As I watched the talking heads this past Sunday, all I could hear was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I am saturated, and I really, really wish election day were today and not a week from now. This has been draining.
Daniel Drezner asks the question I believe our nation’s best minds should be focussing on now…so I’ll repeat it here:
Today’s topic: assume that next week’s election ends cleanly — i.e., it’s clear to one and all who wins and who loses, and the losing candidate concedes defeat on election night. Does the country remain as polarized as it has been during the campaign season (or as polarized as the discussion thread in my last post suggests)? And can that question be answered differently depending on who the winner is?
UPDATE: Constant Reader Rilkefan suggests the following:
could we maybe have a thread about this blog and Moe’s departure and how we commenters can make this a more fun and friendly place – or whether it’s too fun/friendly as is – or whatever?
I believe Moe would have opened the comments on his last post if he had wanted a discussion about it, so I’ll respect his decision and not make this about that (besides the haiku’s folks have offered Moe are perfect tributes to his creation and should continue to function as such, methinks).
As for how to make this a more fun and friendly place, though…by all means…all advice welcome!
if Kerry wins, it’ll get even more polarized.
first, the right already showed us what they’re capable of when Clinton was president. and why should they react any different to Kerry – someone they apparently already loathe (plenty of examples of that around) ?
second, the right seems utterly shocked that the left dared to criticize W “during wartime”. so, there will be payback for that. you can already see the sentiment in some of the comment sections around town (
Reg, at Tacitus):
In a Kerry administration, I think I can speak for most conservatives that we plan to “Hold Kerry Accountable” and blame Kerry for every drop in jobs numbers, every minor screwup in the military, every increase in poverty numbers, every point inflation increases, every successful terrorist attack anywhere in the world, any unhappy allies, every lost life in military, every failure to enact promised legislation regardless of reason, every increase in deficit regardless of extingency, and especially every absurd thing said by Theresa Heinz Kerry.
i recall similar comments on Pandagon and PolAnimal.
and, of course, the left is going to find itself suddenly very tolerant of presidential missteps.
i’m looking forward to dropping political blogs for good, if Kerry wins. 🙂
Drezner’s question would be interesting if it weren’t already a counterfactual. The chances of the current election ending cleanly verges on zero. If Kerry wins, the GOP has already laid the groundwork for claims both in court and in the media for ‘voter fraud’. Vice-versa, the Democratic line will be ‘voter suppression’. The lawyers from both sides will be like underfed sharks at a chum slick. Count on it.
As an aside to cleek, please don’t speak for other people. As a real leftist (for the record, the Democratic party is almost entirely populated by wussy-ass centrists) I was at least as critical of Clinton as the wingnuts to his right. The difference was that I criticized his policies on substantive ground, since I have never cared what politicians did with their weenies on their own time. “The left” is going to be pretty intolerant of hypothetical Kerry missteps. It is the establishment center which may moderate its rhetoric.
I can’t speak for everyone, but if (heaven forfend) Kerry wins, I will hope that I was wrong about all of his foreign policy and will support any effort he makes to create a stable and democratic Iraq. I will also support any effort he makes to root out terrorism in the other place that need it.
I won’t promise to support him if cuts out of Iraq or otherwise abandons the war on terrorism. I think that is the wrong thing to do.
I won’t freak out as he deals with North Korea or Iran unless he totally capitulates them, I understand that both countries present difficult situations.
If Bush wins (get the worst over with first): no change. Four more years of a disaster-area administration, with hard-core Bush supporters continuing to attribute everything that goes wrong and all outright evil acts to “bureaucratic blunders”. Nothing will ever be the fault of the man at the top. Well, things might get worse, since neither Bush nor Cheney will be worrying about any election in 2008. I hate to say “I can’t imagine how” but I can’t imagine how. Still, the limits of my imagination do not overtop the possible.
If Kerry wins, a repeat of the Clinton Presidency. For the next 11 years or so, and longer if Edwards wins in 2012, hard-core far-rightists will do their utmost to abuse Kerry, Edwards, and anyone who supports them. Despite this, I anticipate Kerry being a reasonably popular President: I think he’ll win comfortably, and he’ll have the major advantage of being competent. However, the mass hate from the right-wing media, blogs, and the really hard-core Bush supporters (the ones who won’t be convinced even by indictments: who still think that Oliver North was innocent), will likely be as bad or worse than it was against Clinton, and for much the same reason.
umm: As an aside to cleek, please don’t speak for other people
and then: “The left” is going to be pretty intolerant of hypothetical Kerry missteps. It is the establishment center which may moderate its rhetoric.
where did i do what you didn’t do ?
of course the partisans are going to be partisans, on both sides. and there’s nothing about this election that promises to tone down the level of partisanship. we’re not entering a new era of human consciousness here. to paraphrase Bono, nothing changes on Election Day.
