October 2004

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The War at Home

Derail the Vote 2004: A Karl Rove Production

 

The Bush administration's long-anticipated October Surprise is upon us. Are you watching? The real magnitude of the story is not evident, because it's the sum of many local and regional stories. So do this. Go to Google News and type these words into the search engine: voter registration fraud. As of Monday morning, that string yielded 1,940 returns from the previous couple of weeks. You will find mainly three kinds of tales. The first involves numerous instances of seemingly capricious legal and bureaucratic maneuvering by elected Republican officials where election rules are at issue. The second concerns allegations of fraud by paid operatives of the national Republican party working in several states. The third, predictably, consists of blustery accusations by Republicans that the Democrats are preparing to commit election fraud and to falsely accuse Republicans of doing the same.

 

Here in Minnesota the legalistic and political antics of Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer have hewn to a seeming pattern around the country: Take advantage of any unclear or archaic provisions in the law, and of any bureaucratic two-steps available to you, to make it needlessly confusing and difficult to register and to vote. And by all means call into question the integrity of the process itself. Warn about the practically non-existent threat of fraud by individual voters, cluck about the terrorists likely to be lurking nearby on election day. Give confusing or impracticable advice to your polling place workers. All this, of course, can be done within the law. Just last week it was revealed that Madam Secretary had trained some 50 volunteer election "observers" cherry-picked in large measure from the ranks of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota email list to monitor the conduct of election judges and report back to her office through the course of the day. And on Friday, the Minnesota GOP entered the fray by filing a lawsuit claiming an overabundance of Democratic election judges in the Twin Cities metro area. (To lull the dimwitted, they also cited too many Republican judges in Olmsted County--this isn't, you know, a partisan stunt of some kind.)

 

The same sort of obstructionism is being tried, to potentially much greater effect, in the pivotal swing state of Ohio, whose Secretary of State likewise happens to be a politically ambitious Republican hack. Last month the office of J. Kenneth Blackwell tried, unsuccessfully, to decree that all voter registrations in the state had to be filled out on 80-lb. paper stock, citing an obscure provision in the law that dated to pre-computer days when hard copies of registration forms had to be sturdy since they were the primary record retained. What was the practical impetus? Simply that not all new registrations were being collected on 80-lb. paper stock, and the fiat offered grounds for rejecting more of them.

 

Blackwell also sought to make election judges apply the strictest standards of verification to those voters who had moved to a new address. Why? Fraud worries, of course, though the measure also would have served to exclude more Democratic voters. In Ohio's Taft family Republican stronghold of Hamilton County, election registrars have purged some 105,000 "inactive" registrants over the past four years, as they are allowed but not obliged to do under law. In the Columbus area, writes the Cleveland Free Press, "Franklin County election officials are considering a contingent of actions including arrests if the [Republican-appointed] certified election challengers attempt to challenge all new voters and hold up the voting process."  This underscores an important point. A cynic might conclude that there is a Republican electoral offensive whose real object is not just to disqualify and discourage voters, but to make the lines in polling places move more slowly, so that fewer ballots can be cast before the clock runs out at 8 p.m. that day.

 

In Nevada and Oregon and possibly several other states, one paid Republican registration group has been accused of representing itself as non-partisan in order to do registration drives at prime spots such as libraries, and then systematically destroying any forms they received from Democrats.

 

And of course there is Florida, where another Bush administration's allies commissioned the scrubbing of voter rolls in 2000 and attempted to do the same thing again this year before they were caught in July. But there is no end to the shenanigans a resourceful bureaucrat can pull; as Paul Krugman wrote in his most recent column, "Florida's secretary of state recently ruled that voter registrations would be deemed incomplete if those registering failed to check a box affirming their citizenship, even if they had signed an oath saying the same thing elsewhere on the form."

 

In the broadest sense, the jiggering of the American vote is one of the more routine facts of political life. Typically it's accomplished right out in the open through the vital gatekeeping function of campaign money, which assures that incumbency rates in the U.S. Congress rival those of the old Soviet politburo, and that almost no one who is not on the same page with the money power gets a chance to be heard from. (Paul Wellstone was so venerated because he was, at first, one of the rare exceptions that prove the rule.) The mere fact that Minnesota is one of only six states that use the eminently sensible, eminently workable same-day voter registration system ought to tell you something about the American predisposition to limit the franchise. 

