The Broad View

Follow the Minnesota recount

Here.

Frank Rich's Sunday piece moved me to tears

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/opinion/09rich.html

Astonishing shift to blue

Of all the electoral maps, the one I found most fascinating is the "Voter Shift" map that appeared in The New York Times on Thursday. It shows, county by county, where and by what percentage the electorate changed its voting preference this year compared to 2004. (Note: there's a box to the left of the map that lets you choose various ways of looking at the results. "Voter Shift" is one of the choices.)

 

The shifts do not necessarily correlate directly to a "win" in a particular state, but demonstrate rather, at a deeper level of detail, the change in direction of voter sentiment.

It's a very pretty, very blue map. Enjoy!

First in the nation

Update: The Dixville Notch results are in! It's Obama! The vote was 15 to 6. See the full story here.

By tradition, Dixville Notch, way up at the tippy-top of New Hampshire, is the first community to cast its ballots on Election Day. The polls (or more properly, poll — there's only one venue, the ballroom of the grand and venerable Balsams Hotel, pictured above) will open in a scant two hours and 15 minutes — at midnight, EST.

According to a Reuters report of the primary election last January, there were 17 registered voters in Dixville Notch. Obama won seven of the 10 Democratic votes; McCain won all seven of the Republican tally. There must have been some cross-over voting, because this is a reliably Republican town you betcha.

You need only check the stats for voting in years past to confirm that. But who knows, with Obama's strong showing in the primary, perhaps things will be different this year. In any event, if tradition is followed, the good citizens will all vote simultaneously, the balloting will close a minute later, and the results will be announced shortly thereafter.

(Get Out The) VOTE!

Hat tip to my friend Carla, and to her aunt, who sent her this. To you, and all the other great broads out there, I give you my prognostication: that in 2016 we will have women as the presidential candidates for both parties. I sure hope I'll be around to collect on the bets I'm making now!

A village voice speaks — from the crypt

I nearly blew my coffee out of my nose when I read this, from David Broder, to be published in tomorrow's WaPo.

The country faces a choice between two men who both promise the nation a more principled, less partisan leadership.

Broder says this is the best campaign he's ever covered. The best? Well, maybe the craziest and even the most exciting, from his Village perspective. "Best" is a word that just doesn't fit. And Broder's forcing an equality between the presumed governance styles of both candidates is, at the very most charitable, absurd.

As for "more principled" — see RJ Eskow's piece, noted immediately below.

And for "less partisan" — well, Tristero at Hullabaloo has the last word.

Update: Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of The Australian says something a lot different from Broder, and a lot closer to the mark:

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I've ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

I don't agree with Sheridan's general slant (he leans to the right, and doesn't like Obama) but I think his lede quite captures the "American Idol" idiocies of our post-modern campaigns.

RJ is brilliant...again

This is a MUST READ!

An excerpt:

You probably remember Rumsfeld's line: "Democracy is messy." But you may not remember when he said it. It was in response to widespread looting of banks, offices, and museums. That says a lot. To this crowd, "democracy" is a violent mob. Representative government is an unpleasant necessity, not a value or an ideal. The rest of us think "war is too important to be left to the generals." They think self-government is too important to be left to the voters.

To some extent this is nothing more than greed and lust for power, the misuse of conservatism as a cover for naked self-interest. But it also reflects a difference in political philosophy that goes back to Locke and Hobbes. Their equation of democracy with mob rule, so clearly mirrored in Rumsfeld's comment, helps explain why they feel morally entitled to lie, cheat, and steal votes. To them, voters aren't reflections of a democratic ideal. They're suspects, threats, enemies. They're the Iraqi mob looting the Museum of Antiquities.

Uh-oh!

Well, the only poll that matters has been taken, the only vote that counts has been cast.

The Alien has endorsed McCain. Obama should just concede the election right now and save us all time and money.

WASHINGTON, DC - In a shocking reversal, the Alien has switched his endorsement from Barack Obama to John McCain.

With major implications for the U.S. presidential election, political kingmaker the Alien has changed his endorsement amid furor. Both political camps are buzzing about the implications, as the Alien has correctly predicted the winning president in every election for the past 28 years.

Ongoing investigation points to Cindy McCain as being the cause for this historic shift in allegiances.