Sebastian: I won’t promise to support him if cuts out of Iraq or otherwise abandons the war on terrorism. I think that is the wrong thing to do.
And how will you react if Bush wins, and cuts out of Iraq? I think that as least as likely: he abandoned Afghanistan without a qualm. Going to do that list I challenged you about? Pre-election, war-on-terrorism objectives for the winner?
Maybe, but I rather doubt that the right can put up louder chicken-squawking than what we’ve had to endure for the last four years.
Maybe, but I rather doubt that the right can put up louder chicken-squawking than what we’ve had to endure for the last four years.
You obviously slept through the Clinton administration.
On the subject of polarization, could we maybe have a thread about this blog and Moe‘s departure and how we commenters can make this a more fun and friendly place – or whether it’s too fun/friendly as is – or whatever?
Nearly, yes.
Rilke, I begin to think the only way that’s going to happen if the ObWing blogteam agree to only put up nonpolitical threads from now till Nov 3rd.
Maybe alternate them? One political thread, one nonpolitical thread?
Nearly, yes.
Thought so. Whatever “chicken squawking”‘s gone up from Bush opponents from center and left was nothing compared to the tirade from Clinton opponents from the far right. You won’t believe this, but they actually managed to have him impeached – not because he’d lied about WMD or gotten the US into an illegal war or started an illegal prison camp on Cuba, but because he was asked an irrelevant question about his sex life in the middle of an investigation into his wife’s finances (which turned out to be squeaky clean, unlike George W. Bush’s) and the whole thing ended up costing the US several million dollars to establish that yes, it’s a bad thing to get blowjobs and then lie about it.
Lucky you managed to sleep through it. I think you must have been the only one in the world who did.
I’m looking forward to a Kerry win. I’m not looking forward to 11 years of anti-Kerry squawking from the far right.
Rilkefan,
I took Moe disabling the comments on his last post as an indication he didn’t wish to discuss the decision. I think the very lovely haiku wishes from folks were a very fitting “until we meet again” for the most versifying ObWinger too.
I’ll update this post to make it an open thread for your other comments though.
e
As in the Iliad, or Henry V, there will be a short break due to exhaustion.
Then, it will get worse. That’s a bipartisan assessment.
Plus, another canary drops off the perch, like Bill Bradley did. The atmosphere is poisoned.
Moe quit. One less rhetorically moderate voice.
As a rhetorically immoderate voice who still has his wits about him, I propose the following:
Poisoning the air the polity breathes is a crime punishable by some sort of prolonged, public, not unpainful humiliation. If the Republican Party offers three of their poisoners (I’ll accept Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Tom Delay) to be punished for their crimes, the Democratic Party should offer up three of their poisoners (somebody else suggest some names) for the same.
This would all be done under the rule of law with trials, prosecutors, defenders, and impartial judges.
Make that four on the Democratic side: include me. That’s how much I want Norquist punished. I’m willing to go down, too.
Let’s get three reps from the MSM and three from the blogging community too. Do it all.
If ANY President of the US subtantially pulls out of Iraq in the next four years leaving behind something more politically unstable than Sweden, I will be very angry and will strongly criticize the decision.
Perhaps placing the Civility Post at the top of the list of current posts, and leaving it there would be a good reminder of what we strive for in these dialogs.
Yes, and John Edwards thought it was a thing of beauty:
I think the right was rather noisy in the Clinton era, Jesurgislac, and I think Clinton did give them more than a smidgen of ammunition to make noise with. We had our Vince Fosterites, and you have your voter-intimidation-in-Florida crazies, your Bushitlerites, and your BushAWOL groupies. Overall, I think four years of Loyal Opposition have produced more shrillness in the Bush administration than in eight years of Clinton. Asinine, unsupportable, baseless assertions built on incorrect premises. If you don’t like it, don’t engage in it.
Who’s in charge now? Mr. Underscore?
I’m with the “it’s gonna get worse” crowd. If Kerry wins, the same crowd that went after Clinton will be back in force. There’s the added incentive for the deposed Republicans that many of the things they’ve been doing are indictable offenses — if President Kerry so chooses, they could find themselves fighting to stay out of jail.
If Bush wins, he’ll keep doing the things he’s been doing for the past 3.5 years — gutting environmental regulations, ignoring corporate fraud, pandering to the Religious Right, offending everybody in the world outside the US, and in general cheerfully ignoring what the rest of us think of as “reality”. And the opposition to Bush is starting to adopt some of the tools that the Republicans have been using against the Center and the Left. Ugly.