 

But this is different. I believe we are seeing a war over voting rights on a scale no American has seen since the fight that culminated in the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and no Northerner has seen since the age of the utterly powerful and utterly corrupt urban political machines. The Rove-led Republicans do not seem to care if they lay waste to public confidence in the ballot box once and for all. They care only about holding on to the White House, and they appear to be making all due effort to render it as difficult as possible for people to turn out in large numbers to vote against them. If they fail in this, they at least will have created a legal foundation for conjuring a crisis of succession that can be kicked upstairs to the Supreme Court once again.

 

God knows I'm no Democrat. I voted for Nader in 2000, and the time before that I was proud to be one of a couple of dozen signers of a New York Times ad endorsing his candidacy on election eve. I think eight years of Bill Clinton played a vital and as yet unacknowledged role in setting the stage for George W. Bush in the first place. But the first order of business now is to understand what the Republicans are up to, and to combat it tooth and nail. At this point our job as small-d democrats and small-r republicans is to turn out for Kerry (the only not-Bush vote that counts this time) in such numbers as to ensure that Bush/Rove cannot hijack the outcome.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 19, 2004 1:04 PM

 

Dayton: What the Fuck?

Shades of the Wellstone memorial service

Yesterday, as BW's local readers already know, Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton made a rather dramatic announcement: He would be closing his Washington office through the election on the grounds that a secret briefing of Congress (two weeks ago...) suggested serious danger of a terror attack on Capitol Hill. So far no official source, even among those speaking on background, has credited Dayton's implication that We Know Something's Coming. According to the Star Tribune, "A separate government official said Dayton and other senators were shown a CIA document that projected a worst-case scenario of a terrorist attack based on an uncorroborated piece of intelligence that did not contain any specifics."

Well, Dayton wouldn't just conjure something like this in his own mind, would he? The truth is, I think he might. 

We'll see what transpires, but two things occurred to me yesterday when I heard the news: Dayton has assured once and for all his status as a one-term senator; and he has provided 11th-hour fodder for Republican 527s: When there's danger, Democrats cut and run!

I expected the item would lead on Drudge. It didn't, which can only mean the GOP brain trust did not want it to lead on Drudge. The Bush administration has to be careful spinning something like this: After all they have done to raise red flags, they can hardly afford to say that Dayton is an alarmist. But if we get on toward Election Day without the attack to which Dayton alludes, expect the episode to be taken up by ancillary attack squads.

Here's hoping that an episode involving Minnesota Democrats doesn't ripple across the country to the benefit of Republicans for the second election cycle in a row. 

Postscript, Wednesday noon:

One of Dayton's prospective foes, Republican House member Mark Kennedy, has issued this manly response.

The right-wing bloggers are predictably going after Dayton.

    

Posted by Steve Perry at October 13, 2004 9:46 AM

 

Why We Fight

What is, and isn't, at stake in beating Bush

allhatnocattle.net

Sometimes the truth just ain't enough
Or it's too much in times like this
--Bruce Springsteen, "Worlds Apart"

Last Tuesday's Vote for Change concert in St. Paul contained a number of scenes I'll never forget: 55-year-old Bruce Springsteen watching with glee and a little awe as 59-year-old John Fogerty bounced around the stage, forgot his own lyrics, and sounded 25 again; Neil Young's surprise entrance, and every note he played that night; Michael Stipe pogo-ing around the audience pit in front during "Born to Run," just another fan, before dashing back to the stage for a last song. But my favorite moment may have been the quietest of the evening. In a between-songs break near the end, Springsteen made a little ceremony of presenting a wrinkled second-hand corduroy sports coat to Conor Oberst, the lead singer of the tour's opening act, Bright Eyes. Oberst, a 24-year-old indie rock cult figure from Omaha, was an unknown to most of the people who came to see Bruce or REM, and the gesture was Springsteen's way of telling Oberst he belonged, that he was as much a part of what was happening there as anyone else on the stage--an actor and not merely an accessory in the proceedings.

It's hard to imagine that the presidential campaign that Springsteen et al. came to speak their piece about has left very many people feeling that way.  Yes, a lot of people are "mobilized," meaning mad as hell, or scared as hell, but for what purpose? The answer is, to rid themselves of George W. Bush. As for that other guy, John Kerry has been at his very best in the two debates held thus far, going after Bush with acuity and even verve. But on the whole he has run the sort of shabby, pallid, Republican-lite campaign to which rank-and-file Democrats have grown too accustomed. Democrat or otherwise, those of us who want to see Bush go at practically any cost will err greatly if we forget the central question that has hung over Election 2004 like a shroud: Why, after four years of egregious lies, failure, and cronyism on the part of a president who is more widely despised than polls skewed toward registered and "likely" voters will ever apprehend, is this a race at all?

