Food For Thought
As This Election Unfolds
We serve two purposes here: to participate in our country’s highest pageant of democracy, the presidential election, and to urge as many others as possible to participate in it too. Yes, we at Women Barack the Vote! are partisan, unabashedly so. We came together freely in a purely grassroots effort to present women’s voices, to give women voters a chance to speak – especially to undecided voters, left and right, women and men, urging them to vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. We feel passionately that it is vital to the future well-being of our country to change the status quo that we’ve had for the past eight years. Voting for Obama and Biden will help that along immensely.
There are ideals at work here, and they’re always present behind the ideas we present to you. We believe in free and fair elections. We believe a society has the right to choose its leaders. And we believe the will of a society should be known and followed by its leaders. Toward this end, we present our point of view on this election and we invite you to get involved – at the very least by voting!
Political debate is a wonderful thing. Or can be. The free expression of political thoughts and beliefs is one of the greatest hallmarks and most profound guarantees of our country. At its best, political debate lifts us up and carries us all forward, perhaps better than any other mode of communication. Whether the candidates who espouse the policies and positions we prefer win or not, there is beauty in participating in the American electoral process, at any level, in hearing and considering what the candidates have to say. This country is at its best when its citizens respectfully converse with each other about the issues, especially if they feel strongly enough to try to persuade others to their point of view. We all win when we are engaged and connected to the process.
Far too often, though, especially in the past few decades, the process has not been at its best. It has brought out ugliness in various forms, even hatreds bordering on violence at times. It’s a sad truth that campaign teams and their distant surrogates have demonized opponents or whole groups of people, cynically divided people by region, religion, race and other false “differences,” and engaged in other underhanded, misleading, distracting, trivializing or untruthful practices that appeal to the worst in people rather than the best. Folks of good character and decency of spirit – whatever their political stripe – should be feeling let down by these practices, deeply dissatisfied, and more than ready to demand a change in the way things go when we choose who will lead us next.
One of the most harmful and despicable problems with our elections is a set of illegal practices contributing to voter fraud, suppression and disenfranchisement.
- Certain voting precincts have only one or two machines to serve thousands of voters, creating lines 4-5-6 hours long, while other precincts with far fewer voters have more machines than they need. This is usually not the result of a mistake or incompetent management practices but a deliberate attempt to discourage certain voters and have them walk away without voting – suppression.
- Unrealistic demands are made for perfect correlation between the info on voter registrations and government records such as the driver’s license. If there is any difference, no matter how small or inconsequential (a middle initial included on one and not the other) registrations are being thrown out without prior notice so that voters expecting to vote are denied at their polling place – again, happening only in certain precincts and in certain states – swing states.
- Then there are the official-sounding phone calls and official-looking fliers instructing voters that they should only vote on certain days after November 4th – nullifying their votes. Or fliers distributed telling people predominantly in inner city black neighborhoods that police will be at polling stations ready to arrest people who have outstanding traffic tickets.
- Not to mention, many computerized voting machines have proven faulty, automatically flipping choices from Democrats to Republicans when the voter votes, or recording “non-votes” when the voter had definitely made a choice – nearly always for the Democrat.
- Another practice is to arm-twist voters into filling out a provisional ballot, most often for false or dubious reasons, and then simply discarding these ballots rather than counting and reporting them, since the law doesn’t require provisional votes to be counted and they are easily ditched later when nobody’s watching.
These and other practices are an outrage. They offend our democracy grievously, nullifying the national will and trashing our precious freedoms. They are, in the purest sense, un-American. They put our system under attack – solely to steal victory for candidates who would not win by legitimate means. It’s in our national interest to treat all of those who commit these acts as criminals whenever and wherever they’re found, and to seek the harshest remedies allowed by law.
Our system isn’t perfect, to say the least. There aren’t a complete set of remedies in place in this particular election. Sadly, they will happen to some extent, as they have in the recent past.
However, the Obama-Biden campaign will have people watching every polling place, ready to step in and assist whoever asks for it – they won’t ask who you’re voting for before helping. There will also be teams of lawyers on call, often at the polling places but never far away in any case, ready to step in, deal with the authorities and help defend your right to vote. It’s a fight most worth fighting, and nobody should take things lying down.
As this election unfolds, if you meet with irregularities, whether it’s when you try to vote early (if that’s allowed where you are) or at your polling place on November 4, 2008, do not accept less than your full rights! Seek out the poll watchers and explain the problem.
Vote! Go prepared to fight for your right to vote and have it count. It’s the American way!
Serving the Interests of the Great Middle
In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Judging which politicians to vote for based on self-interest is essentially good advice.
That’s where “Women Barack the Vote!” comes in. Yes, we are making our appeal primarily to women, but we’re here to see if we can help all uncommitted voters – women and men – see that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will best serve your interests and the interests of a large majority of your neighbors. Our reasons here apply to everybody.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden have consistently taken up the causes of this country’s middle class. They know that nothing great happens in this country without the women and men who work and carry most of the burden, work the tough jobs, fight the wars, raise the children, pay the most taxes, make up our strong backbone from coast to coast. These are the people who are most deserving of support from their leaders.
Especially now that the Bush economy is in collapse, Obama and Biden recognize that ordinary Americans have been suffering. They know the middle class has gotten too many raw deals from their leaders and they deserve a break, deserve to be thought of first for a change – more than the multinational corporations and the rich they make richer who have gotten far too many free rides with the “hopes” that the crumbs will trickle on down to others. Obama and Biden believe success is a wonderful thing, that becoming rich in a righteous way is not wrong but a wonderful achievement. But they also believe strongly that basic things like decency and consideration should always apply to everyone, not just the favored few.
