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Fight Tea Partiers with Fresh Voters
Candidates have been in their districts, making nice to likely mid-term voters. They're more scarce than general election voters, and typically a more polarized bunch. What if there were more of them and more low-income people, particularly women, were in the mix?
In a country where 131 million people voted in the 2008 presidential election, a few million more voters sprinkled across the states, just might make a difference. In a handful of swing states, voting rights groups have sued and won voting rights for hundreds of thousands of low-income people, two-thirds of them women, in the last few years.
The results are impressive. In Missouri, where John McCain beat Barack Obama by less than 4,000 votes, nearly a quarter-million voter registration applications have been filed by people applying for state public assistance since August '08. In Ohio, where George W. Bush beat John Kerry by nearly 119,000 votes in 2004, low-income Ohioans filed 100,000 voter applications in just the first six months of 2010.
Project Vote, Demos, The Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the local civil rights groups who sued these states and won have been waging a lonely fight to implement the National Voter Registration Act. The 1993 law requires a range of state agencies, not just motor vehicles, to offer voter registration services.
That fight became a little less lonely in June, when, for the first time, the Justice Department announced it would start enforcing the NVRA’s voter registration mandate. This isn't rocket science. This April, 40 million Americans applied for food stamps. If even 10 percent of those people registered to vote – the nation’s voter rolls would get a millions-strong boost.
The numbers from from Missouri and Ohio dwarf the size of the largest Tea Party rallies and already, right-wingers fear these voters and NVRA compliance, commenting on websites that poor people should not vote for any number of ugly reasons. Now it's up to other candidates to pay attention to voters who've until now been overlooked. Instead of obsessing about the Tea Partiers -- give those newest voters some good reason to use that vote!
71 Comments so far
Show AllWhile in principal I think it is a good thing to make it as easy as possible for citizens to vote, in reality in Amerikkka it makes little difference if they elect anyone from either wing of the Corporate Party. It seems to me that Ms. Flanders has forgotten about the last presidential election when Democrats turned out to elect Barry.
The "hope and change" candidate turned out to be W. Bush on steroids. Barry has not only continued W's policies of endless wars and crackdowns on civil liberties, he has in fact escalated them.
Instead of urging voters to elect Democratic candidates, who are really just a different brand of the Corporate duopoly, we need to form One Big Union that will take power from the corporate elite who have decimated our nation.
"While in principal I think it is a good thing to make it as easy as possible for citizens to vote,"
In principle, is making it as "easy as possible for citizens to vote" increase or decrease the overall "quality" of the electorate?
I struggle with the fact that we look to increase voter rolls in order to win elections. Should we want people who vote one way or the other just because they are told to have the power to sway elections?
I look at our republic and see it not as a democracy but as a representative republic that needs informed voters to make it continue. If we continue to add more uninformed voters are we really going to be accomplishing anything?
It seems to me that term "informed voters" is subjective. I'm fairly certain that the Fox News viewers who are hanging on to every word that Glen Beck and Sarah Palin utter consider themselves "informed voters."
My question to you is "Who gets to decide who the 'informed voters' are?"
"My question to you is "Who gets to decide who the 'informed voters' are?""
No one has a monopoly on that decision, it rests with all individuals to decide. This leaves unanswered the question as to whether making it easier to vote moves the average up or down. One would think you would get more people who have a more casual attitude about politics and I don't think that would be good.
Its like Mark Twain said:
"Voters who don't read newspapers are uninformed while
Voters who read newspapers are misinformed."
Mister Twain was a total badass!
I think I agree with much of what you wrote which is why I asked the question. One would think that we would want informed and intelligent voters, and the idea of just making it easier makes me suspect that you would would decrease the average in that respect.
Love the Twain comment and I agree with the take on FoxNews viewers who would consider themselves "informed". There are only two ways I think you could actually increase the "intelligent" voters. One would be to require a test to vote to make some sort of objective criteria to base whether or not a person is an "intelligent" voter. The other way would be to require all persons running for office to fill out some vanilla standard questionnaire with some basic questions on issues that would be handed out to every voter at the polls or by some date before the election...do you support repealing tax cuts? Do you want to increase the level of troops in Afghanistan? Not sure if I like either option but at least with the second one it would pin down the politicians and in black and white make them commit to a position or explain themselves when they back out on what they claimed.
