T.C.B.

Thanks to everyone who ordered signed prints--the response has already exceeded my expectations. I've just finished printing and signing the first batch, and I'll get them to the post office tomorrow. If you don't receive them within a week or so, or if there's any problem with the print when it arrives, let me know. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, details are in the Crass Commercialism section.)

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 3:51 PM| link

Whoops they did it again

The polls opened on time and the new voting machines worked properly, but Broward County election officials couldn't get the results right in Tuesday's election.

Between 1 a.m. and 5 p.m. Wednesday, the elections office found it had left 103,222 votes out of the total ballots cast, including 34,136 votes for the governor's race -- even though the total announced at 1 a.m. was given as a 100 percent count.

Story here.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:29 AM| link

Here we go

Heavy blogging around an election feels somehow mandatory, and maybe for that very reason I haven't had a whole lot to say. Republicans won, Democrats lost--though barely, as I pointed out yesterday and Howie Kurtz points out today:

But is the press pack now overinterpreting Tuesday's results? Who really knows whether the president's frenetic campaigning made the difference? Besides, a switch of roughly 29,000 votes in Minnesota, 11,500 in Missouri and 9,500 in New Hampshire would have produced a Democratic Senate and gobs of stories about how the White House blew it.

"The cycle for the next few days," says Polman, "will be to beat up on ourselves for having said for days and days that this is a 50-50 nation: Boy, aren't we foolish! But the underlying fundamentals haven't changed all that much."

Not, of course, that I had much faith in the Democrats to Make Things Better even if they had somehow managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, rather than the other way around. They spent the last two years--and especially the last year-- bowing and scraping obsequiously before the Republican agenda, not wanting to be labeled unpatriotic, unAmerican. Well, memo to the Democratic leadership: You're called "leaders" for a reason. Sometimes you have to take what you fear may be an unpopular stand and try to, well, lead the public to your position. And you know what? Sometimes it may cost you your job. You wanted job security, you should have gone into another line of work.

Harry Truman said it fifty years ago (unless, of course, this is one of those apocryphal quotes to which the internet so often subjects us): If you give the people a choice between a Republican and a Republican, they'll choose the Republican every time. The 2000 election was a statistical tie, fifty/fifty, right down the middle--neither party sufficiently differentiated itself, and that should have been a wake up call, but Democrats instead chose to focus on Nader, on voting irregularities, on the Supreme Court. But those were all symptoms, not causes. And I'm not saying you should just ignore the symptoms, but if you don't deal with the underlying illness, they will simply continue to recur in one form or another. And they have.

This time around, Democrats simply must wake up and face facts--the party no longer stands for anything. Enron alone should have given them this election on a silver platter, but they were too timid to speak out against corporate corruption--because, yes, they are equally vested in the system, and because, as I think Joe Lieberman put it, they didn't want to appear too "anti-business."

Maybe it's time for some good old fashioned class warfare, but that's not something you can adopt like a new set of clothes, as Al Gore made painfully clear in 2000. So who's the fighter, who's the Democrat coming up through the ranks who can energize the party and make it stand for something again? You need someone with the courage of his or her convictions and the charisma and force of personality of a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan (and whether you hated either or both of them, there's no denying that they were both extraordinary at connecting with people, in their own ways). I don't know who that person is, but the Democrats need him or her, and soon.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 10:23 AM| link

It just gets better and better

I'm on a tight post election deadline, so blogging will be light for a day or two. But let me just summarize the lengthier post I would have written this morning if I'd had the time:

Oh. My. Freaking. God.

One quick afterthought: before we get too carried away with talk about mandates and how "the voters have spoken," keep in mind how many of these races were decided by a statistical handful of voters--as of this writing, it appears that Dole won by 9%, Chambliss by 7%, Coleman by 4%, Talent by one percent. These aren't exactly huge mandate-style numbers.

And of course, keep in mind that 61% of eligible voters didn't even bother to drag their asses off the couch for this one.

The country's still split pretty much down the middle. The Republicans just happened to win the coin toss this time around. If the Democrats would ever get around to showing a little something called "leadership," they might actually win one of these things sometime.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 9:04 AM| link

On an entirely different note

There they go again

In Baltimore, someone (cough cough Republicanscumbags cough cough) has been posting fliers in inner city neighborhoods which read:

URGENT NOTICE. Come out to vote on November 6th. Before you come to vote make sure you pay your parking tickets, motor vehicle tickets, overdue rent and most important any warrants.

Full story here. November 6 is, of course, tomorrow.

And here's a blog that's keeping track of other cases of "voter suppression." (Via Tapped, which considers the term "too bland to describe activities designed to deter the basic act of democracy.")

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 9:55 AM| link

Go. Vote.

Be idealistic, be pragmatic, be cynical and resigned, whatever works for you. But don't sit it out.

Apathy is so 1990's.

posted by Tom Tomorrow at 9:43 AM| link