Yes, it's true. The Alien has been mesmerized by Cindy McCain's eerily transparent eyeballs and was last seen cavorting with Mrs. McCain in a hot-tub.

Also abuzz are the Village Elders who have been rendered incoherent by the revelations. While they are properly scandalized by Cindy's dalliance with the Alien -- Sally Quinn has vowed to strike the hussy from her guest list -- they are simultaneously overjoyed that Favorite Son and former Maverick John McCain will be their next club president. The Washington Post reports that David Broder, Dean of the Undead, will postpone his embalming to attend the Inaugural Balls.

Weekly World News editors remain cautious in their predictions:

What impact this news will have on the election has yet to be determined. Swing state voters, who will decide this election, have the highest rate of alien abductions and UFO sightings and are known to vote in accordance with supernatural forces.

Who the heck cares what Ken Duberstein says?

Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff to Ronald Reagan and super-connected Washington insider¹, has made some waves, or at least caused a ripple, by saying that he'll be voting for Barack Obama.

Wolf Blitzer asked James Carville and Bill Bennett today what they thought about that. Bennett dismissed Blitzer's question with: "Who the heck cares what Ken Duberstein says?"

Well, I do. Ken Duberstein is my cousin², and for years now, every time I hear his name — my maiden name — or see it in print, I cringe. Duberstein is a pretty uncommon name. If my maiden name were Smith or Goldberg, I'm sure I wouldn't react so viscerally to its public mention.

The McCain camp is dismissive, too, calling their erstwhile ally's turnabout sour grapes. But I applaud his decision. It helps remove what I considered a blot on the family's copybook.

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¹ John Harwood and Gerald Seib, in Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Backroom Power, devote a whole chapter to him, headed "The Fixer."

² Ken's older sister, Susan, was my classmate in high school, but we were never close. Ken is five years younger — which made him a kid then, and thus totally out of our orbit. If I recall correctly their father, Aaron, was a macher with the Boy Scouts of America. He was a Republican. My father and he, second cousins, never had much contact.

How I'm going to spend Election Day

I'm going to spend Election Day at a polling place near my home. My son Adam and I have volunteered to be poll workers, and the working day will be from 6 a.m. until the polls close at 8 o'clock. There are five of us assigned to this site -- an inspector, and four clerks to perform the necessary administrative jobs: voter sign-in, ballot issuance, and so on.

We had a well-organized training session last week, at which time we received a packet of instructional materials to study as well as a recap of the training on DVD. Adam and I will review these detailed instructions together over the weekend. They are not uncomplicated, and it will help both of us to study as a team.

No, they are not uncomplicated. They cover, among a significant number of scenarios, what to do when an address in the roster does not match the address a voter gives the sign-in clerk; how to cross-reference a voter in the roster to a control sheet; what to do if a voter mis-marks his or her ballot and needs a new one; under what circumstances a provisional ballot must be issued; how to aid a disabled voter. And so on. Everything is designed to provide a system of checks and double-checks, down the line, so that at the end there are no discrepancies.  

There will be a dedicated cell phone provided for voters with issues or questions that can't be answered at the polling place, so that they can call the Elections Office for clarification or to register a complaint. The assigned inspectors are seasoned polling veterans.

Everything in the process is set up to assure access and to give voters full confidence that their vote is properly recorded. (Obviously we use paper ballots -- ones that are then scanned for tallying. Filling one out always reminds me of taking the SATs.)

Our immediate community is pretty settled and most people are likely to be entirely conversant and comfortable with the routine. Things may be more hectic in some other parts of town -- at the university, for example. But I doubt that there will be any serious disturbances. Joe Holland, our County Clerk and the man in charge, has proven himself an exemplary administrator over the years.

Joe is expecting a huge turnout. Santa Barbara historically has an excellent voting percentage (it's relative, of course -- as we all know, too many people in this country are eligible to vote but don't). This year in SB, Joe thinks it could be as high as 80%! We have a large number of people who choose to vote by mail, including me (I typically deliver my sealed ballot to a polling place on Election Day so I can pick up an "I Voted" sticker), and apparently a record number of those ballots have already been received at the Elections Office.

The downside of being at the polling place until 8 p.m. is that we'll miss all the minute-by-minute coverage (and that great CNN "magic wall") from when the polls on the East Coast start to close.

The upside, of course, is that we'll be spending the day at the very heart of democracy.