Red, White, and Blue

Today is Veterans Day. Saying "Happy Veterans Day" doesn't seem right, but like Thanksgiving, this is a day we say thanks, especially to those who didn't survive to see a Veterans Day of their own.

© Bish

Florida Fallout

The election is over, thank God. We can clap ourselves on the back for yet another peaceful transition of power. The year was long and the invective sometimes nasty, but I admired the symbolism of Chris Christie and President Obama. They stood shoulder to shoulder helping storm victims, reminiscent of days when opponents respected each other. Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman were known for hiring their admirable adversaries, which is the way it should be.

© Wiley Miller

I'm grateful we had decent candidates. Despite differing political persuasions, both were decent family men, both well educated, both moderate, both dedicated to improving the country, and both seemed better than their parties. (I know, I know… opinions vary.)

But in Florida, we have a problem. The past half year alarmed me. I gathered news clippings– 55 to date– about my home state's attempts at voter suppression. As an independent, I disdain both parties, but coming up to the election, how could I document voter suppression without seeming to zero in on one party? I couldn't; the only solution was to let the problem become so evident it could no longer be ignored.

By now you know Florida's governor and legislature made it difficult to register and vote. Changes in state law reduced the number of days to vote by 43%, reduced the number of hours, and reduced resources. Worse, the law provided harsh, harsh penalties for the simplest of mistakes when helping others to register.

League of Women Voters– out of Florida

Penalties were so draconian, the League of Women Voters– sneered at in Florida as 'leftist'– abandoned its registration drives for the first time in 72 years.

What we took for granted was no more: Civics teacher Jill Cicciarelli headed New Smyrna Beach's student government association, which encouraged students to take part in democracy. She tripped over the new regulations and found herself subjected to prosecution and 'massive fines' for helping qualified students to register.

Why restrict new registration? Florida is a magnet for several groups, including retirees and Hispanics. Florida's percentage of voters past a certain age tends to top other states. Health care is of great concern to the elderly as insurance premiums and outright rejections shoot up while income plummets. The aged was only one minority group targeted by strategists, but that was where another part of the new restrictions kicked in.

Not Just Any ID

Originally an applicant's details were gathered during registration including address and signature. On voting day, we once simply identified ourselves in the book, we signed in, precinct workers matched the signatures and addresses, and we were free to vote. The new law required not merely ID, but Florida photo ID. An out-of-state license would not do, nor would student ID, or a utility bill to prove residence, or even a passport if it still had an address from 'up north'. On election day, hundreds of new residents were turned away because, as per the new law, they hadn't updated their IDs.

By the end of October, former governors Charlie Crist and Jeb Bush had had enough and spoke out. Charlie Crist sharply chastised Governor Scott reminding him he was supposed to serve all Florida citizens, not just his own party.

Voting Overseas

Although I've often lived and worked in other countries, this is the first time I've filled in a ballot overseas. The process takes two steps.

For federal election, you can request a mail-in package from your embassy or consulate, or visit the nearest consulate, in my case Durban, South Africa. Before 911, a reception center might have looked like an old-fashioned drawing room where avuncular employees called you into wood-paneled offices for conversations. These days consulates are found on secured floors in secured buildings with lexan and more lexan, rather like banks. Once you're admitted, you wait at a teller-like window until an employee comes to help.

The federal package contains questionnaires and identification forms, then a couple of envelopes and a ballot, or 'smart ballot' if you vote by party rather than candidate. What that means is if you don't happen to know your congressional candidates or senators, as long as you select a president, the rest will be filled in automatically by residence and party affiliation. To split a ticket, fill in your candidates as you please.

Place your ballot in the small envelope and seal it. Place the small envelope and the questionnaire in the large envelope and write your county and state upon it. Your ballot is delivered, presumably by diplomatic pouch.

For state, county, and local, you have to contact your county elections office and request a packet well in advance of elections. Fill in the questionnaires, fill in the ballots, and mail them before election day. Florida ballots are huge as is the postage required.

Sim-Florida

The Speaker of the House of the Florida Legislature ducked acknowledging the obvious when he said he'll investigate what went wrong during the election. Cynics perhaps unfairly say the investigation will be how his party failed to deliver his party's vote. For his part, Governor Rick Scott still insists the election worked exactly as planned– precisely what most people feared.

