Have you heard abut the dust-up involving a couple of bloggers that John Edwards hired to work for his site?
For a good recap check out BlogHer's post MarcotteGate.
Basically John Edwards hired two prominent lefty bloggers, Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon and Melissa McEwan from Shakespeare's Sister. Then some righty folks figured out that Amanda and Melissa had said some rather inflammatory things over the course of their political blogging.
Shocking, I know. Hope you were sitting down for that revelation.
Here's at least one blogger who is sick of everyone acting so shocked by it. And thus sealing my fate of never being able to work on a presidential campaign, I have to say that what he says rings true.
Have you actually read political blogs on both sides of the aisle (including this one)? Hey, we all feel pretty passionately about our positions. And we all disagree pretty vociferously with the extremists on the other side of the aisle. And we're not always polite in how we express that disagreement. Since when did being a politician mean that you could no longer believe in real right and actual wrong?
I'm so naive, I know.
Now, that is not to say that I don't think we all sometimes cross the line into offending someone somewhere. If these bloggers criticized the policies of the Catholic Church, as charged, then for someone who is an absolute believer that every Catholic Church policy is the word of God and absolutely in the right (which is not all Catholics by any stretch) than yeah, I'm not surprised they're offended.
But good luck finding any blogger who is prominent in their field and not finding them passionately offering an opinion that someone somewhere is going to disagree with and even be offended by.
You'll note if you visit Pandagon at the link above that it redirects to a mirror site. http://blog.johnedwards.com/story/2007/2/13/111751/942 Amanda apparently resigned from the Edwards campaign and is receiving a ration of hate mail because some supposed religious leader is egging his parishoners on to do so. Nice.
Some additional interesting links:
A discussion on the Edwards site
Wonderful analysis over at MyDD.
Bottom line: I guess I could never work on a campaign, and I guess the Santa Clara County Democratic Party leadership has more cojones than most in politics, because they aren't afraid to let the bloggers on this site say when they passionately and vehemently disagree with the other side. And even more so: when we think the position of the other side is not just supid or misguided, but actually immoral.
I'm glad to be whatever size fish i am in this pond, and not in the big politico pond.
CSPAN is covering the opening of the 110th Congress, right now the vote is being taken for Speaker of the house, click here to watch history in the making.
The time for electing new delegates and executive board members to represent your assembly district at California state party functions and meetings is drawing near.
I have been the E-Board rep for my AD, #24. My term is ending, and we'll be convening (as will every other AD) on Sunday January 14, 2007 to elect a new slate.
Hopefully all caucus information for our county will go on our calendar here. (There's one there already.)
I can tell you that AD #24 is meeting as follows:
January 14, 2007
2-4PM
Campbell Community Center
Room E-46, the Activity Room
1 W. Campbell Avenue
Campbell, CA
See you there!
Have you seen the new ATMs? I don't know about other banks, but at Wells Fargo they've replaced their ATMs with a new machine. And the way it handles deposits makes me wonder anew at the low standards we have in place for electronic voting machines.
Now for deposits you no longer need envelopes, you simply insert a stack of cash or checks into a slot. You can pile up to 10 checks on top of one another and stick them in there, where the machine magically sorts, scans and processes them. It them tells you how many checks you've inserted and for which amounts, which you can confirm or correct. If it can't read one, it shows you an image of the one it couldn't read, and asks you to enter the correct info.
At the end of the transaction it gives you 3 choices: no receipt, a receipt with a list of your despots, or a receipts with little mini-images of each check you deposited.
I don't know how they do it; I don't really care. What I do know is that such features should be a minimum requirement for voting machines.
Why are our government officials willing to settle for so much less?
I wish I had posted this before the election, butit's almost sweeter to watch it now, knowing we did the right thing this Tuesday.
Make no mistake though: there's nothing sweet about most of the iamges in this video...they are a stark reminder of what we are taking our country back from!
Yes, Tuesday's results are very very heartening. We have re-taken not only the House, which was predicted by all, but also the Senate...which was far from a sure thing. But now is not the time to rest on our laurels, it's the time to push for positive changes. And it's the time to acknowledge what those changes should be.
First, the positive results, well stated by faithful blog reader Ed Taub has to say in his Letter to the Editor sent to the Merc...
