Wednesday, November 03, 2004
(7:59 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Assessing the Damage (updated)
The Senate doesn't look too bad. There are 48 Democrats and 1 Independent, and the Independent is basically a Democrat. Certainly the Democrats have a chance to be obstructionist. [CORRECTION: I misread the NY Times thing indicating the Senate seats -- Democrats actually lost seats.] We must also take into account the fact that Kerry is not conceding yet and is certainly not likely to repeat the mistakes of Gore in that regard.[UPDATE: Kerry has conceded. It remains to be see whether that will have been a Gore-like mistake. The New York Times is making it sound unlikely:
In Ohio, with 99 percent of the vote reported, Mr. B--- was leading by a margin of 51 percent to 48.5 percent for Mr. Kerry, or an edge of about 130,000 votes.My favorite paragraph of the article, however, is the following:
Senator Kerry had been pinning his hopes on as-yet-uncounted provisional ballots, which voters can cast if there is some question about their eligibility to vote when they appear at a polling station. Ohio officials said they knew of 135, 149 such ballots. In addition, a dozen counties had not yet totaled their provisional ballots, but in the past these counties accounted for about 10 percent of the provisional ballot total.
President B--- currently holds a margin over Mr. Kerry of about 130,000 votes in Ohio. Mathematically, the 135,149 known provisional ballots, plus the 10 percent or so say, 13,000 to 15,000 estimated to have been cast in the dozen counties still to report them, would give Mr. Kerry an opportunity to overtake President B---. But that would mean that nearly all the provisional ballots would need to be accepted which has not been the case in the past and then Mr. Kerry would need to win nearly all of them.
Republicans said Mr. Bush was holding off a bit on declaring victory this morning in order to give Mr. Kerry time to concede. "I hope over the course of the day the obvious reality will become apparent" to Mr. Kerry, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, said on CNN today.I don't know what the deal is with John Edwards playing attack dog, however -- is it a good-cop/bad-cop thing? Does anyone know if Edwards has conceded or made a speech to that effect?]
I personally don't care that Kerry's opponent won the popular vote -- our electoral system is clearly broken, and the important thing right now is not to artificially inflate people's "trust" in it, but to get a reasonable human being in the White House. Kerry had to know that he was offering himself up as a sacrificial lamb, a stop-gap, and his persistence today in the face of his opponent's supposed mandate indicates that he is willing to keep that role. At least if both sides have been burned by the Electoral College system and by our nation's congenintal inability to accurately count votes -- which, to be honest, seems like a really fucking easy thing to do -- then maybe we can get some reform in that regard. That is, unless the Republicans are busy finding some pretext to impeach Kerry. [UPDATE: Obviously a lot of this paragraph is no longer applicable, although it may still be conceivable for someone other than Kerry to file a lawsuit to get a recount, giving Kerry victory by a hair. I really wish that Kerry would shut up about national unity, though -- because it can only be unity on the Republicans' terms. It's hard to work for harmony and love with someone who is looking to destroy you entirely, as Rove himself has said of his approach to the Democrats.]
I encourage everyone to look into conscientious objector status. I am currently a member of Pax Christi, a Catholic pacifist group (which is important, because religious conviction is the main way to prove objector status -- a philosophical or political conviction, such as believing that US military power is hopelessly corrupt, does not cut it). For my Christian ethics class, I am writing a paper on nonviolent resistence, and I will likely send off my requisite letter to the Selective Service within the week. Click here for more details.
There is always a chance, though, that the continued existence of the current administration will force them, however reluctantly, to join the reality-based community. Arguably, the "October Surprise" was Justice Renquist's illness, which obviously worked to Bush's favor in rallying "moral value" types. There are so many things that are on the verge of happening, though, that it easily could have gone the other way. Winning the popular vote by a narrow margin, and the Electoral College by a slightly less narrow margin, such that one's opponent was in striking distance of pulling off a "2000-style victory," does not prove anything. Winning by a slightly more than a hair in a race that was impossible to call the morning of the election does not indicate that the American people have finally fallen in line behind one's controversial policies. It just means that one was able to build a slightly more effective and motivated coalition than one's opponent -- slightly.
Within the next two years, some of the receipts from the foolishness of the past four years will hopefully start to come in an undeniable way -- and if the Democrats can nationalize the Congressional race in the same way that Republicans have done for the past decade, then maybe even control of the House would not be totally out of the question. That depends heavily on a strong leader emerging, parallel to Newt Gingrich, and the loss of Daschle perhaps clears the way for actual effective leadership to emerge. Obama already has a national profile, as does Edwards, and both have populist impulses.
But man, either way Ohio turns out -- things are going to get worse before they get better, perhaps much worse. I've committed to give $10.00 a month to the ACLU, which Ted Jennings has called "the one thing standing between us and barbarism." Although you should probably save some money to buy a third-world family a llama, I suggest that you use your other charitable funds to help keep the ACLU in business.
Meanwhile, as Deleuze said of the student uprisings, in a post from Spurious that I can't find, maybe the best way to help the revolution is to finish your dissertation. Nottingham e-mailed me to say that they received all my supplemental materials, which means that most of my other schools must have my stuff as well. Perhaps in such a dark time, it's best to study with people who have an FBI file, at least for as long as possible -- and it's rumored that even Milbank can't get into the country now. [UPDATE: I don't know the details of this; it may be an unfounded rumor. Milbank is an avowed socialist, however. It wouldn't be surprising if it was not a true story, though, since almost everything else I said in this post was wrong in some way, as was my prediction about who would win. I have been wrong, wrong, wrong. Am I the first blogger ever to say it that plainly?]