It looks bad either way. And the only types of political reforms that I see as doing any good at all are about as likely as an invasion from Mars.
Who’s in charge now? Mr. Underscore?
No, as founding member and senior blogger, Von is in charge until such time as Moe wants to return.
“I think four years of Loyal Opposition have produced more shrillness in the Bush administration than in eight years of Clinton.”
I have two words for that: Re diculous.
No point in making the counter argument to someone who thinks the $80 million phony investigation of White Water that resulted in Grand Jury trap about a blow job was a legitiment way for the government to spend its time. And by the way, why shouldn’t the president have whatever travel contractor he/she wants? I’ve never figured out why people thinks its a scandel to do something they have every right to do. And another by the way – don’t wars of choice usually come associated with a little ferver? This charade you have about Clinton had it coming to him and poor innocent Bush was reeping somebody else’s whirlwind is nonsense.
That’d be a swell argument, except I never, ever said Bush hasn’t earned some measure of scorn. Nor did I say Clinton earned everything that he got. If it had been up to me, none of that would ever have happened, and Clinton would’ve just walked away leaving pretty much the same Presidential legacy to Gore, who most likely (IMO) would have lost by a wider margin.
But thanks for mischaracterizing me; it’s been at least a couple of minutes since that’s happened.
Let’s remember that predictions of shrillness are self-fulfilling if we don’t keep our own rhetoric within spitting distance of rational discussion.
“I rather doubt that the right can put up louder chicken-squawking”
As they say, nobody minds the smell of their own flatulence.
I actually hope people will be permanently more critical (though constructively and not gratuitously) — especially against their own side. Or perhaps they’ll stop pretending that they have a single side, for the sake of argument.
“you have your voter-intimidation-in-Florida crazies”
No, those doing the intimidation in Florida were _your_ crazies.
Posts on Food and Travel.
C’mon, the holiday season starts in five days. let’s have knock-down drag-out threads on turkey recipes.
and it looks like there might be enough $ in the fdl budget for a vacation next year. let’s have posts on where and how to relax.
fdl
p.s. i’m thinking greece, ’cause i’ve always wanted to go to Santorini.
What intimidation, rilkefan?
Jes or someone, care to field the above question from Slart? I just had to swallow a bunch of snide comments – I’m trying to keep especially civil given the circumstances.
Slart: I’m taking a quick break from work, but here are some places to start:
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Report on Voting Irregularities in Florida
Parts of this report from PFAW and the NAACP
I’ve read the USCCR report. This is your evidence? Let’s just look at the Executive Summary, shall we?
Get that? No deliberate disenfranchisement occurred as the result of high-level government. Translation: Kathleen Harris and Jeb Bush did not conspire to disenfranchise voters.
It’s probably worth noting, too, that the word intimidation occurs exactly zero times in the Executive Summary.
The USCCR report is a deeply flawed document. It doesn’t do what it set out to do, and what it does do is mostly wrong. If you’ve read it, hilzoy, then I’d be curious to see what you thought about the Dissenting Opinion.
As for the PFAW report, did you actually read that? Here’s what it has to say about Florida:
In other words, we’re going to bait you with a report of intimidation in Florida, and then switch to the felon list. I could find no single incidence of Florida voter intimidation documented in the PFAW report.
Rilkefan, as I recall (and as news reports from 2000 suggest) evidence of voter intimidation on the way to the polls in Florida was not nearly as clear-cut as the evidence that the polls themselves were rigged: it was entirely anecdotal, though there were a lot of “entirely anecdotal” reports.
As Slartibartfast declines to believe that the polls were rigged in Florida, despite the considerable body evidence, I doubt he will believe the anecdotal evidence that reported multiple instances of voter intimidation.
Ah, it’s a faith issue? I’d suspected that for quite some time, but I never expected you to come right out and say it.
As a sometime fun killer, I’d make a modest suggestion. The fewer posts about politics, the greater possiblity for fun. But that more or less goes against the blog ideal, yes? No? Maybe?
Harley:
What’s fun lately over at Tacitus? 😉
Ah, it’s a faith issue? I’d suspected that for quite some time, but I never expected you to come right out and say it.
Well, clearly it’s a faith issue for you, Slarti. I’ve been convinced of this for some time.
For me, it was a matter of following the unfolding evidence. But for you, as I think it was for Moe, it’s a necessity to believe in the Bush administration: facts be damned. That’s faith.