The new Democratic majorities in Congress are a welcome response to the irresponsible behavior of both the Bush Administration and its enabling Republican congressional representatives.I am grateful for the American people's clear rejection of ideological and theological extremism that focused more on doctrinal issues like personal religious and sexual preferences than on real world issues
like health care, access to education and improving economic opportunity for working people. Let's focus on those priorities, ones we can all unite behind.
But yeah, I got some issues..outlined in the extended entry.
Here are some of my thoughts about where we still need to work for change:
-While it is heartening that Arizone became the first state to reject a same-sex marriage ban, the others all passed...not so heartening.
-Not only is it disappointing that Harold Ford Jr. lost, it is discouraging that his talking point response to the Playboy party commercial was to say: "I like football, and I like girls. That goes over pretty well in my state." I heard him repeat this on more than one TV show, and I found it appalling and disheartening that this was considered the best approach by Ford and his team. Disrespectful to women, arguably homophobic. That's the best they could come up wth?
-Why is Howard Dean stating outright that they won't impeach Bush? Does he have all the evidence that previously Democrats were trying to get an inquiry set up to investigate? Then otherwise, why say it?
It was the War in Iraq and dissatisfaction with how it's been handled, and dissatisfaction with the total lack of accountability for that mis-handling that delivered this election to us. Let's not forget it.
There are few words that can explain fully the joy of Democrats taking back both the house and the senate. In many ways the takeover of the house and senate aren't even about partisan politics, the voters of this country are demanding oversight, they are demanding an end to the corruption in D.C. and they are looking for leadership that will work FOR all Americans, not just those at the very top.
Here is perhaps the best tribute to the demise of the GOP one could offer.
Our nation will be better served by having what our founding fathers envisioned, checks and balances, a means of assuring that no one party, no one special interest could rule our government. For the last four years our nation has seen what total control of our government by the GOP has brought us, and on Tuesday our nation, in a strong voice said "no more."
A great night for Democrats and a new vision for America.
I'm in SF at a conference, and within minutes met someone who was looking for a political blogger to report her election experience: a bad one.
Please hear guest blogger Jessica Hardwick's story:
I take my right to vote very seriously, so I was quite dismayed when I received my sample ballot in spanish. I called the Registrar of Voters and after navigating the somewhat confusing voicemail prompts, I reached a human. She explained that sometime in the last year a postcard was mailed requesting language preferences for sample ballots, if no response was received the default was Spanish. I was taken aback to learn that the default was a language other than the offical language, but requested a new ballot in english, stating the urgency as I would be away from my polling place and I needed to cast an absentee vote. A week later, I had still not received a ballot so I requested another, and 5 days after that I logged yet another request. Now, on election day, I am 60 miles from my polling place, and won't be home until well after the polls close, I never received a new ballot in english, and I will not be able to participate in today's election. In short, because of bureaucracy, I was denied my legal right to vote.
If it can happen here, in what is admittedly a heavily Democratic-leaning county, I can only image what is happening elsewhere.
Anyone else have a story?
Have you heard about the robo-calls?
I don't know why I'm surprised, but the Republicans have come up with something new to suppress the vote. Sure, the Repugs have done other more overt things to affect the vote (not enough voting machines in minority-domanted neighborhoods in Ohio anyone?) But their bread and butter is voter suppression...finding ways to intimidate or annoy people into not voting.
The latest: recorded robo-calls that appear to be from the Democratic candidate. If you hang up, the auto-dialer will call you again and again and again. The goal: to annoy you so much you say "screw that candidate" or just stay home. If you actually listen to the entire call you'll hear a negative message about the Democratic candidate.
People have definitely caught on. I've read about it on BlogHer and on the California Progress Report.
Too true comment from SCCDP Communications Director David Cohen: " It will be good to be rid of the Republican majority, but we'll be fighting unethical campaign behavior for years."
Yup.
A few weeks ago Senator Joe Lieberman lost his Democratic primary bid for Senator in CT to newcomer Ned Lamont. What, exactly, does this mean to the Democratic Party? Has, as Les Francis suggests, our party gone off a cliff? Or does Steve Preminger have a more realistic view of the Democratic Party?
