Just A Liberal Idea?

[Guest guest]

Angel N. -->

Just A Liberal Idea?

 

Harold Meyerson: Voting rights being treated as a musty liberal ideal

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5057811.html

 

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is

running a campaign or plotting a coup d'état.

 

By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting

nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to

mobilizing their own.

 

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep

African-Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but

drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers to keep

their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.

 

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however,

universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens

conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a

dirty secret to a public norm.

 

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them

disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where

Democratic " 527 " groups have registered many tens of thousands of new voters.

" The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters -- I call them

ringers -- have created these problems " of potential massive vote fraud,

Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James Trakas recently told the New York

Times.

 

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a liberal

group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word " ringers. "

 

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that

roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who does

Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African-Americans been sneaking

over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in Cleveland -- thus

putting their own battleground states more at risk of a Republican victory? Is

Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American argot? Or are

the Republicans simply terrified that a record number of minority voters will go

to the polls next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop them -- up

to and including threatening to criminalize Voting While Black in a Battleground

State?

 

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become a

continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war on --

against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva Conventions,

against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. Only

bleeding hearts with a pre-9/11 mind-set still believe in voting rights.

 

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the

first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the

flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against itself in

the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable Republican majority.

The 9/11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks to relentlessly

partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's

reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself the

standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant

cosmopolitans.

 

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the election

of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith

bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic and nativist-immigrant

lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual victor), Herbert Hoover,

did not exploit this rift himself.

 

Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited the modernist-traditionalist

tensions in America but helped create new ones and summoned old ones we could be

forgiven for thinking were permanently interred. (Kerry will ban the Bible?)

 

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately divisive than

the current one. I can come up with only one other president who sought so

assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of American policy (as Bush has

undermined the New Deal at home and the systems of post-World War II alliances

abroad) with so little concern for the effect this would have on the comity and

viability of the nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president of the

United States.

 

After four years in the White House, Bush's most significant contribution to

American life is this pervasive bitterness, this division of the house into

raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each with a culture that attacks

the other. And politics, as the Republicans are openly playing it, need no

longer concern itself with the most fundamental democratic norm: the universal

right to vote.

 

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the center.

 

That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head. The

essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of strategy and

temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to narrow them.

 

That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday: between one candidate who

wants to pry this nation apart to his own advantage, and another who seeks to

make it whole.

 

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and political editor of

the L.A. Weekly.

 

 

 

http://pets.care2.com/

 

" The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. " --

Plato

" Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing

health care to all Americans is socialism. " -- anon

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Guest guest]

If corrupt, Republican dominated State and Federal governments and Courts,

succeed, once more, in taking (or stealing) our vote from us, and forcing

Bush on us, it'll be clear that the Republicans are asking for Civil War.

Reactionary politics, have lost their hope in our national politics, and

corruption and treachery, have become the only ways left for this new

fascism to force itself on the people. Obviously they're taking a

calculated risk, assuming that opposition to one coup after another, will

not meet with stiff and unyielding resistance.

JP

 

-

" DitziSis " <marykaye

Just A Liberal Idea?

Angel N. -->

Just A Liberal Idea?

 

Harold Meyerson: Voting rights being treated as a musty liberal ideal

http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/5057811.html

 

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is

running a campaign or plotting a coup d'état.

 

By all accounts, Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting

nearly as much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to

mobilizing their own.