I voted at 8:37 a.m. today in Ridgewood, N.J. I did not have any problem whatsoever. Meanwhile, the video above was Sen. Barack Obama addressing more than 60,000 supporters in the last rally before today’s voting.
Update: A friend sent me e-mail saying “I got out early and voted. I was there almost and hour early and when they opened the doors there were several hundred people in line.”
Another friend, Jim Sleeper, wrote about his experience here: “Polling places in New York City open at 6:00 am, and when I arrived at mine at 5:45 a.m. at least 600 people were on line, stretching from the school door near East 33rd Street and Third Avenue back to the end of the block on Second Avenue, and then down the avenue to 32nd Street. By the time I left after casting my vote, at 6:45 or so, it had grown light out, and there were at least another 600 people waiting on line.”
(GARETH FULLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS) U.S. Politics Featured in bonfire Festival in England.
An effigy of U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, accompanied by presidential candidate Barack Obama, is unveiled by designer Mark Oldroyd ahead of a bonfire night celebration in Battle, England, Saturday Nov. 1.
(CHRIS O’MEARA, ASSOCIATED PRESS) U.S. Army Gen. David Petraeus, U.S. Central Command, the infallible surge-meister and new head of the U.S. Central Command, bursts a move taking the stage during change of command ceremonies Friday morning Oct. 31 at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla.
Editor’s note:
I am so nervous about the presidential election on Tuesday that I’m almost paralyzed. Certainly here I have been content to let others post instead of writing myself. I hope to summon some of my own words before Tuesday’s voting actually begins (I know boat loads of people have already voted).
My friend Jim Sleeper, who deserves a wider audience, has been one of the best and wisest writers on this election. I am going to post links here to a few of his last few pieces, which he has kindly grouped under: Thinking About Race and This Election
My Almost-Hidden Stake in an Obama Win By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Cafe, October 27, 2008, 2:21PM
Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called “Bradley Effect.” Maybe, maybe not, but that we’re even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary just posted at “Things No One Talks About,” in Dissent magazine.
What I don’t talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we’d heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn’t, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.So let’s glance back 15 or 20 years, to when contests involving even only white candidates were shadowed by Willie Horton, Sister Souljah, Tawana Brawley, and O.J. Simpson. Only a few black scholars, such as William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, and white writers, such as yours truly, suggested that the significance of race was declining – and that it should.
Things No One Talks About, by Jim Sleeper, Dissent,
October 27, 2008
AS PUNDITS dithered late last week over “the Bradley effect” and other racial clouds on Obama’s horizon, the candidate was making a difficult, possibly final, visit to the white mother of his white mother. Few commented on the implications of the fact that while racial identity runs deep in America, maternal bonding runs deeper. But maybe our Hollywood-besotted political culture requires the drama and sentiment in Obama’s farewell visit to “Toot” (the Hawaiian name for “grandma” is “Tutu“) to drive those implications home.
Sarah Palin claims that Obama doesn’t know or represent the real America. That both Obama’s color and his childhood exposure to Muslims are assets to America’s image abroad doesn’t matter much to Americans who are still offended or frightened by racial and religious difference. Image is one thing; intimate fears another. In a small former steel town in Pennsylvania this weekend a 71-year old woman, a Democrat who considers McCain a grouchy old man and Sarah Palin a joke, paused when a New York Times reporter asked her about Obama. “He scares me,” she said finally. “The coloreds are excited, but my friends and I plan to write in Hillary’s name.”
No one mentions that Obama’s biracial provenance and childhood brush with Islam launched him on struggles that have prepared him unusually well to address one of his country’s most daunting challenges: youthful alienation in inner cities where, at least until 9/11, the Nation of Islam held a certain appeal.
How to Gauge Racism in This Election, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 28, 2008
As the polls tighten, Slate’s veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can’t bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.
Let me give this sage of journalism something he deserves — a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits’ jitters are worth frothing about right now. Ask yourself these simple questions:
What if it had been the Obamas, not the Palins, parading five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
Would the polls be so tight if it had been Barack Obama who’d finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class and if John McCain had been president of the Harvard Law Review?
