[Vision2020] The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy

[Tbertruss at aol.com]

All:

The election is over so we all go back to our "normal" lives till next time, 
right?  Wrong!  I dont't care what your political views are.  The evidence is 
clear that voting systems in the USA, and the monitoring and support they get, 
need improvement and more investment, if we are even to pretend we have a 
healthy and well functioning democracy.

Ted Moffett

The GOP's Shameful Vote Strategy 
By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 27, 2004; Page A25

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President Bush is 
running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts, Republicans are 
spending these last precious days devoting nearly as much energy to suppressing 
the Democratic vote as they are to mobilizing their own.
Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts to keep 
African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed Rollins was all but 
drummed out of the profession after his efforts to pay black ministers to 
keep their congregants from voting in a 1993 New Jersey election came to light.
For George W. Bush, Karl Rove and their legion of genteel thugs, however, 
universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that threatens 
conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote suppression from a dirty 
secret to a public norm.
In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned them 
disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city Cleveland, where 
Democratic "527" groups have registered many tens of thousands of new voters. 
"The organized left's efforts to, quote unquote, register voters -- I call them 
ringers -- have created these problems" of potential massive vote fraud, 
Cuyahoga County Republican Chairman James P. Trakas recently told the New York 
Times.
Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a liberal 
group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that word "ringers."
Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate that 
roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this year. Who does 
Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of African Americans been 
sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh and Detroit to vote in Cleveland -- 
thus putting their own battleground states more at risk of a Republican victory? 
Is Shaker Heights suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American argot? Or 
are the Republicans simply terrified that a record number of minority voters 
will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to stop 
them -- up to and including threatening to criminalize Voting While Black in a 
Battleground State?
This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has become 
a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America, there's a war 
on -- against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore the Geneva 
Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we can ignore democratic norms. 
Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11 mind-set still believe in voting 
rights.
For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism. From the 
first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the right, to fan the 
flames of cultural resentment, to divide the American house against itself in 
the hope that cultural conservatism would create a stable Republican majority. 
The Sept. 11 attacks unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks to 
relentlessly partisan ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's 
reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself the 
standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his backers as arrogant 
cosmopolitans.
And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the 
election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential nominee Al Smith 
bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic and nativist-immigrant 
lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and eventual victor), Herbert Hoover, 
did not exploit this rift himself. Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited 
the modernist-traditionalist tensions in America but helped create new ones and 
summoned old ones we could be forgiven for thinking were permanently 
interred. (Kerry will ban the Bible?)
Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately divisive 
than the current one. I can come up with only one other president who sought so 
assiduously to undermine the basic arrangements of American policy (as Bush 
has undermined the New Deal at home and the systems of post-World War II 
alliances abroad) with so little concern for the effect this would have on the comity 
and viability of the nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president of 
the United States.
After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant 
contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this division of the 
house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations now, each with a culture 
that attacks the other. And politics, as the Republicans are openly playing it, 
need no longer concern itself with the most fundamental democratic norm: the 
universal right to vote.
As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the center.
That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head. The 
essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of strategy and 
temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to narrow them. That, 
finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday: between one candidate who wants to 
pry this nation apart to his own advantage, and another who seeks to make it 
whole. 
meyersonh at washpost.com 

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