First of all Francis suggests that:
Lieberman is an old-fashioned internationalist who sees the dangers facing the United States, Europe and other peoples of the world, which today are largely attributable to radical Islamist terrorism. He also has had the temerity to treat the president of the United States with a degree of personal respect that the vast majority of Democratic activists simply find repulsive. And that is a sad, sad commentary on the health of contemporary American politics, and on the psychology of today's Democratic Party.
While Preminger, Chair of the Santa Clara County Democratic Party, states:
Democrats who criticize these trade pacts are not against economic interaction between the United States and the rest of the world. They challenge the terms of those interactions. Most opponents of trade pacts demand terms that offer opportunity to American workers and help preserve the American middle class. They readily support trade pacts like those with Cambodia and Jordan that include those elements.
More below the fold.
Has the Democratic Party moved too far to the left, as Francis suggests? Or is Preminger on the mark when he states:
People who raise these questions of complexity and strategy aren't saying America should be weak. They are saying that part of being strong is being smart. Our problems in Iraq are not a failure of military capacity, or of courage, or of will, but of intelligence. Smart decisions rarely occur when ideologues manage to shut everyone else up. Much of the opposition to Lieberman stemmed from his unwillingness to challenge such Republican bullying.
Having read both editorials my money is on Preminger, and my hope is that Francis will start to understand that Lieberman left the Democratic Party before it left him.
Last weekend I too was at the California Democratic Party State Convention.
The absolute best parts of going to these events is hearing your heroes speak. because of my attendance at CDP events I've seen Boxer and Feinstein and Pelosi and Dean and Huffington and Waters and Lee and many more speak. This year we can add Cleland and Richardson to the list.
Another great part is being reminded in the most motivating way possible that all those people who say the Democrats don't have a message or aren't really different than the Republicans are craaaazy.
The not-so-great part? I don't like the fact that we have multiple great candidates for state-wide office, any of whom would be far better than the Republican alternative, and yet we choose to endorse before the primary.
At this convention we got to attend panels featuring all the candidates for those offices and hear them speak to the issues. Sure there are some differences...many of the differences are really in the experience and backgrounds of the candidates, not so much their philosophies and beliefs. I found myself really liking them all and knowing I'd be happy with any of them in office vs. the current Republican regime.
Is it productive or constructive to endorse pre-primary like this?
Anyone have any thoughts on that?
This editorial in today's NY Times just gives me the willies:the authors lament the 2-term limit for Presidents and feel it's time to end it.
Actually I might get behind some of their points. But I would hardly get in line to help Dubya steal a third election.
Bottom line is that I don't buy their line that the power of incumbency declines over time. They cite one and only one example: FDR. Seems kind of natural that his popularity would decline given that he had to engage in a lot more controversial activities, like going to war, in his later terms.
But when you look at congresspeople, and note that even the most do-nothing congresspeople can easily get re-elected term after term...the power of incumbency seems pretty strong. And don't tell me re-districting will solve that. I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of people who vote along party lines and a lot of people who don't pay too much attention until right before elections (when name recognition will go a long way toward sending someone to victory.) And I'd even venture a guess that we all hate negative campaigning, but we let it work on us anyway.
Anyway, it's an interesting, although certainly not new, idea to get rid of the 22nd Amendment.
What do you think?
I'm not sure I like being an Absentee Ballot gal. There's something about showing up to do your civic duty on Election Day that feels much more patriotic and true.
So, get out there and vote people. Today is an awesome opporunity to get our State back on the right track. To keep our State from heading down the path that Texas has taken, that the country has taken, for that matter. We can say "no" to the right-wing agenda.
And believe me, even in this state that is perceived to be true-blue, it will send a big message to send Props 73-78 DOWN IN FLAMES!
It sends a message not just to Ah-nold, but across the country that people are sick and tired of corrption and incompetence and power-grabs.
So, go VOTE.
Pick up an "I Voted" sticker for me!
Everyone seems to agree that turnout is critical for the November 8th special election. Don't let polls lull you into the sense that those evil propositions are going down. You have to get out there and vote. And if you've been putting off registering, or if you've moved and need to re-register...tomorrow is your last day to do so.
So do so.
Read Paul Krugman's piece today.
The question is: what are we going to do about it?