Where would the polls be if McCain had married only once and had stayed married, while Obama had been the divorcee?
What if it was Obama who had been a member of the Keating Five (the U.S. Senators accused of corruption in a scandal that helped ignite the Savings and Loan meltdown of the late 1980s and early 1990s)?
How tight would the polls be if it had been Obama whose military service had included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
Treat, or Trick? Elections Officials, Beware!, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 31, 2008
In honor of Halloween, here’s one more frisson about election tricks that are perverse enough to block the treat of a victory.
One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty “checking” voter registration cards from the recent primary election.
The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again.
Beatty’s minions – the young Rev. Al Sharpton among them — were actually fabricating “evidence” of voter fraud in Beatty’s recent defeat in his bid to succeed Shirley Chisholm, who was retiring from Congress.
They were forging thousands of signatures on voter-registration cards to create enough fraud to invalidate the 54-46% victory of his opponent, State Senator Major R. Owens, in the historic Bedford Stuyvesant district, one of the first created under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Beatty would submit the Saturday morning forgeries to a county court as evidence that Owens had rigged the election!
I hadn’t simply stumbled upon this scam. A political operative close to the Brooklyn Democratic machine had tipped me off. Had I not rushed down to the board that Saturday knowing what to look for, Beatty would likely have won his suit, and Owens, a redoubtable reformer, a graduate of the famed black Morehouse College, a librarian by training and a long-time progressive activist, would have been smeared.
So a lot was at stake in my Village Voice story that week on Beatty’s outrageous gambit: “Look at it this way,” said my tipster; “The man is either going to Congress or he’s going to jail.” (The pdf of these old stories is very slow, but worth the wait if you’re interested. Read the second story, “Vander Batty’s Desperate Gamble.”)
Sen. John McCain’s relentlessly desperate, dirty attacks against Sen. Barack Obama should not be forgotten no matter how this election comes out on Tuesday. His name should go down in infamy with that of Sen. Joe McCarthy for the worst kind of guilt-by-association attacks.
The New Republic’s John Judis points out in this video the latest filth being hurled by McCain’s campaign.
It has been an impressively inspirational campaign waged by one man, Obama, as he is buffeted by the most bigoted assault on his character and good by his opponent.
I fear the nation will reward McCain with the presidency and the squalor of his campaign would become part of lore, the way people now remember George H.W. Bush’s savaging of Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988. The elder Bush is not a disgraced figure in the nation despite his seamy tactics.
McCain is counting on that kind of amnesia on the part of our nation. It should not be so.
American Stories, American Solutions
Update: Babe, a commenter at The New York Times blog post about the ad, said this
What was most striking about Obama’s half-hour infomercial was that he never mentioned McCain’s name, in fact never spoke of him. We essentially heard a politician speak without throwing dirt, tossing around falsehoods about his opponent or indeed being negative in any way. What was the basis of the infomercial? Vignettes of people with problems and what Obama would do for them. The half hour was very well produced, obviously utilizing some top notch professionals, who managed to make all the amateurs look and sound good. It was an interesting contrast to McCain’s appearance on Larry King, spending most of his interview time to make insinuations about Obama’s veracity, campaign finances, associations and general qualifications for president. McCain truly seems frantic and desperate — and very old. I believe it would be a very sad day for America should get himself elected.
–Babe
The GOP’s Blame-ACORN Game By Peter Dreier & John Atlas This article appeared in the November 10, 2008 edition of The Nation.
An increasingly desperate Republican attack machine has recently identified the community organizing group ACORN as Public Enemy Number One. Among ACORN’s alleged crimes, perhaps the most serious is that it caused, nearly single-handedly, the world’s financial crisis. That’s the fantasy. In the reality-based world, it was ACORN that sounded the alarm about the exploitative lending practices that led to the current mortgage meltdown and financial crisis.