Forty years ago, it took one decent, steady salary for a middle class family to live in a modest house, while one parent stayed home and made sure the kids had what they needed. In many ways, while we still had problems to address and solve, America was a much more decent place then. There were no predatory lenders, because banks saw to it that people didn’t qualify for a mortgage unless they didn’t owe too much to others and could put down a hefty down payment. Families had a Chevy and a Ford in the driveway, and gas was twenty-nine cents a gallon. And a single-earner family could even put the kids through college if they didn’t have too many kids too close in age. They could pay a visit to the doctor whenever necessary or have the doctor visit the home if that was better, and not go broke in the process.
American workers then made what the world wanted, so America was by far the most prosperous nation on earth in 1968, despite any of its problems. The world sent us their money to buy our goods, not the other way around like it is today.
Somewhere between 1968 and 2008, mostly in little steps that didn’t seem to make much difference but ended up making a huge difference, the middle class lost many of the advantages it once had. Many of its comforts were replaced by harsher realities. It became harder every year to maintain the lifestyle they once thought was theirs forever.
In the 1970s, steel companies began shipping their furnaces overseas and leaving behind the empty foundries and factories that became known as the Rust Belt. Working folks in cities like Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Akron, Buffalo, Scranton and the Lehigh Valley were hit hard across proud, decent neighborhoods that had done nothing to cause their own upheavals and pain. Not since their parents dealt with a worldwide depression in the 1930s was such hardship known in these places.
Family farmers came under assault during the 1980s. Especially in many areas of the heartland and the south, farm foreclosures reached a high never before known in our history, even during the Great Depression, and those families had to vacate land that many of them had farmed for generations. Agribusinesses favored by Reagan policies gobbled up the vacant land to form huge factory farms. Yet, historians today largely forget the family famers of the 80s, remembering instead the “Reagan Revolution” and the birth of “yuppies” when once again the rich got richer and the great middle, the people of the land, got the sharp end of the stick.
Many of those displaced farmers (typically people who are political moderates or conservatives) were voters that the Right could count on for support on Election Day. But could those middle class workers count on the Right for real support before and after Election Day? Did displaced family farmers really cast votes in their own self-interests when they voted for Right Wing candidates? It strains a fair mind to see how that could be true.
Now, it takes two and a half salaries to maintain a middle class family and household, where in 1968 it was possible on just one – and things in the economy seem about to get even worse. There might still be a couple of cars in the driveway – if the family still has a house to live in – but they probably went deeper into debt to purchase them, pay them off slowly with interest instead of buying them outright. By the time they get the car paid off, it’s time for the family to buy another car and go into debt all over again. Debt has become the new “American way” and everybody pays interest. And even if the price for a gallon of gas does come down some, it’s as ridiculously high now as it was preposterously low then, we’ll never see cheap gas again. It’s high time for us to get beyond gasoline.
American workers have increased their productivity by about 90% since 1980, and you’d think the rewards for more productive work would take the form of higher wages, wouldn’t you? That would only be fair and just. But it hasn’t happened that way. The cost of living always rises, but not salaries – except for the salaries of upper management, which used to make about 40 times what their average worker made but now makes an obscene 525 times the average worker salary.
John McCain is not steady in our economic crisis. He’s jumping and grasping at all sorts of messages as things unfold. He’s been railing at those greedy, irresponsible, incompetent Wall Street executives and their golden parachutes, saying failure should not be rewarded. Somehow, though, his criticism doesn’t seem to apply to Carly Fiorina, his close advisor who failed utterly as CEO of Hewlett Packard yet landed softly because of her $42 million dollar parachute made of gold, while Hewlett Packard had to lay off thousands of workers. Sometimes what a self-described straight talker doesn’t say can be more important than what he does.
And let’s not forget that he’s still close to former Senator Phil Gramm, the one who claimed that the recession is “a figment of the middle class’s imagination”, and you are “a bunch of whiners.” Pundits think it’s likely that Phil Gramm would be one of the key people running our economy in a McCain administration.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden have not forgotten what happened to the steel workers and the family farmers. Seeing what they see, knowing what they know, believing what they believe, Obama and Biden know the middle class needs a change, needs a real break – before anyone else.
Voting to continue the way things have been going is definitely not voting in your own interest. You need change that you can believe in, and leaders who believe in you!
The important questions voters should be asking themselves in this election are along these lines: “Am I better off now than I was 4 years ago, or 8 years ago, or 30 years ago? Which candidates will offer me more when they govern? Which will think of me more? Which will lessen my load for once, instead of favoring the rich? Which candidates will make the fat cats pay a bit more and level the playing field at least a bit? Which ones will lower the crazy level of borrowing by our government so that maybe our great grandchildren might see a time when our economy isn’t so shaky?”
Barack Obama and Joe Biden will be your champions in the White House, they will fight for you, rally you to your own renewal and the country as a whole to come back stronger, better. Obama and Biden will drive the new Green Revolution, will unleash America’s genius for invention and ingenuity. They’ll create the great new Energy Technology Industry right here. They’ll create thousands of new and permanent blue- and white-collar jobs. American workers will once again make what the world wants and needs as oil gets more and more scarce, more and more expensive.
If you give Obama and Biden the chance – by voting – they will give you a fairer deal and a more level playing field. If you give Obama and Biden the chance – by voting – you will be serving your own best-interest. And that is exactly what you should be doing on Election Day.
Are you better off today than you were four years ago?
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