The Pakistani Spectator

All three of the debates in the American presidential election are now behind us. This seems like a good time to give some overall impressions of the campaign and of the two candidates, so I will begin with those impressions, then focus on one particular issue that has been badly misrepresented in the more conservative campaign coverage, lately.

I’ve written previously of the broad difference between the main American parties, with the Democratic Party tending to favor policies that appear better for the poor and middle class, while the Republican Party tends to favor policies that appear better for the rich and for business interests. The Republicans also tend to favor higher military spending and more aggressive use of the military in support of American economic interests, and they favor using government more to promote traditional social values, at the expense of some personal freedoms. In fighting the threat of terrorism, Republicans appear more ready to compromise the freedoms of persons lacking US citizenship and suspected of being connected with terrorism, even to the point of using what most reasonable people would call torture, and long, even lifelong, detention with no trial and very little evidence of guilt. (This is my own view of the main differences, as a Democrat – Republicans would describe the differences in very different terms, but I’ll leave it to the inevitable comments this article will draw from Republicans for them to speak for themselves!) As far as those differences go, Obama and McCain are not far from their parties’ respective mainstream positions, although McCain has shown more independence than most, occasionally bucking his own party’s mainstream position, most notably by opposing torture. (McCain was himself a victim of torture when he was held as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, so he understands the evil of this far more than most!)

The positions of the candidates are not very surprising, then – any student of American politics could have guessed the broad outlines of their positions on 95% of the issues four years ago, long before we had any idea which specific individuals would be running. What I have found more interesting has been the effect of the individual personalities of the candidates. John McCain has long been known to be quick to anger, and he has surprised no one by showing his abrasive nature in the debates. Obama was much more an unknown, though, to most Americans. A student of American culture might have predicted a year ago that any African American man who managed by some miracle to gain the nomination of one of our major parties for president would face a huge personal challenge, regardless of his politics. The challenge would be that all too many Americans, including Americans who believe themselves to be free of racism, have an unconscious (and sometimes conscious) assumption that African American men are dangerous and untrustworthy. This assumption is reinforced, sadly, by popular television programs that focus on crime, and that too often depict African American men as criminals. Most African American men can tell stories, for example, of walking down the street, well dressed and minding their own business, and hearing car doors lock as they walk by, as white people inside feel compelled to protect themselves from this assumed threat. African Americans also find themselves sometimes stopped by police while driving, especially in areas where most residents are white, where the police assume that any African American they find driving has a much higher-than-average likelihood of being up to mischief – there is even an ironic name for this: being pulled over for “Driving While Black” (DWB), a play on the real crime of Driving Under the Influence (DUI), the police term for drunk driving.

So, having an African American man running for President, we ought to expect that on some level, perhaps not ever admitted out loud, an awful lot of white voters would be likely to be very worried, would find the candidate frightening, somehow, though they might never admit, even to themselves, that their deep-down fear had anything to do with his race. Yet, here is the really amazing feature of this election: Between Obama and McCain, in spite of all the prejudice that might unjustly drive the opposite opinion, it is McCain who is viewed as the more erratic, the more aggressive, the more unpredictable candidate, by an overwhelming margin, in poll after poll. In striking contrast to McCain’s aggressive, volatile nature, which was on constant display in all the debates, Obama came across as amazingly even-tempered, calm, and collected. He is so even-tempered that he has picked up a nickname: “No-Drama Obama”! He has an uncanny ability to see himself through the eyes of all sorts of political groupings, and to choose his words not for easy, dramatic points he might score with his friends, but gently and patiently to persuade those who do not already agree. I look back on his words with awe, because after hours of consideration, after the fact, I can see how well he chose his words, but he did not have hours to make those choices – just seconds, and those seconds were under unimaginable pressure! He came across as a man who could be in the middle of the most horrendous national crisis imaginable, as President, and yet could avoid any trace of panic, any temptation to take the easy way out, and could intelligently consider the options calmly and coolly, and choose, unmoved by anger or fear, the best option, however difficult that option might be, however great the necessary sacrifice that option might require.

