Routed

I spent the day alternating between despair and deep anger, vanquishing the elation of last week’s Red Sox victory. But here’s one thought I ran across today that however trivial, seems apropos. The Red Sox fans kept the faith. For 86 years each spring their hopes would be up, only to be dashed by season’s end. But they never gave up on their team. And one year, they finally won. We lost, and we will lose again. But one day victory will be ours, if we keep up the hope.

Jarrett has started a blog on place and politics, and has some initial ponderings about the geography of this election. This topic may be a starting point for me to regroup: to begin diving into the county-level patterns in the election data and see how it compares to demographic information. And maybe I’ll end up with interesting maps and charts for all to see.

I Can’t Stand It…

... so I’m going to bed.

Dashing Into A Swing State

Today we went on our day trip to Carson City, Nevada for a little bit of get-out-the-vote work. We met Susan and Barbara at nine in town in Davis and rode in Susan’s Subie Forester. Our first stop was just outside Auburn for fuel. The attendant at the gas station, a middle-aged guy with a long white beard, said we were the third group to pass through wearing Kerry-Edwards buttons, and wondered if there was a rally somewhere. We explained we were headed to Nevada. He said he was probably the only person in his precinct to be supporting Kerry, and they knew who he was! On the way over the mountain, we passed another car clearly filled with volunteers; we waved and they waved back.

We were told to arrive by 1 PM; there was no point in doing work in the morning since it was Nevada Day (celebrating the founding of the state) and there was a big parade downtown. Our coordinator was Kris, a youngish guy wearing a Yes on Kerry, No on Yucca Mountain t-shirt, who’s been at this since mid-August. Our brief was to visit voters not so much to persuade them to support Kerry but to get them to go to the polls, and offer them help if they needed any. Volunteers had already contacted most of the registered Democratic voters, so we started in on the non-partisan voters.

Nevada has early elections: one of the things we discovered is that a large fraction of the people have already voted. The people we talked to seemed pretty evenly split between Bushites and Kerry supporters—it is a swing state after all—and we had only one overtly hostile encounter. We figure our afternoon’s efforts probably netted the cause a couple more voters, and certainly helped the Carson City locals cover more ground. Kerry’s sister Peggy was in town campaigning today as part of the Nevada Day activities, and Anne Richards, the former governor of Texas who was defeated in 1994 by Bush, will be speaking there tomorrow, so Carson City is definitely getting some upper-level attention.

We stopped at a restaurant for dinner on the way back. On one of the televisions by the bar they had figures from I think the last day of early voting. This showed about 37,000 votes cast, apparently evenly between those registered Democrat and Republican. I think this is a good sign for Kerry, since far more Republicans are going to cross over and vote Kerry than vice-versa.

Proposition Soup

Since we live out in the boonies—a precinct with less than 250 voters—we need to vote absentee. That means I’d better send in that ballot pronto. Alas, we Californians always get intimidated by a daunting list of propositions on the ballot: this time we have sixteen. It’s an ordeal to wade through, as most of time the measures are fairly technical things pushed forth by one special interest group after another. I look forward to seeing someday a proposition to make getting propositions on the ballot much, much harder.

On Saturday we’re heading over the mountains to go canvassing in Carson City, Nevada. We’ll be riding up with our friends and fellow baseball fans Susan and Barbara. Nevada is at the moment leaning Bush but we’ll see if we can do something about that.

The Terror Myth

Here’s a documentary you’re not likely to see on American television in the near future. The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear argues that “the idea that we are threatened by a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion…a myth that has spread unquestioned through politics, the security services and the international media.” This is a three-part series being shown on BBC2 starting this Wednesday, and is written and produced by Adam Curtis, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker. The series traces two intellectual threads that start in 1949 with the the thinkings of the radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb and the American political philosopher Leo Strauss and shows how these run very much in parallel, both movements believing that liberalism is amoral. Saying that “in an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power” is something of a heretical message—I like it!

