On politics.

[lionofgod]

I was listening to On Point this morning, and as usual these days the topic was politics. Some fellow in Somerville called in to talk about how he had been undecided, but that a speech by Obama that he'd heard this weekend was so powerful it made him cry. As a result, he's decided that what the country really needs is a great leader, and Obama is

Comments

[nakor]

"Disenfranchised" doesn't mean that the guy you voted for lost. It means you didn't get to vote. Some people have been disenfranchised. Please stop diluting the term: you want to use it to emphasize social problems, but I want to use its pre-existing meaning to build better election systems.

Minorities voting as blocks will always feel disempowered. The candidate of the poor wins. The candidate of queer left-handed bisexual midwestern fans of the original Battlestar Galactica loses. In America, because most people see themselves as middle class whether they're poor or rich, the candidate who most convinces us he is Middle Class wins.

The last sixteen years have been divisive in comparison to GHBW, Reagan, Carter, Ford.... Nixon? Wait a minute. Kennedy was shot at. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court. Adams tried to ban Jefferson's party as seditious. You and I have only really been aware of the last 25-27 years, tops. I remember Mondale/Ferraro, but I don't remember his policies. So our perceptions may be quite far off: I'm not at all convinced that the last few decades have been more politically divisive than the general trend of American politics. It's the Eisenhower-to-Carter years that seem unduly friendly, in America's Golden Age.

That said, Senator Obama is the least bad of the major-party candidates I can find, too. I also hope that he'll increase citizen confidence in legitimate government. And I hold out the hope that he'll think further than the other candidates about the real consequences, not just the political consequences, of his actions as President. Certainly, that seems to have influenced his behavior as Senator.

[capsicumanuum]

Disenfranchised" doesn't mean that the guy you voted for lost. It means you didn't get to vote. Some people have been disenfranchised.

I know what words mean, and I use that term deliberately. In my home state, the Secretary of State refused to prosecute obvious voter suppression tactics on the part of the Republicans. After reading many many technical reports on the Diebold voting machines in use in many states, I cannot say with confidence that votes were not rigged. Voting rolls across the country were purged of "ineligible" voters, many of whom were in truth eligible to vote. The city of Cleveland deliberately did not set up enough voting machines in poor and predominantly black neighborhoods to allow everyone to vote. Hundreds of voters were sent away. If you want to claim that the mass suppression of poor and black votes was not disenfranchisement, go right ahead, though.

I do not at all believe the candidate of the poor wins. Instead, I would claim that the candidate with the most corporate funding and the greatest number of talking heads in his/her pocket wins, and I would argure further that even though elections in this country have always had problems, the problems with manipulation of hte media have gotten worse. And while vote rigging has always been attempted, electronic voting technology makes it easier to rig greater numbers of votes than ever before.

Furthermore I think it is incredibly dangerous to have a political climate that makes a significantly large minority of voters believe that not only does their candidate not win, but that they're votes were not even counted (when they are able to cast a ballot at all). And I do think that in a field of issues, "Who can best make people who have felt disempowered and/or disenfranchised feel like they can become part of the system?" is a very valid point to think about.