There is no way to discuss this matter sensibly without first discarding some of our most treasured myths about American politics. Put simply, the Democrats are not a real opposition party (only consider the ease with which they swallowed Bush's outrages as they were occurring) and the mass media are not remotely critical of power. A huge and mostly invisible segment of the populace is angry and frightened, less by Osama bin Laden than by what might happen if they get sick or lose their jobs. What passes for public discourse washes over them like a narcotic haze and leaves them feeling left out and bamboozled, powerless, as it is supposed to; thanks to the ministrations of media and the steady erosion of public schools for more than a generation now, the American public is probably more ill-informed than at any time since the 19^th century.

This state of affairs informs the real spirit of the Bush/Cheney government, the campaign slogan you'll never see on a bumpersticker--BC04: Because You'll Believe Anything. In four years the only thing the Bush White House has done well is to generate a massive volume of propaganda. As former Marine intelligence officer Andrew Borene says elsewhere in this issue [see 10/13 City Pages], part of the disaster of Iraq stemmed from the Bushmen's obsession with spinning the war to the folks at home. Team Rove has stuck to its stories, or changed them in nakedly peremptory fashion to suit the occasion, with unblinking resolve. (Goebbels pronounced the last word on the subject: "The rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.")

 

Karl Rove's image offensive has been defined mainly by his recognition that this is all that really matters. He understands what the people who work in media, ironically, do not: If it isn't on the evening news or the cable talk shows or the first few paragraphs of the local newspaper's front page, then half to two-thirds of the American public will never know it happened. (Or that it didn't: According to a poll I saw just last week, some 40 percent of Americans still believe Saddam played a role in 9/11.) He further knows that the White House can usually manipulate what is said on television and the front pages of newspapers simply by showing up every day to tell the assembled hordes of stenographers and microphone-carriers what is newsworthy that day.

 

This is a horrifying statement about our political culture, especially when you consider that the Bush gang has done nearly everything else wrong, whether one is measuring their actions against the world we live in, against any semblance of decency or "traditional American values," or purely on tactical/operational grounds.

To reiterate, in the broadest strokes: On the eve of a war he was determined to conjure from whole cloth, the president sought and won a tax cut that principally benefited the very richest Americans (and if you've only got $10 or $20 million, you aren't one of them; see David Cay Johnston's book Perfectly Legal) and did nothing to spur job creation. (No surprise: Studies conducted after the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s demonstrated that corporations and individuals tended not to invest their tax savings thus, but to distribute them or pocket them as profit-takings.) Bush passed a schools initiative called No Child Left Behind that, in the guise of ensuring educational progress for every student, actually guaranteed the quickening of public schools' bankruptcy as they strived to meet unfunded and statistically impossible goals.

In Iraq, the president rushed to invade in the knowledge that Saddam's government would topple easily, setting right again the question of Bush family honor, but without any consideration of what would happen afterward. It underscored the bully principle that is ever at work in this White House: Sometimes you do things simply because no one can stop you, and you feel at pains to prove it.

In fact, the Bush administration has created numerous precedents for expanded and still more autocratic executive branch powers. It flouted its own intelligence evidence about Iraq, and now proposes to permanently reorganize the "intelligence community" under the aegis of the president's office, so that its findings can be tailored to the government's objectives with less fuss. To preserve and expand its prerogative, the Bush gang has stonewalled (the 9/11 Commission), threatened critics into silence (Paul O'Neill and others), cast a veil of secrecy over political embarrassments while hiding behind national security (FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds), and lied, lied, lied without getting taken to task for it publicly very often. This is not merely a matter of George W. Bush's style or personality. By demonstrating just how much an American president can get away with, the Bush era has given a new dimension of meaning to "executive privilege," and this is a lesson that will survive the departure of Bush three months or four years and three months from now. 

