The naked and the dead--voters

Well, actually, I don't know how many of them are naked, but a recent Pew Poll has shown that more than 1.8 million registered voters in America are actually dead--as opposed to figuratively, of course. (Plenty of those, too.) This brings to mind the grand old days of American presidential electioneering when the dead walked the land on election night. In Illinois back in 1960, political boss Mayor Richard Daley helped get JFK elected by dint of using dead voters (as well as the dead drunk) and back during the Gilded Age--one of the most corrupt in the history of American presidential elections--it was considered de rigeur to trot out corpses to vote. Mitt Romney, surveying his current difficulties, must be thinking, if only some of these 1.8 mil are "severely conservative" Republicans! They're probably not easy to influence, given what they've been through, and not likely to turn to Rick Santorum. If Mitt can get legions of the undead to vote for him, it might convince the Republican base that he's not such a stiff himself.

One's a born liar...

Newt Gingrich is right now suffering the fate of most firebrand populist politicians--think William Jennings Bryan, Huey Long--in that people don't really pay much attention to him unless he's saying shocking things, going nuclear. The problem is that when he does this he opens himself up for attacks by the likes of Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, both of whom laid into him during Thursday night's debates, essentially calling him unstable. Even Ron Paul thought Newt should be "sent to the moon." Newt's demeanor was quite mild under attack--it's difficult to know if he was reeling in shock because Mitt was actually biting back or simply not perturbed in the slightest. It certainly showed in the polls. And Newt is certainly right that the Republican establishment is out to bring him down--Bob Dole, who ran the most tepid of campaigns against Bill Clinton in 1996 (he was criticized by other Republicans for claiming that Clinton was his "opponent, not my enemy") lashed out at Gingrich with what felt like real venom. Next they'll be trotting out the "alienists," as they did to Bryan in 1896, to claim that Newt is crazy.
      I don't think Newt is crazy, but I do think he believes his own bullshit, which may not be something you want in a national leader. But he and Romney are quite a pair. Paraphrasing the great Billy Martin, a friend of mine said the other day: "One's a born liar and the other [lacks] conviction."

Newt--The October Surprise

History is repeating itself in odd but refreshing ways in the current Republican primary contest. Today an increasingly strident Mitt Romney told Florida voters that they should be prepared for an "October Surprise" if Newt were to be nominated for president. “He’s gone from pillar to post, almost like a pinball machine, from item to item, in a way which is highly erratic and does not suggest a stable, thoughtful course, which is normally associated with leadership,” the New York Times reported Mitt as saying.
    Dems used this kind of scare tactic against Barry Goldwater in 1964--just imagine Lyndon Johnson's famous "Daisy" commercial with Newt's face superimposed over the little girl as she strips petals from a flower, innocent of nuclear winter hovering just a reckless finger on the button away. In this case, the nuclear event would be losing to Obama in October because Newt is suddenly found out to be the owner of a diamond mine employing slave labor in Zimbabwe. Figuratively speaking, of course. In some ways, though, Mitt is an even odder duck than Newt (and wouldn't you like to have a pair of ducks and call them "Mitt" and "Newt"?). That strange smile that plays over his lips when he answers questions he doesn't like is in some ways much more disturbing than Newt's flights of grandiosity....

A Year of Dumping Tea Dangerously

My new book Ten Tea Parties: Patriotic Protests That History Forgot ) is getting some good notices--at least, New Jersey Monthly finds it "engaging." The reaction the book is getting around the internet is interesting. The phrase "tea party" in the title is incredibly polarizing. Some people, without reading the book, see the word patriotic in the title and think it must be a current-day Tea Party screed, while others who empathize with the Tea Party are certain it's sympathetic to them.

In fact, like most of my books, its nonpartisan--aiming for the history that people have forgotten. In this case, the book is about the tea parties that took place during colonial times--aside from Boston. Up and down the eastern seaboard, from York, Maine, to Charleston, South Carolina, colonists dumped tea, burned tea, and boycotted tea. They threatened those who delivered tea —be they ship’s captains or humble peddlers—with everything from tarring and feathering to financial ruin. They scorned neighbors who drank tea and concocted an entirely fictitious sickness narrative around tea; they claimed tea stunted growth, turned men into pygmies, and transformed women into, as one patriot writer put it, “God knows what.” They claimed that tea was stomped into chests by Chinese men with dirty feet, that it was infested with bugs.

Taken together, these ten tea parties form an untold narrative of American independence, a narrative that contains the DNA of future American protest movements.  Americans in 1773-74 put aside their geographical and cultural differences to band together as a nation—as one. This had never happened before the tea parties. Colonists overcame what historian T.H. Breen calls “local jealousies and mutual ignorance, profound fear and clashing identities” to find “a common political vision”—what one tea-burning group of citizens called “a general American union.”

More about the book in another post. As we face the most fractious general election year in recent memory, I think the colonial Year of Dumping Tea Dangerously can teach us something.

 

Anything For A Vote 2012 style

It’s been four years since I published the first edition of Anything For A Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Since then we’ve had the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, the Arab Spring, ebooks, Twitter, fracking and Lady Gaga, not necessarily in that order. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, at least when it comes to dirty tricks in presidential contests. The run-up to 2012 has been a lot like that of 2008, only the positions of the respective parties are reversed. Four years ago, John McCain was all but anointed the Republican candidate while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought it out in a bruising primary.
Now the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama has kept out of the fray, while Republican wannabes have clashed for months, trying to tear each other down, bringing to mind Scott Fitzgerald’s famous maxim about Ernest Hemingway: “Ernest is always willing to give a helping hand to the man one rung above him on the ladder.”
Quirk Books, my publisher, is now bringing out my revised and updated e-edition of Anything For A Vote, including a chapter on the historic election of 2008, so I thought it might be time to add a few comments to kick off this grand election year. We’re going to see fireworks, dirty tricks-wise, no doubt about it. How could it be otherwise? The economy is in the tank, approval-ratings for our elected representatives are at an all-time low—only nine percent of Americans are happy with Congress, and one has to wonder if those “nine-percenters” have all their marbles. And President Obama—the 2008 candidate of “hope” and “change”—had better hope for a serious change in 2012, since his approval ratings are south of 50 percent. No American president has ever been re-elected during an economic downturn of such dimensions. However, he does face a divided GOP, which is having a hard time rallying behind their most viable candidate. Dirty tricks always get worse when political powerhouses clash during tough times.
Thus both sides will mount serious attacks. Obama will be called a foreign-born socialist and a weakling; Gingrich will be a serial adulterer and whacko; Romney will be John Kerry-ized as a “flip-flopper,” not to mention an ultra-capitalist who guts companies for profit.
Although we didn’t see the level of voter disenfranchisement I warned of back in 2008, I fear this will be an issue in 2012. At the behest of Republican legislators and chief executives, numerous states have already passed laws making it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote, for instance by requiring driver’s licenses or government id cards as identification. It’s difficult enough to get Americans to turn out to vote—although 61.7 percent of those eligible actually turned out in 2008, the highest percentage since the Goldwater-Johnson slugfest of 1964—so such tactics often make all but the most determined citizens turn wearily back home.
But I’ll be keeping on eye on all of it this year. You can follow me on Twitter: @josephcummins or check out my blog right here.