The Easy Part Over

It's not as if a Republican had won by a single vote; ergo, no "mandate."

It is, on the other hand, a narrow escape.

This makes no difference when the narrative is pre-determined: that The American People want deficit reduction and bi-partisanship. There's plenty of concern that the former aligns with the president's goals.

Of the latter, Obama's instinct to be "the adult" has seemed all about willingness to compromise with insatiable bullies. Charles Pierce writes at length here, about history as a river that "churns up the muck from the bottom and brings it to the surface," with "backwaters so obscure that they no longer appear on modern maps."

Given the noise machine's four-year rampage of bringing up "some of the deepest muck from the river basin," it's hard to disagree when Pierce wonders if Obama, in taking an overly flattering view of the citizenry, can realize "the bottomless thirst the country has for snake oil."

But there is also the matter of willingly selling snake oil, in the forms endorsed by the owners.

And the apparent decisions that, bully pulpit be damned, truth-telling and rule of law are just too impolitic. As Pierce suggests, the president

... has granted immunity to the country by granting immunity to many of the people who did that country the most damage, whether they were the criminals within the previous administration, who tortured without conscience or spied without warrants, or whether they were the criminals within the financial sector, who rigged the game, cheated millions of ordinary people out of their money, and then escaped back into the institutions that had been Too Big to Fail and that, remarkably, came out of the scandal even bigger than they were before.

With a House gerrymandered to stay in the grasp of lunatics, impeachment will begin in January (if not sooner). The noise machine may have been caught a bit off-guard last night, but soon enough it will function as if the election had never happened.

On the very positive side: Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, among other wins.

And passage of marriage equality measures in four states. A truly heartening sign that demographics are changing, and that this particular wedge will lose its power for more of the electorate.

November 6, 2012

And I didn't get a sticker.

Maybe the polling place was out of them, or maybe the workers were just too overloaded to bother. The wait that has never been longer than five or ten minutes was two hours. I got there before 4:30; a few minutes later, the crowd stretched down the block. It got cold during the half hour it took just to reach the building door; ahead of me was an elderly man with walker, who refused an offer to ask poll workers about letting him ahead. After finally getting to the entrance, we had to squeeze into a triple line snaking through a very narrow corridor, in a space inadequate to the turnout.

Poll workers included the usual faces, and they were efficient enough. It's the extra ID and forms, courtesy of our Republican-controlled legislature, that were different this year. Large turnout in a precinct heavily populated by students and this year's long ballot of state and local offices also contributed to the wait, during what was not quite peak time. And this was in a Democratic stronghold where there's no apparent history of voter discouragement efforts.

He so gets to the essentials that it's hard to resist quoting great swaths of Charles Pierce's Election Day summation—

...were it not for the new political universe created by the Big Bang of the Citizens United decision, and were it not for the swiftly established metric that he who has the most money wins, the candidacy of Willard Romney would be an almost impossible burlesque. Four years after the titans of the financial-services industry nearly ate the entire world, the Republicans nominate a plutocratic maladroit who can barely wrestle a coherent sentence to a draw — "We start a new tomorrow tomorrow," was yesterday's gem — and who is entirely a creature of the very industry that had caused the misery in the first place. It is exactly the same as if the Republicans in 1932 had replaced Herbert Hoover at the top of their ticket with Andrew Mellon.

But the election is still within an eyelash, one way or the other, because Romney's money, and all the other money that lined up behind it, made him credible. Exactly forty years after anonymous corporate cash became the first loose thread that would lead to the unravelling of Richard Nixon's presidency, anonymous corporate cash is the coin of the realm....

But, recently, watching things on the ground here in Florida, I've come to think that there is an even bigger story than the money, that the money is merely the only story within the only story. I have watched at close range how very far politicians will go to use their institutional power as elected officials to deaden the instincts of self-government. It is the money that got them into place to do it, but what they're doing is something far more insidious and dangerous. Actively keeping people from exercising the franchise is bad enough. But to continue, over and over and over again, to make the process harder and harder until a critical mass of people decides that self-government is not worth the bother, I think, is far, far worse.

And yet it has to be said, that

...while the process may have been grubby, and the tone of the debate wretched, there was a genuine debate to be had here, and it was worthy of all the best instincts of self-government that had been enervated, day by grinding day, by what our politics had become. It was a debate about the very nature of self-government itself, and about the value of the political commonwealth that is its only worthwhile creative endeavor. There is one side in this election that is far too timid, and far too closely allied with far too many people it ought not to be allied with at all, but which at least does admit the existence of a political commonwealth, and at least does recognize that self-government is an ongoing creative endeavor. And there is one side that simply does neither, and that has been quite clear about why it does not, and that has worked within the institutional structures of self-government to undermine the creative soul of the democratic project. And that has been a debate worth having, and that is the debate that will conclude today.

Given that the average person tunes out politics unless bothering to vote in presidential elections, today does conclude what's dubbed public "debate."

Ending some measure of self-government, on the other hand, is not yet an entirely done deal. If Obama is re-elected, the money will go on subverting democracy by stealth. And Obama will presumably go on being "far too closely allied with far too many people ... [he] ought not to be allied with at all."

If the unthinkable happens, those who will "undermine the creative soul of the democratic project" won't tarry at their work of devastating what's left of the economy. At least they should no longer need to pander to The Base, or pretend to any concern for the non-One Percent.

A mere four years (and one black man) ago, even Republicans were frightened by the thought of Sarah Palin, a heartbeat away. Those voters have no such fear this time. If their Monopoly man and Ayn Rand fan grasp this enormous power, it will be theirs along with the Mandate due only to Republicans.