Who is Governor Rick Scott? He engineered the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud in US History. The fines alone were $1.7 BILLION. That didn't touch the great wealth Scott socked away. Records show he spent $71 million of his own money to acquire the governorship– actually $71 million of our money.

Florida should feel embarrassed even if Scott isn't. Since then, he's run the state like he's playing a Sim-City game. In doing so, he's managed to become one of the most unpopular governors ever.

Meanwhile in America

I once lived in a forest in the distant north. I got to know two men– one young, one not– each who caused fatal DUI accidents and spent time incarcerated. Each petitioned the state for restoration of civil rights including the right to freely travel and vote.

We're taught in civics classes once a felon pays his obligation to society, he's free to rejoin and live his life as normal. But that doesn't always happen. Some people endure continuing punishment: sex register lists, restrictions on foreign travel, and often curtailment of voting rights. Not all states restore civil rights when a sentence ends.

A California sheriff is taking a different approach. He encourages inmates in his jail to integrate into society by voting. And, as long as an inmate isn't a convicted felon, he helps inmates register.

Who knows how that might work out? I admire lateral thinking and any experiment that offers a chance of reducing our exploding prison population deserves a shot.

On this Veteran's Day, I'm pleased this election year is behind us. For many of us, a shorter election season now looks attractive. Whatever your political party, whoever your candidate, we owe a debt to others who can't be with us. Have a good, good Veterans Day.

Election Day

    Whew! 

    What can make you long for an otherwise insufferable commercial hawking ginsu knives?  (But wait – call in the next ten minutes and we will double your order!  Operators are standing by!) The answer, at least in areas within and surrounding eight so-called “battleground states” in our fine (but now frayed) union is the political commercial.

    We live in Washington, D.C., safely Democratic.  And we are close to Maryland, also safely Democratic.  But our television channels broadcast south as well, across the Potomac River to decidedly purple Virginia.  So we have been bombarded with political hawking now for months, and that seems to the captive viewer like years. 

   Commercials grant politicians the license to be a bit freer with the truth than they are in person.  (“Freer with the truth” being a euphemism for “lying.”)  Actual in-person accusations of lying are rather infrequent now-a-days.  But this was not always the case.  Theodore Roosevelt once roared at a presidential opponent that he was “atrociously and wickedly lying.”  And good old Abraham Lincoln had this to say about Stephen Douglas during the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates:  “I don’t know what to call you except you are a liar.” 

    According to those keeping tabs on such things the current candidates to lead the country for the next four years have largely eschewed the use of the “L” word.  Instead of accusing each other of lies here is what we have instead by proxy (as collected in The Washington Post, October 24, 2012 at page A19):

    Mitt Romney: 

• “I don’t concur with what the president said about my own record and the things that I’ve said. They don’t happen to be accurate.”

• “You got that fact wrong.”

• “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

• “You’re wrong.”

President Obama:

• “The math doesn’t work, but he continues to claim that he’s going to do it.”

• “This has been probably the biggest whopper that’s been told during the course of this campaign. And every fact checker and every reporter who’s looked at it, Governor, has said this is not true.”

• “And the fact is . . . ”

• “Governor Romney, that’s not what you said . . . ”

• “I think anybody out there can check the record. Governor Romney, you keep on trying to, you know, airbrush history here. . . . That wasn’t true."

    But the simple fact is, if you credibly don’t want to be called a liar the easiest approach is this:  Don’t lie.  The problem with the approach is, that like many simple solutions it doesn’t work.  Bending the truth has a long history of getting candidates elected in the United States.  But for one of the best solutions that honors telling only the truth while still maintaining the capacity to sway the unsuspecting electorate one can look back to 1950 and the fabled Florida senatorial race between Claude Pepper, a liberal New Dealer previously swept into the Senate for what turned out to be only one term, and George Smathers, who took Pepper’s seat and served as Florida’s senator through 1969. 