The following essay was written by Jay Jackman, a Santa Clara County Democratic activist who spent the final 8 days of the 2004 election in Ohio. It is a summary of his experiences, some of which are inspiring and some of which are disappointing. You might find the entire entry to by very interesting:
November 21, 2004
Dear friends:
I would like to tell you about some of my experiences in Ohio during this past election. I have been so disappointed and upset with the results of the election that I just could not sit down to write about my time there until now. A little time has dulled the wounds and it is time to return to this task. I felt before the election and I still feel it is true that this was the most important election of my lifetime and that I felt that I could not be a passive participant in the event. I needed to actively participate and because I have a son, Rashi, living in Athens, Ohio I chose to go there and then to Columbus, which was in fact, the center of the election. I consider myself fortunate to have been able to play even a small role in this election.
More in the extended entry:
I went first to Athens, Ohio, location of Ohio University, Monday October 25 to work on the Kerry campaign. I chose Athens because my son Rashi lives there with his wife Maike and their son Jasper. I spent all of Tuesday through Saturday working at the local United Democratic Campaign office on Court Street, an operation very similar to the United Democratic Campaign run here in Palo Alto by the Santa Clara County Democratic Party.
Athens County has about 40,000 registered voters, about the size of Palo Alto and Stanford combined including students. The Athens headquarters was totally unpretentious, a small storefront about ten to twelve feet wide and fifty to sixty fee deep, filled with tables to work at, a few phones, mostly cells and a handful of computers. Doors opened at 10:00 AM and stayed open until late at night. Everyone believed that Kerry would carry Ohio and everyone was in great spirits the entire time.
From 11:00 AM on there were usually fifteen to twenty people working at HQ. They came from everywhere. There were five of us from California; four women had been there for two weeks already. There were people from New York, Oregon, and Washington DC. All of us were in our fifties and sixties. Then there were the grade schoolers, middle schoolers, high schoolers, University of Ohio students and committed citizens: teachers, social workers, housewives, faculty spouses. Much of what we did for the first few days was to put address labels on mailers, something all of us campaign volunteers have done. As we all sat together at our tables there was endless time to gab and get to know each other. I was amazed at how much appreciation was expressed by local folks from grade schoolers to retirees that all of us out of staters had taken the time and spent the money to come to Ohio to work with them to elect John Kerry.
The entire operation was run by a young woman, Amy Flowers, who had taken time off from Ohio U. to run the operation. She could not have been more than nineteen or twenty. She was in command of everything. She never raised her voice, never lost her temper and set the most remarkable emotional tone for our work. During the five days that I worked there there was not one cross word, raised voice, expression of anger or upset, even when there were foul-ups, which did occur. Everyone worked in harmony. The campaign was supporting a number of candidates from judicial positions to state legislature to U.S. Senate to the presidency. Every one of the really local candidates dropped by usually at least once a day. They were all genuinely friendly and also remarkably appreciative that we had come from so far away to work in Ohio. Everyone knew how much was at stake.
My last two days there was spent entirely on reaching by phone absentee voters
to determine whether they had received the absentee ballots and whether they had returned them yet, and if not, we encouraged them to do that ASAP. Not one person that I spoke with was offended or irritated that I was calling or following up on a prior call. Everyone knew how important the election was.
The highlight of the last day I worked in Athens, Saturday, October 30, Michael Moore and Jesse Jackson were in town for a rally. I had the opportunity to go to a press conference for them at a local pub with Rashi. Both of them were outstanding speakers. Both were extremely serious. Michael Moore was just like he was in Fahrenheit 911. He was serious, sober and very compelling. His concern for the future of the country was palpable. It was a memorable event. The press conference was followed by a rally attended by several thousand students where both of them spoke again, but with a very different focus. They had with them a display on cloth about 100 yards long with the names and identification of all of our soldiers who have died in Iraq. It evoked the same kinds of feelings for me as the Vietnam memorial in Washington.
