This past week, for some reason I’ve had every elected Democrat in the state call me at home, begging me to get out and vote for John Kerry. This is curious because I’m registered as a non-partisan and have never donated money to either political party. Yet, for some reason, Kerry’s having all of his friends call me and millions of others to reassure us that he really really likes us and needs his vote. One live volunteer, who interrupted me while working on my “Crime and Criminals” entry for the Encyclopedia of American Urban History, went so far as to tell me exactly where to vote and ask if I needed a ride. Now that’s service. I do need a ride to the airport this Thursday, but apparently the Kerry campaign won’t help me with that.
I would say that the barrage of well-meaning Democratic phone calls has driven me irrevocably into the Republican camp, but I’ve had the exact opposite problem there. The GOP hasn’t seen fit to break off one call to me to ask how I’m doing and to encourage me to vote. Honestly, I don’t know which is worse. And, as I told John Kerry in the weird dream I had last week, I’m not telling anyone how I’m voting anyway. Usually when people discuss politics they just want re-affirmation of their own indignant principles, so I’ve learned that it’s best just to smile and nod.
The t-shirt fun comes from this story I got from ABC News via Drudge. Its sad but true, wearing t-shirts for the other party will get you crowded off TV at campaign events:
ABC News conducted a bipartisan experiment in which producers and volunteers went to rallies for each candidate wearing the other party’s T-shirt, and found that each campaign had its own methods of preventing the shirts from being seen.“We’ve reached a sad state of affairs when a T-shirt is that offensive,” said Yale professor Robert Post, a specialist in First Amendment law. “It tells me that these are photo opportunities, and not about dialogue.”
The rules were to behave exactly the same at each rally, to be polite participants and to leave when asked. The ABC News team obtained tickets for all of the events attended � tickets for Kerry events can be attained from the official campaign Web site and tickets for Bush events from local Republican party or campaign offices.
At an Oct. 21 Kerry rally in Minneapolis, ABC news producers were surrounded and followed by a team of dancing Kerry campaign workers with large signs, effectively obstructing the Bush-Cheney T-shirts from the view of the national press.
“My job tonight was to run interference so that we didn’t have any negative situation on our hands,” said a female Kerry campaign volunteer. “Our job was to stand in front of them and make sure that, number one, that press had access to Kerry stuff and not necessarily Bush.”
The Bush campaign was even more aggressive in its response to the opposing party’s T-shirts.
When ABC News volunteers Matt Walter and Sherrie Varpula tried to attend an Oct. 23 Bush rally at Space Coast Stadium in Melbourne, Fla., they were told by event volunteers the Kerry-Edwards T-shirts they were wearing would cause them not to be admitted.
This is just fantastic, isn’t it? The candidates can’t articulate lucid plans to deal with problems like terrorism, environmental degradation (or the nuclear waste dump planned for Yuuca Mt), or even the economy, but their people are Johnny-on-the-spot when it comes to getting unfriendly t-shirts off the air.
Here’s the problem with politics today: all style, no substance.
But please, don’t tell me how “bitterly divided” the country is today. We could go back to the 19th century, when voter turnout was much higher, and most urban electioneering was done by gangs of shoulder hitters. Election violence and even rioting was common. So, comparatively speaking, this campaign has been pretty civil.
That’s all you’ll hear from me about the election, unless an electoral college deadlock forces me to revive the idea of election by lottery.