Geodog

Putting the pieces back together, slowly

It's been a long strange trip since the election, and I haven't felt much like writing, and recent developments in my life haven't left me much time to write, hence the two month silence. I worked in campaign mode for the month leading up to the election, as part of a fabulous team that Dan Robinson and Henri Poole of CivicActions put together to do online support of Get Out The Vote efforts using AdvoKit! While we had our ups and downs, the biggest down of course being the election results, it was a great experience. I helped build sites like Rock the Vote, Vote All Your Values, Voter Call, and I supported some great kids on Zephyr Teachout's Baobabs Teams in their use of AdvoKit! I was putting in 16 to 20 hour days doing everything from project management to Apache configuration to writing documentation for AdvoKit, and I loved it. It was at least moderately effective as well, 15,000 people registered to use our sites and they recorded more than 110,000 phone calls to newly registered voters in battleground states, which research shows should add up to at least 11,000 additional voters going to the polls and voting against Bush.

Of course, it wasn't enough. In spite of massive efforts by groups on the left, we were out-organized by the Republican GOTV operation, as detailed in a recent Washington Post article, and the American people elected as president of the United States a man who condones torture, is borrowing money in our children's name to fund tax breaks for his friends and war on his father's enemies, and who is raping the environment. As you may be able to tell, I took the election hard, which was another reason not to write. Many of my thoughts I am just as happy not to have preserved for posterity. I found consolation in the support of my wonderful family, including a beautifully written note from my conservative father (and Bush 41 government appointee) thanking me and my sister for our efforts to defeat George W. Bush, in the great friends I made working with CivicActions, and the fact that I can at least say, I did my best to elect John Kerry as president of the United States. But great as they are, the consolations make a thin bowl of gruel to subsist on during 4 more years of George W. Bush. It is going to be a grim four years, I fear. I don't expect developments in Iraq, the economy and America's place in the world to be positive, although I would dearly love to be proved wrong.

In the days immediately following the election, I made several resolutions. The first was not to join the circular firing squad that is the Democratic party after every loss. In many ways the amazing thing about the election is that the Democratic candidate did so well. While we made a lot of mistakes we can learn from, narrowly losing an election against an incumbent president who the media had anointed as king, who convinced the country we were at war and who borrowed enough money to pump up the economy is not a sign that everything we did was wrong. I'm an American history buff, and I can't think a single president who was defeated for reelection in wartime, which George W. Bush managed to convince the American people this is (notice how there haven't been any orange alerts since the election?). I've seen a lot of writing on the net about starting a new political party. Did the Republicans think of starting a new party after 1964 or 1976? No, they organized, and the more effective elements took over the Republican party. Anyone who thinks that it would be more successful to start a new political party in America than to reform the Democratic party from within hasn't studied the history of 3rd parties in America. On of my closest friends in college wrote his honor's thesis on the topic, and he convinced me that such efforts are pretty much doomed.

The second resolution was not to give up on grassroots politics, but to continue advocating and organizing for the things I believe in, and find ways to use my professional, writing and technical skills to improve American political and public life. As Pam Costain of the Wellstone Action Network repeatedly said at Camp Wellstone, the organizing needs to start again on November 3, win or lose. I intend to be part of that organizing.

The last resolution was not to overdose on the media (including blogs) and to spend more time and energy on people close to home, who supported me while I was working the 16 to 20 hour days. The necessity of doing this was confirmed a week after the election, when the youngest member of the household decided it was better to jump from the top of a climbing structure than to be tagged "it", resulting in the broken bones in the picture above that gave me the title for this piece. The bones have mostly healed, and America will recover from this election eventually. Absolute power corrupts, and the Republicans will over-reach, they always do. The beliefs and values of George Bush and the leadership of the Republican Party are not those of the majority of the American people, nor even those of the majority of Republicans, and that will become evident over time, and we will throw the bums out. Until then, we have to organize, stand and fight for what is right, and to some degree just endure it. But the nation will heal, eventually, just as my child's bones are healing.