On Sunday I went to Columbus where I stayed until Wednesday morning. I switched hats and now was working for Election Protection; a non-partisan umbrella group whose goal was to see to it that every vote cast would be counted. Sunday was a full day. The first part was still Kerry partisan work, canvassing in a racially mixed working class neighborhood, reaching voters who had not yet been reached. Once again all of the voters were pleased by our efforts to reach them and encourage them to vote. I was surprised, however, when several people not only expressed no interest in the election but also were very clear that they were not going to vote. Following this we attended a John Edwards rally in an African-American neighborhood. He was introduced by the African-American mayor of Columbus, James Coleman, himself a very charismatic politician with gubernatorial ambitions as well as by former Senator John Glenn. I was no more than fifteen feet from Edwards, the first time I had really seen him close up. He was remarkably charismatic, encouraging and extremely youthful. He certainly seemed to have presidential potential.
The evening was spent at a talk given by a retired CIA senior agent about the politicization of the agency over the past several decades and the deterioration of its capabilities as a result. It was a very sobering and somber experience as he felt that there was a time when the agency was truly apolitical, whose sole task was the provision of the best information possible to the executive branch but that that was no longer true.
Monday began with a small breakfast get together of about thirty people with Cameron Kerry, John?s brother, once again accompanied by Mayor Coleman. It was an energizing experience to start the day. Much of the remainder of the day was spent with members of the Upper Arlington Kerry group. My host lived in Upper Arlington, an upscale community within Columbus. They had begun months earlier to begin a campaign to make the Democratic presence in their community known and felt, as it was perceived to be a solidly Republican area. By now there were literally thousands of UA (Upper Arlington) for Kerry lawn signs and people were talking of a turn out of 60% Democrats this election as compared to 30% in 2000. These were very hardworking people committed to delivering every last Democratic vote that they could.
In this process I discovered that there seemed to be virtually no on-going local grass roots Democratic political operation in the Columbus area, or for that matter in much of Ohio so that every election had to begin from the beginning all over again. People were amazed and distinctly interested in what we had accomplished in Santa Clara County as well as the state at large, and I offered to share with them what we had done and how we did it. I am in the process of gathering that information and sending it off. We would be doing a great service if we could help organize a Democratic structure in Ohio that led to political success. That evening we Election Protection people had a training for the real work that we would be doing on Election Day, making sure that all of the votes cast were counted.
Columbus was one of only two cities in Ohio that was using voting machines, a system they had been using for over ten years with relatively few problems, unlike Diebold and Sequoia. I was part of a team of attorneys whose job it would be to attend to whatever voting machine troubles emerged on Election Day. There were scores of us present at the training, several dozen of whom would be working together at the AFL-CIO headquarters in downtown Columbus plus scores a attorneys who would be either in roving groups able to go immediately to any polling place where they were needed or stationed at one of several dozen polling areas in minority communities, which had a history of disenfranchisement. The level of intensity at the training reflected the awareness that all of us had that we had potentially a crucial role to play in the election. Columbus had already been identified in the press as the central community in Ohio where the election was to have been decided. I know I went to sleep that night barely able to close my eyes.
We were up at 4:30 and at headquarters by 5:30. The polls opened at 6:30. Much of the specific training had been focused on responding to and recording incidents involving problems with voting and voting machines. We had all been trained in how to use the computer to fill out the forms plus there were huge piles of the forms to be initially hand written as there were just not enough computers to handle the expected volume of complaints and issues. The initial problem was that there was an inability to get the roll over phone system to work so that incoming calls could be distributed among the available phones. Eventually all of the problems with the phone system did get worked out.
This was a truly remarkable day for me and will stay with me for the rest of my life. I was where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to be doing, in this most important election of my lifetime.
For the first several hours I handled incoming calls with complaints about the length of the lines to vote despite the early hour. Most inquiries for help came from voters who did not know which precinct they should be voting at. Very quickly I had mastered the computer search system which located the polling place for any given address and was of immediate help to scores of people. The major effort was to prevent voters from having to resort to provisional votes as those has the least likelihood of actually being counted. We worked very hard with moderate success to get people to at least go to their correct precinct to cast their provisional vote because Ohio rules were clear that if you cast your provisional ballot at the wrong precinct it would not be counted.
By mid morning we had some scattered reports of voting machine malfunction and went to investigate at two polling places. At each place the poll monitors connected with Election Protection informed us that while there were minor voting machine glitches these were not really a serious problem and that the real problem was the length of the lines, which by 10:00 AM were getting to be up to two hours long.
