| Monday, November 22, 2004 |
13:49 - Here Comes the Flood
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/21/magazine/21OHIO.html?pagewanted=1&oref=login
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This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election; and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail! That's democracy for you.
—Mr. Burns
This is an excellent eight-page exposé on Election Day in Ohio, from the perspective of the ACT group canvassing for Kerry votes; it follows the precipitously changing attitude throughout the day as it became clear that the millions of dollars and the super-high-tech campaign coordination techniques had somehow failed to dictate the election's outcome. The article leaves the reader with a sort of pitying smirk toward these well-illustrated individual personalities who were so sure they'd win; yet there's something very telling about it, in the way it treats the other side:
This effort wasn't visible to Democrats because it was taking place on an entirely new terrain, in counties that Democrats had some vague notion of, but which they never expected could generate so many votes. The 10 Ohio counties with the highest turnout percentages, many of them small and growing, all went for Bush, and none of them had a turnout rate of less than 75 percent.
For Democrats, this new phenomenon on Election Day felt like some kind of horror movie, with conservative voters rising up out of the hills and condo communities in numbers the Kerry forces never knew existed. ''They just came in droves,'' Jennifer Palmieri told me two days after the election. ''We didn't know they had that room to grow. It's like, 'Crunch all you want -- we'll make more.' They just make more Republicans.''
I've heard this over and over: the ominously intoned they. The idea that what the Democrats were fighting against isn't people, or fellow citizens, but some kind of unholy force of nature—as implacable as a hurricane, and as mindlessly destructive. There's never any attempt to understand them, or to reach out to them—only to either scare them straight, or outvote them. I have yet to hear a single Kerry-voting friend or acquaintance acknowledge that anyone might vote Republican for any reason other than fear, hatred, or stupidity. Doggedly though I've tried, it seems that the more I ply someone with reasoned and documented analysis that I think is sound, the more it convinces them that I'm nothing more than a terrified and irrational flunky who would rather blow up the Earth than see a poor black person afford a new car.
I think the moral is that time is the only remedy for this wound. Well, that and not blowing up the Earth, I guess. It's too bad that that doesn't go without saying.
Via Dean Esmay, who also has this interesting post on the potential merits of letting the various States go their own way on the issues that divide them, seeing which ones come up with the best solutions independent of federal uniformity. (Reagan was a big believer in this principle, I recall...)
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Brian Tiemann