Just so we are clear: I am not advocating that we should or shouldn't make it easier for people to vote, only asking what the effect on the overall electorate would be.
The effect would be negligible.
No matter how many voters are added, they'll still be choosing from corporate-approved Party candidates.
True all politics is a sham. You are asked to vote for who and not what.
There is another option! Get rid of politics, politicians and campaigns entirly!
No nation has a functional democracy on this blighted planet. The Athenians started well with random selection of participants in the congress. You need to get rid of politics entirely. Representative democracy will always produce an oligarchy.
Consider the concepts of a demarchy or lottocracy. There are no political parties.
An example of how this could work. Citizens come to represent their regions completly by chance.
On Election day you get two ballots. One with your name on it that you could put into the lottery to become a member of congress. The other one to vote on the continuaton of the terms of incumbents. In any case an official must be retired after a set number of terms.
This would create an unending revolution in participation of Government.
I heard a reporter for the Wall Street Journal on the radio today, saying that when he went to Glen Back's rally, he found the Tea Party people there "very well-informed." He went on to say that most of them know exactly which school President Obama attended in Indonesia.
That is "well-informed?" These are the people James Madison was afraid of.
In principle, is making it as "easy as possible for citizens to vote" increase or decrease the overall "quality" of the electorate?
"Quality of the electorate" Do you aknowlege that that is a profoudly undemocratic concept - bordering on fascism?
The US stands is relatively alone in the putatively democratic world in requiring voter "registration". In the rest of the world, there is no "regiatration" process. A person is simply enfranchised when they turn 18. In Australia, there is a one-time card to fill out when one turns 18. Then, voting is mandatory with a $20 fine if one doesn't vote, unless a formal excuse is provided.
In Canada, it is automatic whenever an address change is put on a tax return, for a drivers license or such. In all cases this is done simply to assure there are relatively equal populations in each representative district.
In many European countries, a voter roll number is assigned when someone is born, and, except for putting a notice of change of address if needed, that's it.
In none of these places is there this obsession with someone being "qualified" to vote - whatever that could possibly mean.
""Quality of the electorate" Do you aknowlege that that is a profoudly undemocratic concept - bordering on fascism?"
Absolutely not. The very idea that it would be I find ridiculous. Maybe you can explain that position? It seems to me that the idea that individual voters and voters as a whole can have certain attributes in varying degrees is perfectly benign. Thank you.
My thought would be that this country was not set up as a democracy but rather as a representative republic. While the way it was set up was backward, racist and sexist in allowing only white property owning males to vote, it set up some way of making the election of officials determined by those who had some idea of what was going on around them (not that it was correct in its assumptions that women or other races did not know what was going on). I'd rather have people of at least a little decision making ability determining the direction of the country than those who do not.
Jake: And what are the qualities that distinguish a good voter from a bad one?
I suspect a good voter would be someone like you.
OK just for fun I'll list a few and see if you agree, assuming you have even considered the idea. I recognize there might be problems measuring these criteria:
Level of intelligence.
Level of knowledge of issues pertinent to the election.
Ability to think critically about what the candidates say.
Just for starters.
Jake--
They used these ideas in the Jim Crow South to keep African-Americans from voting. Under your logic the group that has the most power (i.e. money, guns, number of members, etc.) would be the group that decides who has adequate intelligence, knowledge of the issues and critical-thinking skills to vote.
I don't mean to be condescending, but this is pretty simple stuff.
"They used these ideas in the Jim Crow South to keep African-Americans from voting."
I'm not suggesting we put a test in place. I am simply asking what the effect would be regarding criteria such as these as a result of making it easier to vote. And I acknowleged the difficulties in testing for these things but that doesn't mean you can pretend they don't exist.
This article is an example of why I find it difficult to listen to Laura Flanders and many others who come across as progressives but are, in reality, stuck in an antiquated mindset of democrats-good/republicans-bad/and don't look beyond this framework.
They refuse to see that the "right wing" includes the majority of democrats.
Yes, democracy depends upon participation of as many voices as possible, but Laura Flanders is not really advocating challenging the status quo.
THAT would be delusional. Ask Robert Gibbs.
