Where's the Shame?

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http://www.alternet.org/rights/20371/

 

Where's the Shame?

 

By Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect. Posted November 1, 200

 

The GOP's voter demobilization strategy sets us back decades.

 

With Election Day almost upon us, it's not clear whether President

Bush is running a campaign or plotting a coup d'etat. By all accounts,

Republicans are spending these last precious days devoting nearly as

much energy to suppressing the Democratic vote as they are to

mobilizing their own.

 

Time was when Republicans were at least embarrassed by their efforts

to keep African Americans from the polls. Republican consultant Ed

Rollins was all but drummed out of the profession after his efforts to

pay black ministers to keep their congregants from voting in a 1993

New Jersey election came to light.

 

For George W. Bush, Karl Rove, and their legion of genteel thugs,

however, universal suffrage is just one more musty liberal ideal that

threatens conservative rule. Today's Republicans have elevated vote

suppression from a dirty secret to a public norm.

 

In Ohio, Republicans have recruited 3,600 poll monitors and assigned

them disproportionately to such heavily black areas as inner-city

Cleveland, where Democratic " 527 " groups have registered many tens of

thousands of new voters. " The organized left's efforts to, quote

unquote, register voters – I call them ringers – have created these

problems " of potential massive vote fraud, Cuyahoga County Republican

Chairman James P. Trakas recently told The New York Times.

 

Let's pass over the implication that a registration drive waged by a

liberal group is inherently fraud-ridden, and look instead at that

word " ringers. "

 

Registration in Ohio is nonpartisan, but independent analysts estimate

that roughly 400,000 new Democrats have been added to the rolls this

year. Who does Trakas think they are? Have tens of thousands of

African Americans been sneaking over the state lines from Pittsburgh

and Detroit to vote in Cleveland – thus putting their own battleground

states more at risk of a Republican victory? Is Shaker Heights

suddenly filled with Parisians affecting American argot? Or are the

Republicans simply terrified that a record number of minority voters

will go to the polls next Tuesday? Have they decided to do anything to

stop them – up to and including threatening to criminalize Voting

While Black in a Battleground State?

 

This is civic life in the age of George W. Bush, in which politics has

become a continuation of civil war by other means. In Bush's America,

there's a war on – against a foreign enemy so evil that we can ignore

the Geneva Conventions, against domestic liberals so insidious that we

can ignore democratic norms. Only bleeding hearts with a pre-Sept. 11

mind-set still believe in voting rights.

 

For Bush and Rove, the domestic war predates the war on terrorism.

From the first day of his presidency, Bush opted to govern from the

right, to fan the flames of cultural resentment, to divide the

American house against itself in the hope that cultural conservatism

would create a stable Republican majority. The Sept. 11 attacks

unified us, but Bush exploited those attacks to relentlessly partisan

ends. As his foreign and domestic policies abjectly failed, Bush's

reliance on identity politics only grew stronger. He anointed himself

the standard-bearer for provincials and portrayed Kerry and his

backers as arrogant cosmopolitans.

 

And so here we are, improbably enmeshed in a latter-day version of the

election of 1928, when the Catholicism of Democratic presidential

nominee Al Smith bitterly divided the nation along Protestant-Catholic

and nativist-immigrant lines. To his credit, Smith's opponent (and

eventual victor), Herbert Hoover, did not exploit this rift himself.

Bush, by contrast, has not merely exploited the

modernist-traditionalist tensions in America but helped create new

ones and summoned old ones we could be forgiven for thinking were

permanently interred. (Kerry will ban the Bible?)

 

Indeed, it's hard to think of another president more deliberately

divisive than the current one. I can come up with only one other

president who sought so assiduously to undermine the basic

arrangements of American policy (as Bush has undermined the New Deal

at home and the systems of post-World War II alliances abroad) with so

little concern for the effect this would have on the comity and

viability of the nation. And Jefferson Davis wasn't really a president

of the United States.

 

After four years in the White House, George W. Bush's most significant

contribution to American life is this pervasive bitterness, this

division of the house into raging, feuding halves. We are two nations

now, each with a culture that attacks the other. And politics, as the

Republicans are openly playing it, need no longer concern itself with

the most fundamental democratic norm: the universal right to vote.

 

As the campaign ends, Bush is playing to the right and Kerry to the

center.

 

That foretells the course of the administrations that each would head.

The essential difference between them is simply that, as a matter of

strategy and temperament, Bush seeks to exploit our rifts and Kerry to

narrow them. That, finally, is the choice before us next Tuesday:

between one candidate who wants to pry this nation apart to his own

advantage, and another who seeks to make it whole.

 

This article is Copyright 2004 by the American Prospect. This article

may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed for compensation of any

kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct

questions about permissions to permissions.

 

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of The American Prospect.