It is a remarkable coincidence, really – just when Americans are more panicked than they have been for decades, when we desperately crave leadership with a steady hand that can steer our country through the worst of economic storms, along comes Obama with his astonishingly adult, steady temperament. Now many could say, reasonably enough, that my opinion means little in this matter, as I have a lifelong habit of favoring Democrats. My opinions on Obama’s judgment are not just held by American liberals, though. A truly remarkable number of influential conservative figures have endorsed Obama as well, something I have never seen, in anything close to these numbers, in past elections. Christopher Hitchens, an impassioned supporter of the Iraq war, has obvious and important differences with Obama, yet still endorses him. William F. Buckley is often credited as the intellectual father of modern American conservatism. He died not long ago, so we do not know what his opinion might have been at this stage of the campaign, but his son Christopher Buckley, who until very recently wrote for the conservative National Review magazine, which was founded by his father, strongly endorses Obama, with biting words against McCain, promising to vote for a Democrat for president for the first time in his life. (The National Review had such a problem with this, though, that he offered his resignation and they immediately accepted – see this fascinating article on the events, and Buckley’s unsurprised reaction to their closed-mindedness!) The Chicago Tribune, a conservative newspaper that has been endorsing candidates since the 1860s, has never before endorsed a Democrat for President, but endorses Obama. Newspapers in general, including many that usually endorse Republicans overwhelmingly endorse Obama. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, the Republican four-star General Colin Powell, who served the current President’s father, George H. W. Bush, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest non-civilian position in the US military, and who served George W. Bush as his first Secretary of State recently added his enthusiastic endorsement of Obama.

Now, the reasons behind these endorsements are not only Obama’s doing – McCain did his part, as well! His gambling, impulsive temperament is exactly what we do not need, now, and even the conservatives can see it. If he only displayed his volatile temperament and gambling nature in his choices of words, perhaps those endorsing Obama might have let their preference for McCain’s conservative policy ideas win out. The unifying single event, though, that showed that his impulsive nature goes well beyond his words, however, was his choice of vice-presidential running mate, Sarah Palin. The single most important choice any President makes (ironically, a choice made even before becoming President!) is the choice of Vice President. In a very real sense, the entire nation elects the President, but one man chooses the Vice President. (Of course, if we hate the choice, enough, we aren’t likely to vote for that candidate for President, so the rest of us have some say in the matter!) Yet, the Vice Presidents have a remarkably high probability of becoming Presidents, either by the death of a President (particularly likely with McCain being older, already, than any President has ever been at the beginning of his first term!) or simply because the Vice President has an enormous advantage seeking the Party’s nomination after the President serves his one or two terms. How much care and thought did McCain put into this momentously important one-man decision, specifically considering Sarah Palin? By his own account, it was a few hours work, less time than I have spent thinking about my own measly, single vote! And it shows! The conservatives endorsing Obama all mention how crazy this choice was, how unprepared and unfit she is for the job. Even conservatives writers who can’t quite bring themselves to endorse Obama have spoken out in the strongest terms against this choice, hating the idea of the sort of President she is all-too-likely to prove to be, if McCain wins. (See this anti-Palin Article from the same National Review that booted out Christopher Buckley for his endorsement of Obama!) Even McCain’s own campaign seems to have recognized the error, choosing to use her as their attack dog, against Obama, giving speeches carefully written for her, but keeping her diligently out of almost all interaction with the press that they cannot strictly control. (She has only half-jokingly described herself as a “pit bull,” the breed of dog most famous for attacking people and other dogs!) The very few press interviews the campaign handlers have allowed with her were generally seen as disasters for the campaign.

Now, the American voters are a huge group, with vastly varied points of view, so not even someone with Obama’s skills can convince everyone. You will surely see from comments to this very article that there are plenty of people in America who just hate Obama, and plenty of people who are almost hysterically frightened of the idea of him becoming President, in spite of all those reassurances from well-respected, obviously intelligent and worldly conservatives who have freely chosen to place their own reputations on the line to endorse him. Obama, himself, knows that he does not come from the comforting mold that Americans imagine when they picture a leader, and he even mentioned this fact in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention. He has worked with astonishing patience and self-awareness and understanding of the range of American viewpoints to reassure as many voters as possible, far more than I would have imagined possible, myself, but even he cannot reassure foolishly bigoted voters who are determined that no African American can be trusted, or that no Moslem can be trusted, while foolishly insisting that he is a Moslem. Compounding bigotry with foolishness, a surprising number believe that only a Christian be trusted, and they further believe that Obama, being the son of a Moslem father, even though he hardly met his father after his infancy, cannot be trusted to be a Christian, in spite of there being no evidence at all that he has ever practiced any religion other than Christianity, or that his decades-long practice of Christianity is based on anything other than his sincere belief. Perhaps many of the less-crazy members of even this group can eventually come around to believe in Obama’s leadership, but only after they see him in office, governing as steadily and reasonably as he has campaigned, and this transformation, alone, is one reason to hope for his election.