I very much agree. As the election nears, I fear we'll hear more and more people who will advocate for Democrats on so-called progressive websites. Posters who've railed against Obama and Democrats are now talking about fascism if a few Tea Partiers win elections.
Basically, they're advocating for Blue Dog Democrats, because all the Democrats in Congress are Blue Dogs. They've voted for Blue Dog, DLC policies, and that makes them Blue Dogs in deed, if not in name. I don't know how people can stand to think of voting for these people.
There is no "fascism IF".
An objective observation of the past quarter century in US politics can only be defined as fascism here and now.
I think that people who are forced to apply for food stamps are perfectly well 'informed' about who it is that is screwing them. Making it easier for people to vote is an obviously good idea for progressives -- at least for progressives who believe that the working poor and the alienated poor are also members of our 'community.'
But what's the effect on the average caliber of voter by making it easier?
In a democracy, the "caliber" of the voter, whatever that could possibly mean, is absolutely none of your or anyone else's fucking business!
So it would mean nothing to you if all the new voters added to the rolls via "make it easier to vote" drives turned out to be fucking idiots? OK, I won't try to persuade you otherwise, but find it valuable enough just to know where you stand.
jake, We accept that idiots have a right to a political voice.
After all, you're here.
Of course they have a right. Why do you think I am an idiot?
Inability to distinguish trees from forest, wheat from chaff, etc., etc.
You are wrong that I can't do that. Example, I know that a pile of sand has properties that the individual sand grains don't have and vice versa. I know you can appreciate that.
My greater point for those who haven't figured it out is " be careful what you wish for".
Following this discussion has been "enlightening"
In the first place all it takes to vote is to be a citizen and register. Once registered you may vote as you like even if you are a congenital idiot.
If you can't be bothered to take the time and effort to register, which is about the easiest thing there is to do and you can sign up almost anywhere, you shouldn't be voting anyway.
There are no longer any problems in voting for anyone and trying to pretend there are is just looney tunes.
And personal insults are the mark of shallow thinking.
Inclusion
Can you think of anything else at all, this "included" voter who now votes only because it has been made easier?
So the dims have pissed all over the new voters from '08 and '10. What to do? Oh! I know. New, new voters, that's the ticket. At this rate, in 20 years the Repug voters will be literally frothing at the mouth with fervor and the Democrats will have run out of stay-at-homes to sucker. What then?
"The 1993 law requires a range of state agencies, not just motor vehicles, to offer voter registration services."
How about the State Game Commission, where you could register to vote when you apply for your hunting licence?
"This April, 40 million Americans applied for food stamps. "
Actually not true, this is how many are currently on the program, not the number who applied in April.
"...a few milliom more voters...just might make a difference." For whom? More Democrats in Congress?
Ms Flanders is yet another commentator who does a reasonable job of identifying issues but always comes back to "vote Democratic, the other guys are worse" Notice the reference to the Tea Partiers.
What many of us here on CD are saying is that yes, the Tea Partiers are crazy and scary. No doubt. But you can't beat something with nothing. And nothing is what the Democrats offer. Just ask all those "new voters" who turned out for Obama in '08.
We still get posts and comments here to the effect of "what Obama needs to do..." and "if only the Democrats would get a backbone and fight..."
It's the left that needs to grow a backbone and stop supporting the charlatans in BOTH of the counterfeit parties.
The plain truth is that democrats cannot fight the "Tea Party" as it simply reflects many of the American publics views at the moment.
Like it or not that is a truth that will soon be evident.
Tea Bigots?, ya mean?
I don't see any greater variety of bigotry among them than any other group as a matter of strict fact. Democratic propaganda is just that. Democratic propaganda.
That people disagree with you does not in any way make them bigots.
"That people disagree with you does not in any way make them bigots."
The idea that the opposition may have an honest and honorable disagreement is inconceivable to many people. Instead, they must be evil.
The "least of us" have so little with which to fight back; suffrage is truly our most potent weapon. Abandonment of one's own franchise out of the sense that the vote of a single citizen doesn't matter when put up against the dollars of corporations is exactly what corporations and their boards, stockholders, and political partners count on. They understand that, if more Americans register and then actually vote, the current state of ease and comfort they, The Deserving Rich, claim by authority of bank balance will be threatened.