Once again, I invite you to share. You’ve been invited repeatedly (to the point of tediousness, I admit) to share in the past, and I get nothing from you but the claim that evidence exists. Can you really question that it seems to me that it’s a faith thing for you, given your near-pathological avoidance for backing up your arguments with fact?
Wow, a mindread AND a backhanded swipe at Moe. Quality arguments, those. Here’s an idea: you’ve got a livejournal; why not actually use it for this purpose?
Slarti: Once again, I invite you to share.
And once again, I point out that I have.
The problem is that your faith allows you to deny all evidence, and so I see no reason to point out evidence to you again: we’re talking across the gulf between the reality-based universe and the faith-based universe. You’re in the faith-based universe, and evidently likely to remain there until the Bush administration is – finally – kicked out of office.
Fair point about Moe, though. In his absence, I shouldn’t have said that, and I apologise and withdraw the comment.
Claiming that you have isn’t the same as actually having done so. If you have, it should be pretty easily pointed to. Do so, and we can take this discussion to my place instead of threadjacking even the threadjack threads.
Fairly spoken, Jesurgislac.
What worries me is not polarization over opinions. What worries me is polarization over facts. It’s increasingly like we live in parallel realities.
If the election is disputed, this will be awful. I mean, look at the poll in the other thread. Half of the Democrats have little or no confidence that the election results will be fair. And I know that if I go to New Hampshire, and see voter suppression–and I doubt it will happen in NH, this is just hypothetical–few if any Republicans will believe me. And if there are press reports verifying voter suppression and giving evidence of fraud, Republicans will generally believe it is the liberal media. I mean, did you see the survey a few months back where Republican voters said that Fox News was more reliable than PBS, the New York Times, and freaking C-SPAN? I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
Not that Democrats are immune from “incestuous amplification” or trust in lousy news sources either–the same poll said Democrats found CNN more reliable than C-Span and the NY Times, which is not so explicable either.
There are ways of resolving this. We could have installed printers on the voting machines. We could have established boards of independent observers and arbitrators instead of having both side send it it’s own packs of lawyers. We could make it easy for people to find their polling place and standardize ID requirements & provisional ballot laws. We could have Op-Scan ballots where you see whether your vote counts. I bet we could have designed a computer system that allows voters to vote once and only once, in the location of their choice, as they did during the California recall.
We could have a media that made a good faith attempt to sort through the issues.
But we don’t have any of those things.
Speaking of voting irregularities, has everybody already seen this?
Claiming that you have isn’t the same as actually having done so.
Slarti, we’ve been through this. Every time I show evidence, you say “That’s not evidence.” You have faith that it’s not, and I’m tired of showing facts against faith.
Damned HTML.
“We could have installed printers on the voting machines. We could have established boards of independent observers and arbitrators instead of having both side send it it’s own packs of lawyers. We could make it easy for people to find their polling place and standardize ID requirements & provisional ballot laws. We could have Op-Scan ballots where you see whether your vote counts. I bet we could have designed a computer system that allows voters to vote once and only once, in the location of their choice, as they did during the California recall.”
I raised this somewhere else, but here it is again:
Neither party has seriously tried to advance a vote authenication system as outlined above, or any other major system, despite the ugliness of the 2000 election (with allegations of pro-Republican cheating in Florida and pro-Democrat cheating in Wisconsin and New Mexico.) Why is that? My proposed thought is that both parties think they are better at cheating than the other party. But I like to avoid that level of cynicism.
Less cynical: the Republicans didn’t want to admit there were any doubts about 2000 and just told Democrats to “get over it”, and the Congressional Democrats are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
This is not to say that no one has done anything at all, Sebastian.
let’s have posts on where and how to relax
Rent a sailboat. Hire a skipper, make sure the boat’s got a grill and get away from stuff. Park over whichever coral knob you want to snorkel that day. Pull up to the local yacht club and have a Cuba Libre or 9.
Last time I did this it was much cheaper than a hotel vacation and I not only didn’t need keys/wallet (to say nothing of a cphone or computer) but I forgot where I had put the dang things.
Pick French islands, Guadaloupe in the Caribbean or The Societies in the South Seas as the bread will be fresh and the pickings at the supermarket more attractive.
Neither party has seriously tried to advance a vote authenication system as outlined above, or any other major system, despite the ugliness of the 2000 election (with allegations of pro-Republican cheating in Florida and pro-Democrat cheating in Wisconsin and New Mexico.) Why is that?
Why rely solely on the parties? The EFF’s been raising hell about electronic voting, and People for the American Way has a site you can go to to find your polling place and get instructions on how to vote on the machine you’ll be using.