All in all, nothing much is going favorably for the Republicans, this election, with Americans finally and thoroughly sick of the mess that Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress got us into. The economic conditions are looking really frightening, with prospects for much worse unemployment than we have had for decades, as well as a national debt of truly frightening size, not to mention, even, the mess we are in in Iraq and Afghanistan. Americans have long trusted the Democrats more in bad economic times, and these current bad times are so clearly the product of Republican choices to deregulate Wall Street, and of laws passed wholly under Republican control, that the elections chances are truly grim for the Republicans. The Republican strategy, of late, for lack of any better choices, perhaps, has been to focus on anything except the issues that are on our minds, since these issues are so favorable to the Democrats. One of those “issues” chosen as a Republican favorite, lately, is voter fraud. The Republican campaigns are trying to raise panic that vast numbers of Democrats plan, against all reason and self-interest, to steal the election (as if this was even necessary, given the huge lead Democrats hold in all the polls, even in the polls conducted by Republicans!).

Here is a little background: Historically, Republicans have done a very good job of mobilizing their supporters to register to vote and to turn out on Election Day to actually vote. Poor people and young people in America, who are both groups more likely to vote for the Democrat in an election, are less likely on average to register to vote, or to vote, if registered. The Democratic Party has an obvious interest in changing this, so the Democrats and their friends have been working hard on registering a larger fraction of those groups most likely to favor them, and to encourage them to vote. To the Republicans, who have grown accustomed to winning elections with only the support of a minority of the adult population, this is a worrisome thing, but they cannot very well say that new voters legally entitled to vote ought to be prohibited from voting – that would be obviously against the principles Americans hold dear, and the courts would never allow it, anyway. Instead, they need a smokescreen to try to hold back these new voters while pretending to care deeply about some important issue Americans can agree with, so the issue getting much coverage in the conservative press is the supposedly-dire danger of voter fraud.

One of the most successful organizations working to increase voting among the poor and the young is called ACORN, and years ago Obama worked some with ACORN to help it in its efforts to register millions of new voters. Now imagine that you are running an organization registering millions of new voters, with thousands of workers all over the country working to help your commendable cause of increasing the fraction of Americans actively and legally involved in the political process: Some of the individuals filling out their voter-registration forms are going to make innocent, accidental mistakes. Some are going to deliberately fill in false information, as some sort of foolish joke. Some are going to register twice, because they aren’t sure that their previous registration is valid, or just because they want to please the nice person asking them to register. Some are going to fill in perfectly correct information, but that information might not agree with other information on public record, like the address listed on their driver’s license, since they haven’t gotten around to correcting their driver’s-license information after moving. (Americans, especially poor or young Americans change addresses a lot, and there is no legal requirement to instantly notify the government of every move, and even for people who wait longer than they legally should to change their driver’s-license information, this extremely minor infraction does not legally disqualify them from voting!) Some workers, eager to look more productive than they really are, might fill out forms, themselves, for voters who do not even exist. (These non-existent voters will obviously not vote on Election Day, so they will not change the election outcome in the least!)

In such a large organization, doing so much voter-registration all over the country, all of these events are surely inevitable! However, to the conservatives looking for some excuse to slow down the growth in new voters for the Democratic Party, and looking for any issue to focus on other than the miserable economy and the failing campaign of McCain, all these inevitable irregularities are shocking evidence of deliberate, systematic fraud at the highest levels of ACORN! The conservatives insist that because Obama had some minor involvement with ACORN years ago, he must drop all those annoying issues that are the focus of his campaign, and instead prove that he is innocent of conspiracy to commit fraud with ACORN, and must, even if innocent, put aside his campaign and assist them in their efforts to shut down ACORN, and to prosecute the leaders of ACORN, or else he must prove they are innocent, if they are. (Note that in the American courts, persons are considered innocent until proven guilty, and they never need to prove they are innocent – it is up to the government to prove they are guilty, if it can! This is a very good thing, because proving innocence is often almost impossible, even for the most innocent!)

The whole business is quite sneaky, really – any time and resources that ACORN spends defending itself means that much less time and resources to register those bothersome new voters. Any ACORN workers who can be frightened that the government will prosecute them for innocent mistakes may quit, or at the least may be frightened into doing their job more slowly, checking and double-checking everything they do. Anyone considering registering to vote, or considering voting for the first time, may be frightened that some innocent mistake, or some disagreement between the government’s record of their address and their actual address on the registration form, may get them in serious trouble, and so they might just choose to avoid the hassle. (If they are first-time voters, they may already view voting as barely worth the effort, even without the added fear of being falsely prosecuted for voter fraud!) Therefore, even without any actual fraud, making a big issue of potential fraud is a nice win for the Republicans, and it all sounds so reasonable, because, after all, who would actually defend voter fraud?