Exercise of this precious right by more of The People is the only thing that can take the power out of the hands of the elitist and extremist Right, whether they be the relatively few truly wealthy or the Tea Puppets they have created, oversee, and control.
"As the election nears, I fear we'll hear more and more people who will advocate for Democrats on so-called progressive websites."
Flanders is not a "so-called" progressive. She's a progressive through and through.
That's why she helps support a rotten system by deluding other progressives with her fresh progressive "inspiration."
You don't need much to fight back. I have been a Green for a long time, but we have yet to put together a national infrastructure to support our candidates. So the best way to promote our progressive view is to hyjack the infrastructure of another party. Let take back the Democratic Party. Check out your local Democratic Party Committees and get involved. It could be that easy.
The Libertarians are the group who have taken this country into financial ruin. They've had plenty of time to enact their regressive laws and do massive damage to the middle class and theis country's infrastructue over the past 30 years.
"This is one of the best chances a third party will ever have of making the case that the vast majority's needs are being smashed by the major parties."
The problem is that the Tea Party seems to be that "Third Party". They are the ones making inroads into the republican parties infrastructure and beating the establishments candidates.
Problem really is that they have the votes already.
"P.S. To Obama supporters who say Obama can't do anything good because mean old Republicans always stop him."
Hard to argue its republicans stopping him when you need not one republican vote to pass whateverr you like. Or that it is you that may stop the wars at any time...unilaterally, needing not one vote from anyone. How anyone could believe anything this guy says at this point is beyond me.
" The problem is that the Tea Party seems to be that "Third Party". "
mightymite.
Exactly. Your comments on this thread so far have sharp and deep insight. Thanks for them.
"In Australia, there is a one-time card to fill out when one turns 18. Then, voting is mandatory with a $20 fine if one doesn't vote, unless a formal excuse is provided."
As you may know, many Austrailians recently indicated their anger and frustration with the Liberal and Labor parties (and those parties' support of austerity measures) by voting for the progressive Greens.
And what happened?
The Greens claim that the resulting election deadlock opened the way for a new, more inclusive and democratic, “paradigm” of politics.
That is, the Greens are using the shitload of votes they got--to back the austerity reforms of the other two progressive parties.
There's your progressive viewpoint in action for ya.
"In effect, the Greens are striving to channel growing popular disaffection back behind the parliamentary charade, while the ruling elites conspire to fashion a government more willing to push ahead with their demands."
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/elec-a28.shtml
"The Gillard-Brown agreement, which will only take effect if Labor forms government, underscores the key role of the Greens within the Australian political establishment. After capitalising on widespread hostility to the major parties and their right-wing agendas, and winning a record vote for a minor party in the August 21 election, the Greens are now determined to demonstrate their credentials to the ruling elite as a “responsible” force for “stability”."
Greens sign deal backing minority Labor government
http://wsws.org/articles/2010/sep2010/deal-s01.shtml
Could the same kind of bait & switch happen here?
Just as progressive Dennis Kucinich claimed to be for healthcare reform before he voted for Obama's bill, likewise in Austrailia:
"the Greens claim to oppose the government’s brutal treatment of refugees, but will cast their vote in parliament to continue Labor’s funding of asylum seeker detention centres. They claim to oppose the Northern Territory intervention against Aboriginal communities, but will vote for its funding in the budget. They claim to oppose the anti-democratic construction industry policing body, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, but will vote to finance the body’s ongoing activities, including threatening workers with imprisonment and massive fines for taking “unlawful” industrial action."
Sound at all familiar?
BTW, in a recent Chris Hedges quote:
""It is time for us to stop talking about right and left," McKinney told me. "The old political paradigm that serves the interests of the people who put us in this predicament will not be the paradigm that gets us out of this."
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/29-2?page=1
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
To vote for the DLC misled Dimocratic Party this November is to beat a stone dead horse. We need a national progressive leadership summit to create an authentic national movement and/or Third Party, and we need to mimic regional and national mass media access to broadcast a truly progressive message without corporatist filters. Low-power FM radio stations operated by as many left-wing non-profit organizations as can afford it (until they can build enough listenership support to keep individual stations going) is an excellent step in this direction. Nothing pushes the Democratic Party as it now exists to the Left because there is no organized truly progressive left-wards pressure. The Dim Party needs to thus be shoved left or shoved out of existence and replaced.