Since the 1970s ACORN, which has 400,000 low- and moderate-income “member families” in more than 100 cities in forty states, has been warning Congress to protect borrowers from the banking industry’s irresponsible, risky and predatory practices–subprime loans, racial discrimination (called “redlining”) and rip-off fees. ACORN has persistently called for stronger regulations on banks, private mortgage companies, mortgage brokers and rating agencies. For years, ACORN has alerted public officials that the industry was hoodwinking many families into taking out risky loans they couldn’t afford and whose fine print they couldn’t understand.
Now John McCain and his fellow conservatives are accusing ACORN of strong-arming Congress and big Wall Street banks into making subprime loans to poor families who couldn’t afford them, thus causing the economic disaster. McCain’s campaign is running a one-and-a-half-minute video that claims Barack Obama once worked for ACORN, repeats the accusation that ACORN is responsible for widespread voter registration fraud and accuses ACORN of “bullying banks, intimidation tactics, and disruption of business.” The ad claims that ACORN “forced banks to issue risky home loans–the same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.”
For months, the right-wing echo chamber–bloggers, columnists, editorial writers and TV and radio talk-show hosts–has pitched in with a well-orchestrated campaign to blame the mortgage crisis on ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), the 1977 anti-redlining law. In a September 27 editorial, the Wall Street Journal wrote that “ACORN has promoted laws like the Community Reinvestment Act, which laid the foundation for the house of cards built out of subprime loans” and then falsely claimed the bailout bill would create a trust fund “pipeline” to fill ACORN’s coffers. On October 14 the Journal‘s lead editorial, Obama and ACORN, described ACORN as a “shady outfit” and accused the group of being “a major contributor to the subprime meltdown by pushing lenders to make home loans on easy terms, conducting ‘strikes’ against banks so they’d lower credit standards.”
Editorial
Barack Obama for President
Hyperbole is the currency of presidential campaigns, but this year the nation’s future truly hangs in the balance.
The United States is battered and drifting after eight years of President Bush’s failed leadership. He is saddling his successor with two wars, a scarred global image and a government systematically stripped of its ability to protect and help its citizens — whether they are fleeing a hurricane’s floodwaters, searching for affordable health care or struggling to hold on to their homes, jobs, savings and pensions in the midst of a financial crisis that was foretold and preventable.
As tough as the times are, the selection of a new president is easy. After nearly two years of a grueling and ugly campaign, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has proved that he is the right choice to be the 44th president of the United States.
Among the photographs taken by the photog Platon of hundreds of men and women who volunteered to serve in the military and were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan was this striking one of Elsheba Khan at the grave of her son, Specialist Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan. Gen. Colin Powell mentioned the photograph in denouncing the religious bias of people who were accusing Sen. Barack Obama of being a muslim.
This issue has bothered me all year long and everyone has acted disgracefully on the subject, even my candidate, Sen. Barack Obama.
“He’s a muslim,” people have said about him.
Obama, who has taken on all questions and issues with elan, somehow could not figure out how to handle this issue.
His response has basically been: “Who are you calling a muslim? I am a christian!”
The accusation of course rests on the premise that all muslims are terrorists, which is a disgraceful lie unbecoming of our great nation.
Americans who use someone’s supposed religion as a wedge issue should be ashamed of themselves. This is what I expected to hear from Obama. He has handled all other questions that have come his way this election season so expertly that I was mystified why the answer to this one eluded him, why he could not find the grace to not only beat back this slander but welcome muslims into his ever widening tent.
Leave it to Gen. Colin Powell in his endorsement statement to restore my faith in our nation. Gen. Powell found just the right words. First, he saidhe was troubled that Republicans (and some Democrats) have been spreading rumors that Obama is a Muslim.
Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated with terrorists.”
This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards—Purple Heart, Bronze Star—showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.
Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourself in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I’m troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.
It was a tremendously clarifying statement and an affirmation of our diverse and pluralistic society, which has been the envy of the world. We largely don’t engage in ethnic cleansing despite our multitudes of peoples. We strive to build a tolerant society. Gen. Powell told us that even, especially, in the pursuit of the highest office in the land, we must remember the nation that we aspire to be.