In the states where the election is closest, Republicans have even taken the strategy further. There are major efforts to basically treat voters as guilty until proven innocent. In other words, voters will be asked at the polls to prove they are who they claim to be, and they live where they claim to live, so if they don’t have a valid driver’s license with an up-to-date address, for example, then they may be turned away from voting, even though they may have every legal right to vote.

Now there is no requirement in the US that voting citizens must drive, so not all voters have a driver’s license. There is, in fact, no requirement that American adults have any form of picture identification that they could use to prove their identity at the polls. Conservatives in individual states are trying to make such identification part of the requirement for voting, however, especially in the states that where the battle is closest. What are the effects of this? Well, who is least likely to have identification? The person without identification will be someone too poor to own a car, of course, and too poor to wish to spend the time and money to get alternative identification. What party would that person likely vote for? What a coincidence; they would probably vote for a Democrat! There is also a more-subtle effect – slowing down voter-processing at the polls, while handling the requirement for proof, and handling the inevitable arguments that result when an honest person is told to go home without voting simply because he or she lacks identification, or the identification is out of date, or because the state rejected their recent registration over some perceived irregularity. Where are the polls most crowded, so that slowing down voting will result in the longest lines? What a coincidence; the most crowded polls are in the inner cities, where most voters vote Democratic! In those inner cities, past elections have already shown the longest lines, lines often of people who have little time to spare from their stressed, hectic lives, so many people will give up on voting if the lines grow too long, even when they have perfect registrations, and perfect identification. These same inner-city polling places, by the way, are expected to see the most growth in voter numbers, new voters excited specifically into voting for the first time by Obama’s candidacy, so introducing new controls to prevent voter fraud at these places will simply overwhelm their capacity to handle voters in the numbers expected in the time available.

Now here is my main point (at last!): Even millions of bad voter registrations would not change the outcome of the election! To improperly change the election, people must vote fraudulently, and there isn’t a shred of evidence that Democrats do that any more often than Republicans. There is evidence, and every reason to believe, that voter fraud in the US is rare, for both parties, because Americans can all too often barely be troubled to vote at all, so what are the chances that an American would choose personally to risk a long jail term just to add one, or two, or even ten votes for a candidate who will probably win or lose regardless of those few extra votes! This is generally true, and even more true this election, where Obama looks to win by an unusually comfortable margin! (Assuming someone was this motivated to help his or her party by committing fraud at the risk of jail, would they need the help of ACORN just to fill out a few forms?!) Now America is a big country, so I’m sure there are a few crazy people around who will commit voter fraud at the voting booth, and there is nothing wrong with sensible efforts to minimize this or to punish it, but perspective is necessary, here; if the efforts to prevent fraud cost one hundred legal voters their right to vote, for every fraudulent vote prevented, is that a good thing? It would seem, based on their twisted reasoning, that if the efforts to prevent voter fraud have a one-percent chance of costing the Democrats an election they would have won if all legal voters were allowed to vote unmolested, well, that is just tough luck, but if a handful of fraudulent voters might have a thousandth-of-one-percent chance of costing the Republicans their rightful victory, well, that must be prevented at all costs!

There is actually a real irony, here, and an example of huge hypocrisy, I think; One of the favorite sayings of anti-gun-control Republicans is “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” The idea behind this motto is that honest people who want to own guns should not be denied the right to own guns and to conveniently acquire guns – instead, illegal use of guns should be prosecuted (after the fact), rather than blocking gun ownership in general. The most ardent anti-gun-control advocates want buying a gun to be about as easy as buying a pair of pants, and they hold that freedom to be more important than preventing the thousands of deliberate murders and accidental shootings that statistically result from easy gun ownership. These same conservatives, though, seem to be saying that it is perfectly right and proper to block thousand of legal voters from their right to vote, if that is the necessary cost of preventing even a handful of fraudulent votes, rather than allowing likely-legal votes and prosecuting them after, when they get caught, in the rare cases where they were not legal, after all! Apparently, according to these hypocrites, we ought to believe that the right to vote is less important than the right to own a gun, and that a single fraudulent vote is worse than murder!