That said, this was the only article I saw today that talks about the Tea Party and I thought the general media analysis of Beck's recent mass media charade was lacking, so I watched the entire Chris Wallace interview of Beck from last Sunday where Beck actually talked about his real ideology. This is my comment on that particular factional leader of the "Tea Party":
Chris Wallace's Fox McNews interview with Glenn Beck the day after his staged pablum was far more revealing than anything said at the event itself. You can find a link to the video of this interview on huffingtonpost.com
Beck publicly stated that he disagreed with Martin Luther King's economic message of uplift for the poor. He repeatedly tried to simplify MLK's message to limit it to "content of character" as being all that is sufficient for all Americans to be "given a shot" economically. This is equivalent to Newt Gingrich's early '90s GOPAC bloviation that all Americans "have the right to PURSUE happiness but not necessarily to achieve it." Newt didn't define what he meant by "happiness" and Beck doesn't define what he means by being "given a shot."
Beck's call for America to "return to honor" and other "traditional American values" is equivalent to the Newtzis' calls for a "return to family values." Different decade; same empty rhetoric.
For every adherent of Republicanism and Libertarianism I've ever encountered, economic happiness means affluence. For most liberal and progressive working-class folks they would be happy just to have the basic necessities for even a very frugal life without having to exhaust or ruin their body and mind to have them. The true Left understands the difference between needs and wants. Not so the capitalist right and far-right. They insist for themselves on economic and cultural dominance and that requires sufficient affluence not just to live luxuriously but to buy controlling political and media power.
Beck also said that he doesn't believe in any economics that is understood in terms of economic oppressors and economic victims--notwithstanding the fact that all of human history is replete with countless, exhaustively detailed examples of economic oppressors and their victims. This is a key part of the self-serving fairy-tale mythology that is Libertarianism--along with the fictitious "free market" (that has never existed from the time governments first began to levy taxes and control the issuing of money--thousands upon thousands of years ago).
Ask any right-winger or Libertarian about traditional liberal economics and they will go on about how you "can't give everything to everyone" even as they serenely ignore the obscene, god-like, uber-hedonistic "lifestyles" of the plutocrats who over-concentrate political power, industrially rape natural resources and exploit cheap labor on a global scale in order to hoard vast wealth and devastate our planet. They do this while they luxuriously ignore the chaos, outrageously cruel & needless human suffering and destruction they leave in their god-like wake. Of short, medium or long-term ramifications they could care less.
Many on the right simply do not believe that the poor, no matter how poverty stricken or blameless for their poverty, deserve an America that ensures that they have even the basic necessities to survive, let alone the things necessary to prosper enough to comfortably afford to rent a small apartment, let alone own a home. They have no valid religious or moral grounds for this. For every scripture in the Bible whose meaning they will twist to support things like slavery or indifference to poverty there are a hundreds more that refute that contrivance. Over 300 anti-poverty verses in the New Testament alone. Luke, Chapter 11, versus 1-13 is just one of them. You can look to Amos, Elisha, Isaiah and Jeremiah for others.
Most sinisterly, Beck used economically and politically coded "spiritual" language referring to "individual salvation" versus "collective salvation" to try to assert that Obama believes--as a tenet of black liberation theology--that "individual salvation is dependent on collective salvation."
First of all, there is an enormous difference between concept of spiritual salvation and the idea of worldly or material "salvation." Beck self-servingly conflates these ideas in his rhetoric in order to wield this language as a politicized, deliberately vague, all-purpose economic AND spiritual generality. A long oppressed group like black Americans might understand a third meaning for the language "collective salvation" in terms of freedom from broad racist cultural oppression of which economic repression is only a part.
That said, a case can still be made that physical "collective salvation" of a people from the cultural and economic device of slavery (in economic terms: forced free labor) is ALWAYS LINKED to broad economic repression based on race or religion (or other identity factors) by definition of slavery as an institution. In the Bible's Old Testament the ancient Israelites received "collective salvation" from slavery in Egypt. That physical salvation from slavery may be what enabled them to continue to survive as a people culturally united by their religion to this day in order to continue pursuing spiritual salvation, both individually and collectively.