November 2004: Thieves In The Night

Grand Lake Theater
Or to be more precise, thieves in the early morning, just after midnight.

Thom Hartmann—

...I'd been doing live election coverage... during the 12:20 a.m. Associated Press Radio News feed, I was startled to hear the reporter detail how Karen Hughes had earlier sat George W. Bush down to inform him that he'd lost the election. The exit polls were clear: Kerry was winning in a landslide. "Bush took the news stoically," noted the AP report.

But then the computers reported something different. In several pivotal states.

Of course the thieves also had been hard at work in daylight—around the country, and for years—as seen in stories compiled here, and the Project Censored report here.

My state appears to have had a fairly clean process. But we also have a Republican State legislature and Secretary of State, and major polling place changes were timed for this particular election. I worked outside a polling place in my majority Democratic county, and nearly all the black voters who arrived were directed to a different location.

Still, all was going well before before midnight, when I went to bed. It was a very different story in the morning, when the mass media reversed the earlier, more honest reporting.

Greg Palast, here, on the depressing math of grand theft in Ohio and New Mexico; the quantities of Democratic votes not counted; the lack of Democratic Party response.

The rank and file, on the other hand, are outraged. A grassroots group in Ohio holds public hearings, where witnesses testify to how majority black precincts were shorted on voting machines. And about the setup at Kenyon College, where students were forced to wait in line for 10 to 12 hours.

Testimony includes that of a woman whose friend's husband died during the three-hour period he was alone, while his wife waited to vote.

Kerry's concession was almost immediate. Presumably, what the party establishment wants. And probably a careerist's move that Kerry himself wants—he must believe this is a gentleman's game, and that if he shows acceptable sportsmanship, he'll play again.

In the general post-November 2 horror, there was a small thing that struck me.

In all my time volunteering with local Dems this year, I sold buttons and yard signs at lots of public events. And each time, I watched excited kids line up to buy buttons—then saw them go to their parents and beg money to buy more buttons.

One of the designs was an oversized button with a portrait of Kerry. Adult buyers mostly avoided that one. But kids were drawn to it. They seemed to like Kerry's face, but more importantly, they trusted him—he looked to them like a strong adult who would banish the scary monster.

Last month, Clever Sister had forwarded this: Kids Pick Kerry to Be the Next President—

NEW YORK - Kid power! Democrat John Kerry (news - web sites) is the winner, and the rest of the country should pay attention because the vote on Nickelodeon's Web site has correctly chosen the president of the United States in the past four elections.

It wasn't wishful thinking—Kerry did win.

But he and the Party failed the kids.

They failed the voters who waited so many hours in a miserable November rain.

They failed the country we want back—in place of a "Homeland."