Drinking the Koolaid
Voter suppression on a titanic scale.
If you’re going to try to win an election on the backs of a deluded minority…
…better make sure the majority has a lot of trouble getting its votes counted.
Sifting through the dross of Bush’s accomplishments and image, Rove found one precious nugget:
The group of voters so traumatized by 9/11 that they formed a profound emotional bond with George W. Bush.
Voters so dependent on the myths of strength and security spun by the Bush presidency that they would ignore logic, facts, and even the president’s own statements and positions to preserve their unsullied image of him as their champion and America’s defender.
People who believe that the Duelfer Report documented the existence of Saddam’s WMDs. Who believe that the expert opinion is that there was an al Qaeda — Saddam link. People who believe the world loves us and what we’re doing to it.
People who adore our tongue-tied pocket Fuhrer and can’t bear to examine what’s happened — what he has done — to this country in the three years after the national tragedy that Rove transformed into our Reichstag Fire moment.
Maybe 75% of Bush voters, according to the University of Maryland survey that forms a neat, chilling bookend to Ron Suskind’s revelations about the Bush administration’s contempt for the “reality based community”.
People that Karl Rove decided to pander to with scare tactics, code words, and lies and misrepresentations…
…and stampede to the polls...
…while he tries to disenfranchise enough of the majority dismayed or enraged by Bush with a systematic, nationwide effort to suppress the vote…
…and squeak Bush back into the White House.
Someday someone is going to write a big fat book about the dark art of voter suppression as the Republicans practice it.
In this cycle, we can watch in horrified fascination as the story unfold through the news items, comments, and diaries posted on Daily Kos, Atrios, and Smirking Chimp.
How it starts with registration road blocks; then voter roll purges; election day polling place challenges; and manipulation of the counts and recounts.
How Republican Secretaries of States are encouraged to subvert their positions of public trust to put a partisan spin on ballot preparation, polling place locations, challenges, and provisional ballots.
How the whole effort is a creature of the national Republican organization, which pours money into the hands of shadowy electoral consultants for multi-state registration fraud, and rewards revealed abusers with promotions to key positions in swing state campaigns.
It’s not simply a matter of Just Win, Baby!
The Republicans are heirs to a persistent stream in American history that views the broad democratic franchise as a constitutional weakness permitting the lazy, immoral, ignorant, and unworthy to negate the efforts of wise and virtuous patriots to guide our country to greatness.
The Republicans are trying to convince themselves and this country that the democratic process is so tainted by partisan, pseudo-populist class-warfare scheming by the Democrats that it cannot be relied on as an arbiter of victory or legitimacy.
That voting, like the political process itself, is just a horserace in which richly-deserved victory goes to the side that can fight the hardest and the dirtiest.
They seek to cheapen the electoral process in the eyes of Americans, making them less likely to vote and less likely to care if the process is subverted.
They want us to treat voting as an inconsequential bauble, a hypocritical charade that Kerry and the Democrats are trying to sucker us into.
We’re supposed to lose our vote, and not care about it.
There’s supposed to be something more important than democracy.
Like giving an intransigent minority the privilege of wallowing in their fear, prejudices, and misguided adoration for another four years.
But a strategy of base plus voter suppression that looked like a slam dunk a few months ago is now a desperate, high stakes, irrevocable roll of the dice for Rove now that Bush’s disastrous debate performances put a dangerously low cap on his job approval numbers.
Maybe the Republicans have drunk their own Kool-Aid and believe that their fanatical quadrennial obsession with squirming into power by any means necessary despite their minority status is shared by the population at large.
But when you come down to it, I think more people want to see the future of our country decided by shared participation in the democratic process, rather than by acquiescing to what the Republicans think is a virtuous conspiracy to keep an election from screwing up their plans for the country.
We still love democracy.
Every once in a while we get a chance to practice it.
This is one of those times.
I know you’ll vote.
Please also contribute to Election Protection to support their efforts to get out the vote, poll watch, and document and contest voter suppression abuses. And if you run into a problem exercising your right to vote, call their toll-free hotline 866 OUR VOTE.
Copyright 2004 Peter Lee
Peter Lee is the creator of the anti-war satire and commentary website Halcyon Days. He can be reached at peter@halcyondays.info.