The Beast Is Wounded

It was a disappointing weekend baseball-wise, the last games of the season. The Giants played well for 26 out of the 27 innings in their final set with the Dodgers; alas their spectacular collapse in the bottom of the 9th in yesterday’s game would mean they aren’t going to the playoffs. And the A’s played as if their heart wasn’t in it in their final decisive set with the Angels.

But I’m optimistic about the election, and that more than makes up for baseball disappointment. I didn’t watch or listen to the Thursday’s debate—studying for that evening’s Spanish exam took precedence—but I’ve read through the transcript and have been following the aftermath. It’s clear that the dynamic of the race has changed, and Bush is beatable on his greatest perceived strength, foreign policy. On Daily Kos, kid oakland has a couple of diary entries arguing that George W. Bush is toast. Not that we can afford to be complacent now: far from it. Rather, Bush is in a Catch-22. Bush is losing voters, and needs to run a positive campaign to keep them. But the only card he can play is to make strong negative attacks on Kerry. Bush’s credibility gap is catching up with him, and Kerry is calling him on it.

What most heartens me is the work on the ground, especially in the swing states. We’re mobilized. I think we’re going to see the Democrats pull the biggest get-out-the-vote campaign in history. Completely bottom-up, of course: there are an awful lot of desperate progressives in this country anxious to make a difference. My officemate for one: without even trying very hard, he raised over $3000 to send to Democratic campaigners in three different swing states. Or as kid oakland puts it in his diary, we are the October surprise.

From Kos I gleaned another idea for helping out the campaigners. What these folks need is nutritious food. The volunteers who are spending long hours going door-to-door or working the phone banks would love to see hot, delicious stew or chili come their way: much better than take-out pizza!

A couple of bumper stickers to close with. Somebody spotted a Republicans for Voldemort sticker, and immediately ordered some. Scarily, he
discovered that the sticker appeals to actual Republicans as much as it does to Democrats! As for the second sticker, this one will warm the heart of any editor.

Hope and Dissent

“To hope is to gamble. It’s to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.”

— Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is a favorite author of mine: she’s an environmental historian and art critic. One especially enjoyable book of hers is Wanderlust: A History of Walking. At Tom Engelhardt’s site TomDispatch, she has a piece about Thoreau, dissent, and the Republican National Convention. Or as the sign of a protester there said: “No, you can’t have my rights, I’m still using them.”

A New Word for Today: “Bleh”

Feathers of Hope was born when the blogosphere was overwhelmed with political blogs: in the leadup to the war in Iraq we were both reading lots every day. For one reason or another, although our banner says this is a blog about nature and place, the design arts, politics, and baseball, we don’t write much about politics. I tried to articulate why in Where Are My Words?—my feelings of outrage were trumped by my feelings of helplessness.

We’re there again, but for other reasons. For the past few days I’ve been writing letters to single unregistered women in swing states through MMOB—not that I’m Mainstreet or a Mom, but they’ll take anyone.

Turns out even this might be the wrong target; soccer moms have become security moms, apparently, believing that Bush will keep their kids safer than Kerry will.

I can’t promise them that he won’t. But the world is certainly less safe because of this adminstration’s unforgivable excesses of power, greed, arrogance. It will take decades to restore our standing in the world, so forget about one presidential term.

Whoever wins this election—and of course I hope it’s not Bush—will have the biggest mess to fix since the Great Depression, or possibly ever at least in terms of foreign policy. It’s practically hopeless.

Numenius thought the security moms thing sounded like something cooked up by the Republicans as explored by George Lakoff in his latest book, Don’t Think of an Elephant, which we first read about on Daily Kos. Sounds like a must read, particularly with regard to the Republican hijacking of rhetoric about the family. One more for the list…

Tossup

This election is far too close to call. The ever-valuable Electoral Vote Predictor today has Bush up 273 electoral votes to Kerry’s 255, but these values are changing all the time depending on the results of new statewide polls: yesterday this site had Kerry leading 269 to 253. And a state-by-state analysis in the diaries section on Daily Kos today comes up with Kerry winning by 291 to 247 electoral votes.

At least Kerry has locked down the Klingon vote.

He Just KNOWS

Michael Moore definitely has his finger on the pulse of the anti-Bush camp. I thought he had written this piece specifically for me.