you?

Picking up on Thursday’s discussion…

Our voter registration system is inherently messy.  In general, without some sort of a national voter registry, it’s almost impossible to come up with a system that:

a) doesn’t impose massive burdens on people who move a lot*;
b) doesn’t penalize people who don’t vote every year; AND
c) ensures that no one can be registered to vote in more than one place.**

I know that for years and years after I moved away from New York (and registered to vote elsewhere), I remained on the voter rolls in my old precinct.  (My parents still voted there, so could see my name on the list.)  Not sure if my changing my name when I married confused them, or if they just never processed the form that Virginia sent them when I registered here.

I understand the appeal of matching voter registration records against other databases, but the problem is that it’s really easy for perfectly valid registrations to get bumped because people use different variants of their names, or someone can’t read their handwriting, or just plain computer errors.  This is a bigger issue this year than in the past, precisely because in the wake of the 2000 debacle, states were required to clean up their lists.  (As bj said, the issues in 2004 were mostly about the reliability of electronic voting machines, and ballot and machine shortages that led to huge delays in heavily minority areas.)

And the fact is, there are no modern US examples of election fraud happening as the result of widespread false registrations.***  It would be a pretty inefficient way to steal an election, compared to getting election officials to stuff the ballot box (either literally or with electronic tampering), as happened in the 1948 Senate victory by LBJ, which pretty much everyone agrees involved election fraud on both sides.  I’m actually far more worried about the increasing use of mail-in ballots, as that makes it a lot easier for people to either impose social pressure on their friends/family, or to downright buy votes.

So, yeah, when McCain and his surrogates say that improper voter registrations are threatening American democracy, I just don’t buy it. 

* I assume it’s obvious to everyone who reads this why poor people and young people are more likely to move a lot, but if you want me to explain, let me know.  They’re also less likely to have government issued ID.

** Although my friend who is a dual US-Canadian citizen, living in Montreal, assures me that it’s legal for her to vote in both US and Canadian federal elections, although she can’t vote in a US state or local election.

*** Of course there are specific cases of people voting in districts they didn’t live in, or in multiple districts.  And it’s a testimony to most people’s honesty that there aren’t a ton more, given how easy it is to get on the rolls in more than one state.

I sometimes work in legislative coalitions with the folks at ACORN, and I can tell you they’re feeling pretty shell-shocked right now.  For decade they’ve been quietly going about their work, organizing low-income people to fight for things like job training, affordable housing, and child care.  It’s not glamorous work, and the wins come in small increments.  And now they’re suddenly Republicans’ public enemy number one.

I really do think the concerns about voter registration are overblown.  Enough registration forms get lost in the system that there’s a real incentive to submit multiple times until you’re sure one took.  And they’re legally required to submit any form they’re given, because there have been in the past cases of people doing voter registration drives and then tossing all the forms in the trash.  I wonder if, after the election, we could get a bipartisan agreement that allowed for election day registration but required a government issued ID.  Or maybe we could borrow the purple ink from the Iraqis.

But, what’s really bothering me is that the rhetoric that McCain and his supporters are using undermines people’s faith in the system.  I raised the same concern four years ago, when Democrats were worrying about Diebold voting systems.  It’s good and fine to fight hard in elections, but it’s not ok to undermine the legitimacy of the winner.  I’m hoping that Obama wins by big enough margins, in both electoral votes, and in the individual states, that there’s no possibility that anyone could believe that fraud changed the results.

Continuing the conversation:

• ACORN and housing

• more on voter registration

I don’t want to jinx it, but unless all the polls are totally wrong, or something horrendous happens in the next few weeks, the uncertainty on November 4th is not going to be about who is the next President, but about the rest of the elections.*  Do the Dems really have a chance at 60 votes in the Senate?  Is Massachusetts going to commit budget suicide? What’s going to happen to marriage equality in California?

Sam Wang makes a convincing case that if you have money left to spend on political contributions this cycle, you should spend it on the Senate races in Oregon, Georgia and Minnesota.  Of those, the one that jumps out at me is Georgia, because I haven’t forgiven Chambliss for his utterly sleazy ads about Max Cleland.  (And Jim Martin’s making sure the voters don’t forget either.) 

