Political Theatre category archive

Unvarnished dumbness is not enough to win elections.

At least one coat of varnish is required.

Shaun looks at the hangover and speaks some sense:

As someone who has covered a slew of elections over four decades, the big takeaway from the mid-term elections is that despite the sturm und drang of recent weeks, the news media’s obsession with the Tea Party, and the self-flagellation of many Democrats, things are pretty much what they were despite a supposed outpouring of anti-government and anti-incumbent anger.

Indeed, the vast majority of incumbents were re-elected and it pretty much will be business as usual for the 112th Congress — fulfilling promises made not to voters, but to lobbyists for special interests, and continued fealty to Wall Street at the expense of Main Street. This is because people didn’t vote for or against a broken system on Tuesday, but rather for or against candidates, most of whom depend on that system’s perpetuation. Is American democracy a beautiful thing, or what?

The part that follows the excerpt is worth two minutes of your time.

Via Brendan.

Ed Quillen, in the Denver Post, tells of the scariest Hallowe’en visit ever.

The Field nominates his own list.

Via Bartblog.

A historian looks at the teabaggery and finds it indulges in fantastickal thinking. A nugget:

What the Tea Party was marshaling, she (Harvard historian Jill Lepore–ed.) found, wasn’t patriotic spirit, and it certainly wasn’t history. It was, in her term, “antihistory.”

Two things separate antihistory from its prefix-less sibling. First, and most obvious, antihistory gets stuff wrong. In our interview, Lepore cites the example of Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, who, in defending herself to The New York Times, claimed that “those words, ‘too conservative,’ is fairly relative. I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.” The idea of Franklin and Jefferson as social conservatives would certainly surprise their contemporaries, who knew Jefferson for his religious skepticism and Franklin for his public abolitionism.

The second — and, for Lepore, more serious — problem with antihistory is that it hijacks history’s raw materials. It takes a messy tumble of personalities and events and quotations and molds them into a static picture, a picture that happens to line up with current policy goals. “In antihistory, time is an illusion,” Lepore writes. Antihistory is “more literal than an analogy. It wasn’t ‘our struggle is like theirs.’ It was ‘we are there’ or ‘they are here.’ ”

The article goes on to quote teabaggers who disagree.

Via Seeing the Forest.

I have one small quibble with this snippet:

The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past four quarters.

Most voters don’t believe it.

A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 finds that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections think taxes have gone up, the economy has shrunk, and the billions lent to banks as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program won’t be recovered.

“The public view of the economy is at odds with the facts, and the blame has to go to the Democrats,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., a Des Moines, Iowa-based firm that conducted the nationwide survey. “It does not matter much if you make change, if you do not communicate change.”

In the last paragraph, the first “if” should be “whether.”

Read more »

Generally, wearing clothing or accoutrements that favor a candidate is prohibited with in polling places, unless you are Candidate World Wrestling Entertainment Linda McMahon:

A federal judge has ordered Connecticut’s top election official to allow voters to wear World Wrestling Entertainment clothing to the polls.

U.S. District Judge Janet Bond Arterton issued an order Wednesday that requires that Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz not to apply state election laws regarding political advertising to the WWE fans.

A little history:

More about the Oregon election here.

Gary Younge comments in the Guardian on those folks who thought that one election would change the world (emphasis added):

. . . As Democrats prepare for a likely drubbing at the polls, the question many who backed him are asking is whether he raised their hopes too high or their expectations were unrealistic? The answer is neither.

It is not unrealistic to believe that a country as wealthy as the US should be able to provide healthcare for all, a dignified life for its elderly, an infant mortality rate better than Cuba’s, a life expectancy higher than Bosnia’s, a foreign policy that does not hinge on military aggression, and an economy where fewer than one in seven live in poverty. What is unrealistic is to believe that any of those things can be achieved, or even seriously tackled, with just a single vote.

Their mistake was to believe that transformational change was something you could impart to a higher power – the president – and then witness on CNN. The problem was not that many set their hopes too high but that rather than claim those hopes as their own they invested them in a single person – Obama – and in an utterly corrupted political culture. For the narrow ideological and organisational confines within which American electoral politics operates do not leave much room for real change.

A lot of my leftie buddies could do to read the whole thing and remind themselves that Obama was elected president, not wizard.

Nothing proves that more than efforts by the Republican Party and its fellow travelers to suppress the vote. One must wonder why Republicans fear voters.

Well, not really wonder. It is because their policies are inimical to the polity.

Dick Polman considers some of those efforts over the years. A nugget:

One of those ads warrants a few more words, however. I find myself fascinated by the Republican front group that had the temerity to urge Nevada Latinos not to vote in the Reid-Angle Senate election – or, as the ad itself put it, “Don’t vote this November.”

(snip)

Meanwhile, in states where Republican officials run the election process (Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, to cite only two), it’s amazing how often the minority precincts report shortages of voting machines, and an unusually large number of lost or discarded ballots. Currently, the Justice Department is investigating reports that “poll watchers” with ties to a Texas tea party group have intimidated early voters in the Houston area; all the affected polling places are in Latino and black neighborhoods.

TPM discusses the voter fraud fraud:

Fears over the potential for voter fraud in Illinois — where the state GOP has reportedly partnered with a variety of conservative organizations to recruit poll watchers — have been “totally blown out of whack,” Cook County Clerk David Orr tells TPMMuckraker.

(snip)

“Poll watchers are good. You have to separate the fact that it’s good for campaigns, it’s good for the body politic to have people there that are watching, I think that’s important,” Orr told TPMMuckraker on Friday. “The only problem comes if people abuse that, and we’ve certainly seen that in the past. We saw it in the last presidential election, we saw it in Michigan.”

“What some people have done — particularly Republicans in the past few years — is challenge people because of their race or ethnicity, and that is clearly illegal,” Orr added.

On the Media looks at the Juan Williams kerfuffle.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to it (so much outrage, so little time), but this seems to be one of the more level-headed analyses I’ve heard.

This capsule description from the website is not quite accurate:

NPR analyst Juan Williams was fired this week after he told Bill O’Reilly that he feels nervous when he sees religiously attired Muslims on planes. Slate’s William Saletan says Williams shouldn’t have been fired, partly because he was a victim of selective editing.

Left out is that Satetan thought that NPR might have been fully justified in letting Williams go for other reasons, but that they chose was wrong one, for the full transcript shows Williams’s statements to be more nuanced and tolerant than the edited clip that led to his moving to Fox full-time.

Follow the link above to listen or to read the transcript, due to be posted this afternoon, or listen here.

Making the rich richer:

Via Bob Cesca.

Lukovich:

Yes, it is difficult not to be cynical.

Be as cynical as you wish, but vote. Michael Roth explains why in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

But cynicism about politics and the public sphere doesn’t lead to efforts to change the way things are. Instead, it leads to a withdrawal from public life, a withdrawal that is justified by the cynic’s belief in his or her own superiority. We cynics know better, and we know that participation in public life is for those who just don’t understand the ways things really work.