Benchwarmers Sports Bar
Indianapolis, Indiana
Two hours after the polls closed in eastern Indiana, I'm sitting in an Indianapolis sports bar, the only person in sight (and perhaps for miles) displaying any (much less all) of the following: (a) suit jacket, (b) laptop with satellite aircard, (c) waist under 34 inches, and/or (d) Yiddishkeit. Every TV is tuned to a news channel (CNN, Fox, MSNBC and CBS), and the crowd is watching the twists and turns of the election returns as they trickle in. Networks have called North Carolina for Obama by significant margins and deem Indiana too close to call because Indianapolis and western Indiana (where polls close an hour later) have yet to report. Based on the current delegate math, assuming no surprises, the race seems functionally over: Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for president.
My experience in Indiana, like my experience in Pennsylvania last month, New Hampshire four years ago and New York for many years, underscores that this nation's election system is broken. By formal rules, funding, enforcement or their respective and selective absence, the election system is calculated to achieve neither efficiency nor accuracy, and certainly not to vindicate equality or the fundamental constitutional right to vote, but instead to stack the electoral deck in favor of incumbents and otherwise favored insiders. This news won't shock political veterans, but what is news (or should be news) is the systematic disenfranchisement on the basis of race I saw in Indiana. What should be even more alarming is that intentional disenfranchisement would be the abject goal of a Democrat, Clinton's Indiana team.
In the final hours of voting (when I was too busy to blog, for the reasons that follow), Team Clinton made a last attempt at election fraud, this time by (1) repeatedly misrepresenting poll watchers' identity and residency to gain entrance to sterile zones closed to all but local voters, then (2) challenging only African American voters' right to vote. When called on the carpet, Team Clinton produced doctored forgeries of Indiana law purporting to permit their presence and their challenges. I'll leave out the play-by-play of how I rolled back this fraud, but suffice to say that at one harried moment, I was emailing legal research to my Blackberry that I handed to a voter to show the election judge (because I myself couldn't enter the precinct), while I simultaneously looked up voters whose precincts were relocated without their knowledge, while I coordinated their transport, while I relayed information to/from Chicago and Indianapolis headquarters, while I withstood some nifty verbal assaults from Team Clinton folks berating me to distract me from my work.
It was fun for the sport and especially for the winning, but the winning properly can be understood only in the context of a great loss for democracy, for hundreds of voters turned away from the polls, and for the civil rights of the African American community. I should not have needed to litigate the right to vote today, 45 years after the Voting Rights Act. I should not have needed to write affidavits testifying to wholesale election fraud. I should not have needed to summon the state party and the police. I should not have needed to look with suspicion at "press credentials." I should not have needed to hold a crying 85-year-old woman who'd voted for 35 years at this precinct until Indiana wrongly purged her registration without notice and without remedy. I'll remember her tears for a long, long time.
In the end, Obama carried 93% of the vote in my precinct with 250% turnout from the average presidential year. Had I not been present to facilitate voting and keep the Clinton voter-suppression machine at least somewhat at bay, the result might have been quite different. Even these results mask the hard truth that hundreds of voters in my precincts and probably many thousands of voters elsewhere in Indianapolis were disenfranchised despite my efforts, without enough volunteer lawyers to guarantee rights supposedly guaranteed 45 years ago, 140 years ago, 230 years ago....
In the end, if Clinton wins Indiana, I'll never really know if she won. And if the African American community here fairly predicts communities in other swing states, neither will they.
For all of Indiana's saturation with advertising and candidate visits and hoopla, most of the beer guzzlers here at Benchwarmers, all white, have no clue what kind of crap happened here today. Figuring out how to bridge that information gap -- and perhaps more importantly, the caring gap it represents -- is the first and most difficult step to fixing what's broken here. Ultimately it's the reason that the system is so difficult to change and so unlikely to change barring litigation. That may come (unless, of course, the next president makes an issue of fixing the nation's election system). For now, all I can do is my small part and hope others do theirs, mash my teeth that there's so much to do, and down a few beers to make it all seem a bit easier.
Dude. Not cool. Perhaps it's generally reflective of the people you can immediately see, but that comment is totally out-of-line. Someone else on my flist - an Indiana resident - has a post just up about how she's sick of the misinterpretation of Indiana by people
like youfrom the coasts. It's stuff like that which makes those people you are currently mocking say "go back to New York".And (c) was a low blow and irrelevant. And you don't know about (d) - not all Jews look the same, you know (says the blue-eyed Jew from Montana). Google shows me plenty of results for Indianapolis synagogues.