The meanness and ineptitude of the Bush regime is the cornerstone of John Kerry's eleventh-hour resurgence. Stripped to its essentials, Kerry's claim to the White House is that he would be a more moderate, forward-looking executor of empire abroad and of a more familiar, if only incrementally more humane, neo-liberal austerity at home. This is fairly horrifying too, and we only set ourselves up for another fall if we forget it, but it does not mean that this election is less important than advertised, only that the stakes are different. On November 2 we won't be voting for anything like the measure of change we deserve the chance to vote for. We will be casting our ballots in a referendum on whether we wish to pause and reconsider our march toward a homegrown American fascism.

Posted by Steve Perry at October 10, 2004 10:53 AM

 

Marine back from Iraq says No More Bush

Marine intelligence collection officer Andrew Borene talks about Bush's many failures in Iraq

Earlier today I got a phone call from a City Pages reader here in Minneapolis who was discharged from the Marines some months ago after serving in Iraq during the invasion. He had an interesting firsthand story to tell, and he told it well, so we're going to publish it as a First Person feature in next week's City Pages (10/13).   

Meanwhile, here it is early for BW readers: 

Bush's Awful Mess

I've served in Iraq, and that's why I can't vote for this president again

By Andrew Borene  

I'm a Minnesota guy, born and raised. I'm from Edina, I went to the Blake School in Minneapolis, I was the captain of the Macalester football team. After I graduated from Mac in '98, I spent a couple of years working for Norwest and Wells Fargo as an investment banker. I started law school at the University of Minnesota in the year 2000, and after about two months dropped out and enlisted in the Marine Corps. I was going to become a JAG attorney. But after I got bit by the bug to learn a little bit more about the Marine Corps, I decided I wanted to be a ground officer and go around the world with guns rather than deliver legal briefs in a courtroom.

Not long after September 11, I ended up as an intelligence officer with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. I was an intelligence collection officer, one of several, with the 1st Marine Division, which is the infantry unit of the expeditionary force. Personally, most of my work in intelligence was done during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, here in the United States. I deployed to the Middle East in February of 2003. I was in Kuwait, I crossed over to Iraq the night the invasion began. Made it as far north as the north side of Baghdad, drove into Baghdad the day that Saddam's statue fell down. I basically was there for the events of the invasion and the fall of the regime.

Just after President Bush declared Mission Accomplished and the end of major combat operations, I was sent home because it looked like things were going to settle down, and my wife was pregnant and had some pregnancy issues. That was pretty much the end of my combat phase of the war, but the war was not over for me at that time. When I came back, I was still serving as an intelligence officer. My job was to support the troops in Iraq by putting together a lot of reporting from agencies and assets, and helping in an intelligence capacity through the computer and by communicating with the troops on the ground. It was also my job to call families when there were casualties--not deaths but injuries. That is a story that hasn't really been reported. You don't see those numbers. But there are now over 10,000 young Americans whose lives are forever changed by the injuries they sustained there.

When I left Iraq, fully two-thirds of the Iraqi people supported our occupation of Iraq and wanted us there. Also at that time, the 1st Marine Division, the unit I'd been part of, did occupation duty in southern Iraq for four months, in what are now lawless areas where al-Sadr is. But during that four months, no Marines were killed in action. That's an important thing to note: what happened in Iraq to cause the Iraqi people to suddenly swing to--the last poll I saw said over 80 percent of the Iraqi people want the occupation forces gone tomorrow. And they see the coalition as actually creating more chaos and more insecurity in their country. For me personally, I fully supported President Bush, I fully supported the invasion of Iraq. I still support the liberation of the Iraqi people, but I came around to support John Kerry when I realized that this administration has erred time and time again. Even in the pursuit of their own end of a free Iraq, they're incompetently carrying out the plan.

I started to get doubts as I drove south from Baghdad into southern Iraq where we were going to do occupation duty. The Army forces were coming north at the time. At the time we drove into Baghdad, people were literally hugging and kissing the Marines. We had Marines wearing soft-covers instead of helmets. It was a very permissive environment at the time. I'm not going to say it was safe, but I will say that the Iraqi people genuinely appreciated us. The joy that we felt doing that, I've got to think it's only akin to what the WWII vets marching into Paris felt on the day that they liberated France.

