Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2004 22:16:30 -0700
Subject:Sidney Blumenthal: America's hidden vote




Comment
America's hidden vote

Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday October 21, 2004
The Guardian

Passing almost without notice earlier this month, the public release
of The Civil Rights Record of the George W Bush Administration - the
official staff report prepared by the US Civil Rights Commission -
whose submission is required by federal law, was blocked by the
Republican commissioners. None the less, it was posted on the
commission's website:
"This report finds that President Bush has neither exhibited
leadership on pressing civil rights issues, nor taken actions that
matched his words."

Bush has held the Civil Rights Commission in contempt since its June
2001 report on Election Practices in Florida During the 2000 Campaign.
Then it concluded: "The commission's findings make one thing clear:
widespread voter disenfranchisement - not the dead-heat contest - was
the extraordinary feature in the Florida election ... The
disenfranchisement of Florida's voters fell most harshly on the
shoulders of black voters."

Vast efforts to mobilise or suppress African-American, Hispanic and
Democratic voters have already reached a greater level of intensity than
in any modern campaign. The Republicans in Ohio, for example, have
attempted to toss out new Democratregistrations because it was claimed
they were written on the wrong weight of paper, a gambit overruled by a
federal court. From Pennsylvania to Arizona, a Republican consulting
firm is discouraging new Democratic voters from getting on the rolls.

Meanwhile, the Democratic party has more than 10,000 lawyers deployed to
defend against voter suppression, 2,000 stationed in Florida; civil
rights groups are sending out more than 6,000 lawyers. Bush v Gore
remains an open wound; and now the battle over voting rights, over
democracy itself, is being fought again.

Since 2002, when Republicans exploited terrorism to besmirch the
patriotism of Democrats in the midterm elections, what can only be
called a new Democratic party has been summoned into existence by
extra-party groups. More than 100,000 activists are tramping through the
precincts. In Ohio alone, more than 300,000 new Democratic voters have
been added, Cecile Richards, director of America Votes, told me. These
registrations of literally millions of new voters did not just happen;
they were organised.

The polls, nearly all showing a dead-even race, fail to account for
the new voters, who have no past records. They do not measure those
for whom a mobile is their main phone - 6% of the population - who
will vote Democrat by a margin of two-and-a-half to one.

The Democracy Corps poll, however, filters in newly registered voters.
Four months ago, the newly registered made up only 1% of the sample.
One month ago, they comprised 4%. Now they are at 7% and rising. And
they will vote for Kerry over Bush by 61% to 37%.

Bush's job approval has fallen now to 47 in this poll; presidents
below 50 always lose. Bush has not campaigned in Ohio for three weeks,
though he plans to stop there this week. Unemployment continues to
rise in the state. "There is no other explanation for his absence,"
says Stanley Greenberg, Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign pollster, "other
than his numbers go down when he's there. His position on jobs is
implausible."

Democracy Corps research shows that best-case arguments for either
candidate shift no voters. The deciding factor will be turnout: the
higher the turnout the larger the vote for Democrats.

Since September 11 infused Bush with a mission, he has evoked hovering
angels, crusades, mushroom clouds, evildoers, shades of a universe of
death. His imagery induces a dynamic of paralysis before the threat
and fervour in embrace of his absolute reassurance and power. Dread
without end requires faith without limit.

Yet Bush found himself on the defensive when the New York Times
reported on the closed gathering of his campaign contributors, where
he revealed his radical programme for his second term - rightwing
capture of the supreme court, privatising social security, turning
over national land to the oil companies, more tax cuts. Kerry was
prompted to raise these issues. And Bush whined that Kerry was
practising "the politics of fear". The next day Dick Cheney projected
terrorists exploding nuclear weapons within the US, and offered Bush
as saviour from looming apocalypse.

"No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting
and reasoning as terror," wrote Edmund Burke. But not even the eve of
destruction will stifle turnout.

· Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior adviser to President Clinton, is
Washington bureau chief of salon.com
_________________________

Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of
Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter
of the gods.

-- Albert Einstein