I'm in a crabby mood, so this may have just struck a nerve. But it's a particular nerve that gets struck over and over, and it gets old.
As for the Jewish point, I'm certainly not suggesting that I'm the only Jew in town! But there does appear to be a studied lack in this place of what might readily be identified as Yiddishkeit, which is exclusively a cultural phenomenon and certainly nothing remotely normative. You're right that this matter is utterly irrelevant to my broader point about voter disenfranchisement and, on a moment's reflection, I shouldn't have included it precisely because it can give the misimpression that there's a link that certainly doesn't exist. That said, see one of my posts from yesterday: I've been prayed over in the name of Jesus several times over the last 24 hours and I've cherished every moment. I'm just making transparent my own internal narrative that what I'm doing in this particular bar, at this particular time, in this particular way, stands out huge... and several times others have made light of my religion or ethnicity by way of recognizing the very difference I now recognize. I'm sorry for the confusion.
But don't lump me in with the "flyover" dummies. I regret if I gave reason to do so, but that ain't my style (even if I am a New Yorker).
Also, by no means do I single out Indiana: I'm talking about a national problem with the fair conduct of elections that I've seen in states blue, red and numerous shades in between.
I linked to your recent post sequence from my own blog; hope that's OK.
Neither can I say how high such tactics or the volition for them rises in the campaign. I can't know what happens on the inside without being on the inside (and maybe not even then). What I can say, however, is that many people from that team took great pains, in different ways and at different times, to bend and often break the law... and then attempt to cover their tracks. The combination of this consciousness of guilt and the systematic nature of the effort strongly suggests a conclusion that the effort is deliberate and coordinated, as though this result were a clear purpose and not just some accident... and the purposefulness of the enterprise makes me sick.
That said, I would be most surprised if Sen. Clinton herself knew of these tactics. The "ground game" tends to fly far below the radar of a candidate, who has far bigger things to do. On the other hand, both Sen. Clinton and former Pres. Clinton already have been implicated in race-baiting, so neither can I say that these tactics are inconsistent with the tenor and direction they have set for the campaign. At the end of the day, they are responsible for that tone, and they are responsible for the leaders they put in charge. They cannot fairly be held responsible for the conduct of the individual poll worker or street team, but such a systematic effort certainly is indicting of the environment they've created, tolerated or fostered. And given these problems, they have a duty to intervene and correct the wrongs.
While I don't deny that the same stuff goes on in Republican circles as well, this statement strikes me as a little naive. There are times where you're quick to portray Republicans as evil and Democrats as good, then act surprised when Democrats do the same things for which people condemn Republicans so often in liberal circles.
People in both parties cheat, and people like you are key in stopping them all, both in the short run - the work you've been doing here - and the long run - in getting the word out about this so that real change can be effected. But it should be no surprise at all that Democrats pull this sort of thing - Gore's campaign giving cigarettes to homeless people to get them to come to the polls, college students registering in several districts in the same state and voting in each... and redistricting has long been a problem for both parties in many states - some for state electioneering, some for national.
The only reason the Republicans are more famous for it right now is because they won the presidency in '00 and '04, by margins that were both close enough that minor swings would have mattered greatly, and also because those margins were controversial.
But I've polled them, and the younger wombats broke for Obama by a 3 to 1 margin.
If the one is yours, you've got some splaining to do. :)
It's only by dispensation of the parties and the state-by-state laws, IIRC, that the "right" to vote has any legal sway - it's not Constitutional, and it only applies to parties that decide to hold primaries/caucases...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but the right to vote in choosing a nominee is markedly different from the right to vote for the positions themselves, yes?
Not that I'm saying that everyone shouldn't have an equal right to vote during these things - they should - but it's not a Constitutionally canonical thing... which is why it's okay for the DNC to jettison MI/FL, have superdelegates, etc.
Just as a point of note, my wife had two dogs when she lived outside of Chicago. She was surprised to find them both registered to vote; one as a Democrat, and one as a Republican.
One imagines this sort of thing is common to both parties.
Eye-opener
Re: Eye-opener
FYI, my callback interview with E(1) is this coming Monday. More on that soon... after I sleeeeeep. Best to Clara!