Daydreams of Elections Past

Let's go for two posts in one day; it's been dead around here lately.

Last night I finally watched Recount, HBO's 2008 film recounting (pardon the pun) the events in Florida in the 36 days following the 2000 presidential election. None of it was new to me, as I was already painfully familiar with the events of that historic 6 weeks. I just hadn't thought about them in years.

In some ways, watching the movie brought back some personal memories. Election Year 2000 is the moment I pinpoint as the time when I became politically aware. It was the first election in which I had a horse in the race and the first election in which I had determined which political party aligned with my understanding of the world. Recount opens with some real footage from Election Night 2000: Tim Russert with his whiteboard stressing the importance of Florida, Dan Rather and his barrage of bizarre but amazingly entertaining aphorisms, Tom Brokaw sheepishly walking back his network's early call of Florida for Al Gore.

I remember all of it. The exhilaration, watching the early coverage that night, of watching my preferred candidate (the first real political preference of my young life) seemingly headed for victory giving way to the excitement and confusion of that night. Florida goes for Gore, then Florida goes for Bush, then Florida is too close to call. Al Gore's concession call to George W. Bush, followed by his call to retract his concession (and the resulting popularization of "snippy"), and the cancellation of his late night concession speech. I can't recall for sure if my obsession with news coverage and my love affair with C-Span began that night but I suspect it may have. I was up all that night, glued to the coverage of that memorable night, not wanting to risk missing its resolution while I slept. Of course, as we know, there was no danger of that.

But watching the movie--as well as reading the comments in this post about the media coverage of Gore in 2000 over at The Monkey Cage--also reminded me of some of the 2000 campaign itself. The triviality of much of it, the relentless attempts to paint Gore as boring and, worse, some sort of pathological liar over willful distortions of his words (given the sheer volume of whoppers we're being subjected to this cycle about real policy issues of import, not dissections of the precise role one candidate played in securing support for the research that led to the development of the Internet, the more bitterly laughable it seems).

But even more than that, the remembrance of the palpable sense in some quarters that the country was on autopilot and who it put at the helm didn't matter. The false exuberance at the tail end of the Clinton years that lulled many into thinking peace and prosperity are easy. The conviction that, as Ralph Nader suggested, there wasn't "a dime's worth of difference" between Bush and Gore or the Republicans and Democrats.

I didn't believe that then and I don't believe it now.

But we don't get do-overs. We can't get back the lost decade that saw zero net job creation and declining median incomes and ended with us trying to claw our way out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. We can't get back the blood and treasure lost in the deserts of Iraq. We can't erase the torture conducted in our names. Nor can we forget the mistakes and failures of the Democrats in their minority role as the loyal opposition. We can't get back the lost opportunities.

But despite all this, watching Recount wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it might be (not that I didn't expect it to be entertaining and well-done, which it is). That was a long time ago and there's not much use in dwelling too much on what might've been. I find my mind wandering to Obama's '12 campaign theme: "Forward." We can't do 2000 over. But we can do 2012 and beyond right.

So I suppose the moral is: elections matter. Make sure you're registered to vote.

Courting Coruscant

I'm in a mildly reflective mood this afternoon, thinking on the great changes this country has seen since its founding. One window on these changes--the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the steady evolution of our work force (including the coming and going of unions), etc--is where people choose, or are compelled, to live. It should come as no surprise that since the founding days we've seen a massive shift from living in sparsely populated rural areas to the collecting of folks in close proximity to their neighbors in urbanized areas. The ideal in America shifted from the solitary plot of land to the small, fenced in enclosure mere steps from our neighbors (look to the right for the ideal American relationship and proximity to his neighbor in the late 20th century).

I took a look at Census data (and here for the most recent decades) to see just how much and how quickly that transition has happened:

Jefferson's veneration of the yeoman farmer in the vision of agrarian egalitarianism that came to characterize his philosophy took place in a nation that was more than 90% rural. Decades later, when the visceral, visual manifestation of Manifest Destiny, the driving of the Golden Spike into the ground, took place in a nation shifting its attention from war to industry, and when the first great waves of labor unrest swept through the land, the nation was still nearly three-quarters rural. When the American frontier officially closed and William Jennings Bryan took his brand of prairie populism up against the best financed, most Big Moneyed presidential campaign in history (up to that point and since), the nation was still more than 60% rural.

Even as late as the Great War, which saw future president Harry Truman leave behind his plow for the lure of an overseas adventure, the country was still split roughly 50-50 between urban and rural living. By the time our cities burned in the midst of the massive social unrest of the 1960s, the nation was over 70% urbanized. Today we're over the 80% mark.

Where do we go from here? Do these trends reflect changing economic and social realities or shape them (or both)? How do these changes affect our politics and our polity today (e.g. public awareness of and reaction to the fact that the U.S. is now experiencing the largest drought in a half century, or the unusual inability of the current Congress to pass the Farm Bill). No answers, just questions from me this Sunday afternoon.

TDM: Romney on Pre-existing Conditions

Starting with a relevant FDR clip is a sure sign of a good segment. And this one turned out to be very entertaining.

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Seven Memorable, Readily Available DNC Moments

After a thoroughly enjoyable three-day Democratic convention, it's time to put up a few notable moments chosen because 1) they're worth watching, and 2) they're currently available as short clips on YouTube. There are many more notable moments but not notable enough to be clipped off and uploaded to YouTube yet, it seems.

If you didn't watch much of the convention here are, in no particular order, a few clips worth watching.

1) Gabby Giffords leading the Pledge of Allegiance.

In an emotional moment, the former Congresswoman who was shot in the head last year came out to lead the convention in the Pledge. The reaction of the crowd and her obvious joy make this one very enjoyable.



2) John Lewis reminiscing about his incredible past.

He gave the campaign slogan (and frequent thematic device at the convention) "Forward" deeper meaning with powerful reflections on the past and how far we've come.



3) Obama on foreign policy.

In 2008, Obama (though then a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) was the relative neophyte on foreign policy, a subject that was at least theoretically one of John McCain's strengths. The student is now the master. In this clip from Thursday night, he points out his administration's remarkable foreign policy successes and gets in a few jabs and the complete lack of foreign policy experience on the Romney-Ryan ticket. Given that Romney completed neglected to mention our troops currently in harm's way or Afghanistan in his own acceptance speech, this bit stands in sharp contrast to his speech last week.



4) John Kerry (currently Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) making the foreign policy case for Obama.

Kerry gave a surprisingly entertaining speech to push the foreign policy argument, working in both self-deprecating humor ("talk about being for it before you were against it," he said with a half-smile as he attacked Romney's ever-shifting opinions on Afghanistan) and even a reference to Rocky IV! But at a convention where, to put it mildly, Osama bin Laden's death did not pass without notice, Kerry had probably the line of the convention about bin Laden:



5) Clinton makes the economic argument for Obama.

In an extraordinarily policy-oriented and delightfully engaging (even folksy) speech that's rightly been described as a tour de force, Bill Clinton forcefully rebutted Republican criticisms and made the case for a second Obama term. In this short clip, he succinctly lays out the Republican and Democratic arguments and, with a playful grin, recycles a famous line from the Republicans' patron saint.



6) Ted Strickland gets rowdy.

In a speech some felt was too loud or too populist, Ted Strickland reminds us what the auto bailout meant for Ohio. An earnest speech from an earnest Rust Belter and I don't think he could've delivered his final line any better. Plus the strange little chuckle he does occasionally is pretty entertaining.



7) Barack Obama's closing argument.

I'll have more to say about his speech sometime this weekend. But in this short clip, he ends his acceptance speech and officially begins the fall campaign.