Old dog, old tricks
Check out the latest highly nuanced position by John Kerry. He chose a Martin Luther King prayer breakfast to launch charges of massive, systematic voter disenfranchisement in the recent presidential election. The accusations that people were "denied democracy" are very serious, of course. So serious that he chose to sit on his hands.
Though he chose not to contest the vote, Kerry said, he firmly believes thousands of Democratic voters were disenfranchised.
Translation: "Democracy is broken in this country, but I don't want to, you know, actually do anything about it." This is intended to be the "moderate" position, I suppose. Reassure the Left but don't spook the Center. The fact that it's utterly incoherent troubles Kerry not at all. Why should it? He's has plenty of practice straddling the non-straddlabe.
But never mind the disingenuousness of this strategy for a moment, and just look at how artlessly it was executed. What are the actual messages communicated here? To the Left, it was "Your concerns are valid, but I don't really give a shit." To the Center, it was "I may not come across like Michael Moore or George Soros, but they are nonetheless my ideological brethren."
These are the same patterns we saw throughout the campaign. Some things never change, I guess, but they do sometimes become more obvious. Now are you beginining to understand why so many of us simply couldn't vote for this guy?
Comments
This is a huge problem with Democrats I think.
If we believe that this happened, then there needs to be a fight, doesn't there? We can't just say thousands were disenfranchised and leave it at that, surely? Something has to be done other than implementing mass production of electronic voting machines that don't have paper ballots and seem to lose votes or register more votes than is numerically possible (all alleged to have occurred in Ohio). Otherwise this is just yet more rhetoric that leads nowhere.
But as to your last question? I always knew. I just felt stuck between quicksand and a sinkhole.
Posted by: K | January 18, 2005 02:44 PM
BTW, K, I completely agree with you about the black box voting machines. No solution whatsoever. I'm less afraid of conspiracy than incompetence. As someone who knows firsthand how much crappy software is out there (and how it's the norm rather than the exception, really), these things scare me.
BTW, it wasn't just Ohio where there were reports of numerically impossible voter turnouts. It happened more recently in Washington. ;-)
Posted by: Barry N. Johnson | January 18, 2005 02:49 PM
Absolutely correct, Barry and that is why when the likes of Jesse Jackson and John Kerry complain, the unspoken part is they are talking about Democrats only, not Republicans who certainly seem to have a legitimate gripe in Washington state.
Somehow, I doubt if their angst extends to the Evergreen State, don't you?
Hell, the system is indeed screwed up with numerous methods of collecting and tabulating votes - often within the same state. I believe it should be addressed before the next election but doubt that, after both sides have played their sound bytes out, there will be any significant effort from either side to do something.
Posted by: mal | January 18, 2005 03:42 PM
Is North Carolina the only state left with an unresolved election due to loss of ballots in one county because of no back up to electronic votes?
You know we are all on edge down here to see who will be Agricultural Commissioner. I heard on local radio stations that this event has made a NY Times editorial on lost ballots. Anyone read it?
Posted by: Mlv | January 19, 2005 12:14 AM