Increasing the margin in the House is probably less of a priority, but I’m still trying to find some money to toss towards a couple of races:

• Judy Feder’s contest to beat Frank Wolf in Virginia — she’s awesome, and is one of the half dozen or so people in the US who I actually think understand health care reform.  That said, he’s a popular incumbent and he trounced her two years ago.  Virginia polls close early — 7pm Eastern time** — so that’s a good race to keep your eye on — if she wins, it’s a sign that the Dems are really riding a wave.
• Dennis Shulman in New Jersey.  He’s a blind rabbi, a psychologist, running against someone who is incredibly conservative for his district.  And I know his daughter.

I’m finding it hard to get too excited about my own Congressional race, but Anonymous is a Woman has some good posts about it here and here.  I haven’t seen any polling, but I think Connolly should win easily — the district has moved to the left, and the seat has only stayed Republican as long as it has because of people’s respect for Tom Davis and appreciation of what he’s done for federal workers.  I got a very annoying push poll from Fimian last week (although even the poor sap they had doing the poll couldn’t pronounce his name.)

As far as I can tell, we don’t have any wacky policy referenda on our ballot here in Virginia.  Here in Fairfax, there’s a parks bonds referendum, which I’m probably going to vote against.  Given the huge budget deficit the county is running (due to the collapse of property tax revenue), I just don’t think that it makes sense to borrow for things that are nice, but not essential.

* Not that I’m complaining about this.  After the last two Presidential elections,I’d really like one where I’m not sure it’s worth staying up to watch the California returns come in.  My dad and I were talking about this and we decided that the question we wanted to ask is: what’s your prediction for what time you go to bed on election night?

In 2000, I was 6 months pregnant, had a brutal cold, and had to catch a
flight to go to a work meeting in Cleveland at 5.30 the next morning.  At about 2 am, I finally gave up and went to bed.  In 2004, I gave up when they moved Florida back from Kerry to too close to call.

** If you’re likely to be stuck at work and racing home to vote, you might consider going ahead and voting absentee early.  If you’re at work *or commuting* for at least 11 hours that day, it’s an approved reason to vote absentee.  That sounds like a lot, but a 9 hour day and a one hour commute each way qualifies you.

I keep checking the electoral map projections at RealClearPolitics.  They’re far more encouraging than they’ve been until now — McCain would have to win pretty much all of the "toss-up" states in order to win.  And a friend pointed me to this post at FiveThirtyEight, which suggests that RCP’s averages are biased toward McCain, including polls in or out based on how favorable they are towards him.  I don’t know if that’s true, but if even a supposedly pro-McCain site is coming up with numbers like this, that’s a good sign.

Martin Manley correctly warns us that a month is an eternity in politics, so I’m not counting my chickens.  No jogging through the finish line.  But I’m feeling hopeful.

(yes, I’ve got the debate on, but no, I’m not going to blog it unless something crazy happens.)

So, if McCain doesn’t show up for the debate tomorrow night, will they let Obama answer questions on his own for an hour and a half?  That would be awesome.

Until today, I had never head of Christopher Cox.  He’s the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and he seems to be becoming the poster boy for the total failure of the regulatory agencies to do anything to try to prevent the Wall Street meltdown.

Well, that’s not quite fair.  As I learned this afternoon by listening to This American Life, he acted to ban naked short sales (e.g. the practice of selling stocks that you don’t actually own and haven’t borrowed from anyone) but only for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, and 18 other financial institutions, and only for a limited period this summer. 

I’m not defending the idea that you should be able to sell things that you don’t own (and it’s apparently illegal in any case), but what this says to me is that he wanted to shoot the messenger.  Short sellers aren’t what’s bringing these institutions down.  Bad lending standards, massive leverage, and generally really bad judgment are.

When specifically asked by Senator Shelby (who is not exactly known for being an advocate for government intervention) if he wanted more regulatory authority, he said no.

John McCain says that Cox should be fired.  Bush says that he’s doing a great job, Brownie.  (And as in FEMA, I think the problems go much further than the top leadership…)