Oh, what a mixed bag of emotions I felt while reading Chris Bowers’s response to RFK’s stolen election article and OneCrankyDom’s diary. Chris is irritated with fraudsters that sit on their ass:
Is that really the goal–to get the extremely disturbing tale of vote suppression and possible vote fraud in Ohio and elsewhere into the Mainstream? Is the hope that when the Big Papers run with it, then the problem will be solved, because even Republicans in Congress will be shamed into passing good election reform legislation?… Are we supposed to show [the media] some sort of deity-like reverence?
I can sense something really depressing at play here, similar to what I wrote about in my recent dairy Draft Gore–But Only If You Mean It. All of complaints that the Big Bloggers were not writing enough about election reform, the desire to see election reform talked about in the Mainstream Big Papers, the desired hopelessness at play in some “stolen election” threads–I can see where this is all leading now. The mentality surrounding the “stolen election” diaries has the clear stink of looking for someone else to solve the problem for you. There is no sense of “Do It Yourself” grassroots action to fix the problem in these dairies. In the same way that these diaries imply individual voters are being denied by a great outside power of some sort, the same dairies look to a great outside power to solve the problem.
This laziness cannot stand.
As Chris lays out in this same article, in Philadelphia we have been running an insurgency. Chris actually won two elections on May 16th. He was on the ballot for local ward Democratic committee, and he won a successful last minute write-in campaign for the statewide Democratic committee. And he went and counted those write-in votes himself and discussed them with the election judge. When you roll up your sleeves and throw yourself into action, it can be very irritating to encounter electoral defeatism, fatalism, or constant negativity about the state of the party. The cure for this is, trust me, to get into the fight.
And, yet, there is another aspect of Chris’s diary that I disagree with.
Over the past year, I have been involved in what Jerome first termed “the silent revolution,” the national effort by grassroots democrats to retake the Democratic Party by running for local and statewide Democratic Party office. The term “silent” for this effort is important to note, because while thousands of progressive activists have won Democratic Party office in this campaign, it has received virtually no press coverage whatsoever…
This is a massive nationwide movement involving tens of thousands of activists, but the Big Papers, the Mainstream, and even most Big Bloggers have hardly covered it at all. That, however, has not stopped the revolution form taking place. In fact, I’m not even sure what a lot of mainstream coverage would do to help the movement. Would editorials help more people find their local Democratic committee meeting times’? Would they help form new grassroots organizations to recruit and network new committeepeople? I am going to go with “no” on both counts. This is a revolution that does not need press in order to succeed.
The thing is, any real election reform movement would be carried out in precisely the same fashion as the silent revolution is being carried out.
Any national movement for reform will benefit from two things: publicity and the (at least passive) support of the majority of the people. The mainstream media’s influence is waning, and there is no single authoritative voice, like Cronkite’s, that can declare the 2004 election stolen and turn a conspiracy theory into accepted wisdom. But, there is no substitute for open non-cynical MSM coverage and speculation about the 2004 election being stolen, if we want publicity and we want momentum for electoral reform. Getting RFK’s story into the MSM should be a very high priority of the blogosphere. In this case, I think Chris is letting his personal frustration with defeatists and armchair generals cloud his judgment about the benefits of spreading the meme that the 2004 election was stolen. It’s not an either or thing. It’s not either you push the story on the MSM, or you run for office and make sure all the voting equipment is properly audited. It’s both.
And that kind of publicity is important for another reason. As Kerry explained in the RFK article:
Kerry says his fellow Democrats have been reluctant to push the reforms, fearing that Republicans would use their majority in Congress to create even more obstacles to voting. ”The real reason there is no appetite up here is that people are afraid the Republicans will amend HAVA and shove something far worse down our throats,” he told me.
In the current climate, a Democratic bill on electoral reform would be laden down with amendments (like photo ID requirements) that would further disenfranchise African-Americans. Bringing up a bill is, therefore, a fool’s errand. We need the white-hot outrage of an informed public to make such shenanigans impossible. Real reform, requires real outrage. And we need MSM outrage to fuel it.
Moreover, the idea that the 2004 election was stolen plays into a lot more story lines than just the need for electoral reform. It plays into the story of George W. Bush (and Republicans, generally) as a fraud, as a criminal, as illegitimate, as untrustworthy, as ruthless.
All in all, we need this story in the MSM just as much as we need to roll up our sleeves and get to work. Without both, we won’t succeed.