But as we were driving south, there was a Shi'ite pilgrimage going on at the same time. It hadn't happened in over 20 years because of Saddam, but they actually got to exercise their religious freedom. As our Marines were driving south past these Shi'ite people waving and smiling, the Army was driving north, as I said. I expected to see construction equipment, or water, or supplies. Instead what I saw were combat troops--tanks moving up the highway. They had dismounted infantry along the side pushing Iraqi people off to the edge of the highway. It was at that time I started to have some doubts about how the occupation was going to go if we... There was a window of opportunity where the Iraqi people genuinely wanted assistance, and we could have exploited that opportunity and used it to the advantage of the Iraqi people and of the U.S. forces in Iraq.

Unfortunately, the reconstruction funds were never spent. If you just look at the record, I think it was $18 billion appropriated by Congress for reconstruction, of which this administration only spent 5 percent. They spent more than seven times that much money on non-bid contracts to Halliburton. And this is the kind of stuff that got me upset. I think the final screw for me was... there's a Marine general named Anthony Zinni. He wrote a book called <I>Battle Ready<P> with Tom Clancy, who obviously has a following in conservative circles. I read that book, and then General Zinni came and gave a lecture to the Marine officers at Camp Pendleton where I was stationed in which he made a rather scathing indictment of the incompetence with which the White House was essentially interfering with commanders on the ground.

The thing that General Zinni was talking about was that the White House had appointed spokesmen. I don't know if you recall the press conferences in Baghdad, but there was a guy named Dan Senor standing over [military officials'] shoulder at every press conference. They spent more time on the information campaign, on deceiving the American people about what was happening in Iraq, than they did on actually trying to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. That's a problem. General Zinni is one of the generals who spoke out and said, hey, you need more troops for the occupation. And you need better plans for the stability operations after the invasion.

Because everybody knew the invasion was going to go very well, even with the limited number of troops. However, any of the generals who dissented--like Shinseki, who got basically relieved. If you look what happened yesterday, where it looks like even Bremer on the day he got there said he wanted more troops on the ground, and that what we had was not sufficient to stop the looting. The bottom line is that, even though the argument about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist proliferation was fabricated, the underlying argument, the principle that a free Iraq would be better for the war on the terror, still holds true. But you can't even get that done.

And frankly, myself, I have the opportunity to speak out because I'm kind of an odd case. I got back from Iraq completely in one piece and healthy, and was selected to play rugby for the All-Marine Corps rugby team. And I blew out my knee and had reconstructive surgery, and got a medical discharge from the Marine Corps on August 15.

On August 16 I walked into Kerry headquarters and asked them how I could help out, because I've followed the issues very closely, and Senator Kerry laid out a plan long ago to double the size of the special forces, to increase funding for intelligence personnel and operations, and that's the kind of thing we need to do. It's just common sense. Where do terrorists live? How do they get trained? They get trained in little camps. Or they're a couple of guys in an apartment building. Prior to 9/11, many of them were in Hamburg before the attack happened.

How do you get them? You use special forces, you use intelligence operations, you find a couple of them and drop some black helicopters and guys in black pajamas, and you whack them. And that's the kind of operation we need to launch. This sideshow in Iraq where we send 150,000 teenagers without enough equipment to manage the occupation, and without the kind of international support we needed for that battle on the Iraqi front, it really detracted from our ability globally to stop the spread of terror.

Another issue I had is, in the last 12 months, $3-4 billion worth of heroin has been exported from Afghanistan. So that $3-4 billion, that's illicit drugs, that's illicit money. And who does that money go back to? It goes back to the former Taliban warlords, it goes back to the people who generated the very first terrorist strike on America anyway.

And that $3-4 billion worth of heroin, how does it get exported? It gets exported through clandestine shipping networks, the same kind of clandestine shipping networks that one would need to smuggle weapons of mass destruction. So the bottom line for me is, America is less safe because of the way this administration has prosecuted the war on terror. Senator Kerry and Senator Edwards have laid out real structural plans. They want to add two active duty divisions to the armed forces. They want to double special forces. And they want to rely on the 9/11 Commission, which is something the administration opposed in the first place, to look into those failings and ask how we can make America better.

I guess I used to be what they call "Republican in name only." Kind of a Ramstad Republican, you know--socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Unfortunately the issues in this election are just too big for that.

Also see...

My Twin Cities Babelogue colleague Couch Pundit is back from his long computer-induced respite. One of the better culture & politics blogs out there, and right now he's got a posting featuring Harry Shearer's remix of Bush's Debate I fugue-state chant: "Hard Work."  

Posted by Steve Perry at October 7, 2004 3:46 PM

 

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