    Smather’s challenge, in attempting to unseat his fellow Democrat Pepper, (back then in Florida the Democratic primary was the election) was to sway the upstate (for want of a better phrase “educationally challenged”) Florida populace.  Recorded speeches were a rarity in 1950, particularly stump speeches, and what Smathers said and what he did not say in his Florida panhandle campaign addresses has been roundly debated for years.  But according to many reports his stump speech included a clever use of paronomasia, a form of word play that utilizes words that suggests two or more meanings and then relies upon the resulting confusion for rhetorical and persuasive effect.  In any event, here is what Time Magazine in its April 17, 1950 edition had to say about some of the things Smather’s north-Florida stump speech may or may not have contained:

Time, April 17, 1950

Smathers was capable of going to any length in campaigning, but he indignantly denied that he had gone as far as a story printed in northern newspapers. The story wouldn't die, nonetheless, and it deserved not to. According to the yarn, Smathers had a little speech for cracker voters, who were presumed not to know what the words meant except that they must be something bad. The speech went like this: "Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism with his sister-in-law, and he has a sister who was once a thespian in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper before his marriage habitually practiced celibacy."

    It was also reported that Smathers bellowed to the crowds that in order to attend college Mr. Pepper was forced to matriculate.

    True or not, the story became one of which legends are made.  So much so that 20 years later Bill Garvin in issue 139 of Mad Magazine, December, 1970, offered up the following wonderful example of how to nail your opponent without stooping to lying:

Mad Magazine
Dec. 1970

    My fellow citizens, it is an honor and a pleasure to be here today.  My opponent has openly admitted he feels an affinity toward your city, but I happen to like this area. It might be a salubrious place to him, but to me it is one of the nation's most delightful garden spots.

    When I embarked upon this political campaign, I hoped that it could be conducted on a high level and that my opponent would be willing to stick to the issues. Unfortunately, he has decided to be tractable instead -- to indulge in unequivocal language, to eschew the use of outright lies in his speeches, and even to make repeated veracious statements about me.

    At first I tried to ignore these scrupulous, unvarnished fidelities. Now I will do so no longer. If my opponent wants a fight, he's going to get one!

       It might be instructive to start with his background. My friends, have you ever accidentally dislodged a rock on the ground and seen what was underneath? Well, exploring my opponent's background is dissimilar. All the slime and filth and corruption you can possibly imagine, even in your wildest dreams, are glaringly nonexistent in this man's life. And even in his childhood!

       Let us take a very quick look at that childhood: It is a known fact that, on a number of occasions, he emulated older boys at a certain playground. It is also known that his parents not only permitted him to masticate in their presence, but even urged him to do so. Most explicable of all, this man who poses as a paragon of virtue exacerbated his own sister when they were both teenagers!

       I ask you, my fellow Americans: is this the kind of person we want in public office to set an example for our youth?

       Of course, it's not surprising that he should have such a typically pristine background -- no, not when you consider the other members of his family:

       His female relatives put on a constant pose of purity and innocence, and claim they are inscrutable, yet every one of them has taken part in hortatory activities.

       The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion.

       My opponent's uncle was a flagrant heterosexual.

       His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte outside a church.

       His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature.

       His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homo sapien.

       His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease.

       His nephew subscribes to a phonographic magazine.

       His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers.

       And his own mother had to resign from a women's organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian.

       Now what shall we say about the man himself?

       I can tell you in solemn truth that he is the very antithesis of political radicalism, economic irresponsibility and personal depravity. His own record proves that he has frequently discountenanced treasonable, un-American philosophies and has perpetrated many overt acts as well.

       He perambulated his infant on the street.

       He practiced nepotism with his uncle and first cousin.

       He attempted to interest a 13-year-old girl in philately.

       He participated in a seance at a private residence where, among other odd goings-on, there was incense.

       He has declared himself in favor of more homogeneity on college campuses.

       He has advocated social intercourse in mixed company - and has taken part in such gatherings himself.

       He has been deliberately averse to crime in our city streets.

       He has urged our Protestant and Jewish citizens to develop more catholic tastes.

       Last summer he committed a piscatorial act on a boat that was flying the U.S. flag.

       Finally, at a time when we must be on our guard against all foreign isms, he has cooly announced his belief in altruism - and his fervent hope that some day this entire nation will be altruistic!

       I beg you, my friends, to oppose this man whose life and work and ideas are so openly and avowedly compatible with our American way of life. A vote for him would be a vote for the perpetuation of everything we hold dear.

       The facts are clear; the record speaks for itself. Do your duty.

    Well, enough of this.  Be sure you vote today.  Unless you are voting for that other guy.  In which case,  stay home.