The Last Week

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."— George W. Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004

Well, we're in the home stretch. One week from today Americans will go to the polls. What will happen? No one knows. The only certainty is that the campaign commercials will stop. To get a sense of the national mood, one need only look at the text on the cover of the November 1, 2004 issue of Time Magazine:

"On November 3, assuming we have a decision, America will wake up to either a President returning to office or a newly elected one. To the victor goes a nation divided. A nation split over its place in the world, over its basic values, over its future direction. No matter who wins, the Uncivil War is likely to continue. After such a venomous campaign, will it be possible to pick up the pieces, bridge the gaps and reunite the United States? To restore trust — not only in our leaders but also in one another? The stakes are higher than we could ever imagine."

Is that depressing or what?

How chilling is the clause, "assuming we have a decision"? There have been periods of uncertainty following elections before, notably in 1800 and 1876, as an op-ed in today's New York Times (written by Theodore B. Olson, who represented George W. Bush before the Supreme Court in 2000) points out, but until 2000 there wasn't an election in living memory so hotly contested, an election with results that remain controversial four years later. It's cause for tremendous anxiety. Those of us who shrugged in 2000 and asked, "How bad could it be?" are sorry to have found out. There is every reasonable suspicion that, should the election once again be too close to call on November 3, rife with controversies over disenfranchised voters, illegible ballots, inconsistent procedures, and partisan involvement, we will see a legal battle that dwarfs 2000 with its scale and aggression.

So many factors remain in play. Some counties in Florida have eliminated the pregnant/hanging/dimpled chads and replaced the troublesome butterfly ballots with electronic voting machines, which have a proven history of malfunction and no means of verification of accuracy. There has been no widespread national effort to learn from the problems of 2000 and standardize procedures for counting questionable ballots. It's as if the debacle never occurred.

There isn't a poll out there showing Bush with a score of 50% or better. Only in the past couple of days have guesses about which way the electoral chips will fall flipped to indicate a likely Bush win, having shown Kerry with a comfortable electoral lead for months. Yet many of the polls on which these guesses are based show Bush leading by percentages within the margin of error. Polls can also just be wrong; last year at this time Gallup showed Bush ahead by about 13%, but when it came down to it he lost the popular vote. Complicating the matters further, should the election wind up back at the Supreme Court, we now learn that Chief Justice Rehnquist has only just undergone a tracheotomy for thyroid cancer.

The G.O.P. is dispatching a volunteer army to polling stations in Ohio to “verify voter eligibility.” Of course preventing election fraud is a non-partisan issue, one in which everyone has a stake. But the Republicans are sending their volunteers to urban centers in Cleveland and Dayton with high minority populations. The lead editorial in today’s New York Times argues that such tactics could be used to intimidate legitimate voters. In populous urban areas, voters sometimes have to wait in long lines to cast their ballots. If challengers succeed in slowing down the process even by a few minutes per voter, some may be discouraged or might simply not have the time to wait. Additionally, “aggressive challengers have been known to bully poll workers, many of whom are elderly and have only limited knowledge of election law.” One can be sure that such tactics will be deployed outside of Ohio, as well.

The news isn’t helping Bush, either. The story about the missing 380 tons of high-grade explosives has been widely covered in the press. White House spokesman Scott McClellan tried to spin it away by pointing out that the U.S. has destroyed 163,000 tons of munitions in Iraq, but that doesn’t explain why a site the U.N. referred to as “the greatest explosives bonanza in history” was left unguarded. It brings to mind Kerry’s rebuttal from the last debate, when he was talking about financing education in this country. You don’t measure success by a percentage increase, you measure it by whether you’re getting the job done. With regard to making Iraq secure, Bush is clearly not getting the job done. And yet…are there any voters out there remaining to be swayed?

There are other factors, “known unknowns,” if you will, that Michael Moore pointed out in an email to supporters on September 20:

“The polls are wrong. They are all over the map. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead -- and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling "likely voters." "Likely" means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.”

And so we sit here in utter uncertainty about what the future will bring.

Time refers to the “Uncivil War.” We on the left are fighting deeply ingrained misperceptions about who this president is, what he’s doing, and what his policies are really about. I think in my earlier post “Is George Bush Who You Think He Is?” I was maybe unclear about the results of the polls of Bush supporters. When I wrote that 13% knew that Bush was opposed to labor and environmental standards in international trade agreements, what that means is that 87% are under the impression that he supports them. That’s what I’m talking about. They don’t know who their candidate is. A majority – 55% -- believe that the 9/11 Commission concluded that Iraq was providing “substantial support to al Qaeda.” We are confronted with an almost Galilean conundrum; we’ve got millions of people who take it on faith that the sun revolves around the earth, and refuse to acknowledge overwhelming evidence to the contrary. How do we resolve this?

The good news is that Kerry still has a shot…a pretty reasonable shot, even. We’ve all just got to keep our fingers crossed.