On returning to headquarters we found a system in place of organizing the complaints we were getting by category. By noon one category that stood out was the complaint that in at least a dozen precincts there were fewer voting machines than there had been in use during the primary election. In the late morning, under the impetus of one of the local Ohio attorneys three of us went to the Board of Elections to see if we could get a response to this complaint. We met with the deputy director who took our list of complaints and returned after fifteen or twenty minutes with his response, that our informants were wrong and that in each of the ten or so precincts that he checked there was one more machine present per precinct and he was somewhat irritated about what he felt were unfounded complaints.
Shortly after we returned to headquarters our Ohio attorney lead suggested that we go out and in fact check on the actual number of voting machines in use at some of the precincts. This lead to the two most powerful experiences that I had during all of my work.
By around three o?clock we arrived at the Driving Range Recreational Area, a single poling place for several precincts. (You may have read about this elsewhere in the press and I can vouch for the truth based on my own personal experience.) The parking lot was full and there were several hundred cars parked on the grass around the building. As soon as we got out of our car we were approached by several Election Protection monitors who informed us that two vehicles from the Department of Parks and Recreation had recently arrived and that they were putting up "No Parking" signs and there were concerns that they were going to start towing cars away. Our lead attorney spoke with the Parks worker and then his supervisor who was also there, about the unfairness of what they were doing. By this time we had talked with a number of voters who said that they had had to wait 3 1/2 to 4 hours to vote and that there was no place else to park except on the grass. It was drizzling and the grass was wet. I told one Parks worker that it was not right that they would not let people park there in order to vote and it certainly was not fair that they were putting up "No Parking Signs" after people had already parked. We made enough noise that the Parks staff decided to stop whatever they were doing until they heard from their supervisor.
A local African-American woman Democratic worker then told me that she had called a contact of hers, the Assistant Director of Parks and Recreation and had left him a detailed phone message about what was happening and seeking his intervention. He returned her call and left a message that he would seek a satisfactory resolution. I then helped get some disabled voters to the front of the voting line that was by now several hundred people long and snaked in and around the entire recreational center.
When I returned to the parking area I was greeted by an African-American man who identified himself as the Director of Parks and Recreation. He chose me because I had on one of the Election Protection rain slickers which made me easily identifiable. He was somewhat agitated and said that he had come from a major meeting because he had received reports of complaints that his staff was interfering with voters right to vote and he wanted to know what was happening. I told him that that was not the issue, but that parking was. He repeated that it was against the city ordinance to park on the grass of public parks. I replied that I had been told that this type of parking occurred every time there was a football game. After a moment he responded that during the rain, like now, there was no parking on the grass. I was aware that he was looking for a way to defuse what had become a very hot situation. He and I then came up with the solution. He would remove all of his people and not interfere with the parking problem if I would take responsibility for seeing to it that whatever damage to the grass occurred; I would take the responsibility of repairing it, which I was completely amenable to. With that he left and some neighborhood Democratic workers came up to me, thanked me for my intervention and said that there would be no problem in repairing the damage to the grass, that they would take care of it. I felt that I had helped head off what could have become a very hot issue.
We then continued our tour of precincts to check on the actual number of voting machines present. At out next location, at around 5:00 P.M. at a single polling site for three precincts, we were greeted by some Election Protection people who were concerned that there were registered Republican vote challengers in the polling place and that one had already been ejected by the chief polling officer. The status of challengers was unclear but we wanted their roll limited. It turned out that they were functioning only as observers and not as challengers.
It was at this location that we had our starkest experience with the disenfranchisement resulting from long lines. One of the poll workers put it this way. There were about 2700 registered voters in the three precincts. There were ten voting machines. Under state law, which was then in effect, if there were long lines, than each voter had only five minutes to vote, this meant that the machines could handle twelve voters an hour or 156 voters in the thirteen hours the poles were open. By 5:00 about 1300 people had voted leaving another 1200 or so expected to vote with the polls closing in 2 1/2 hours. The polling supervisor said the math was quite simple. 1200 voters. 10 machines. 120 voters per machine. One voter every five minutes. Twelve voters per hour. That meant that there were ten hours of voters to be served in 2 1/2 hours. She said that she had no doubt that they would be working past midnight, with waits of up to 5 to 7 hours. That is how disenfranchisement worked in Columbus that day.
There was no way that this failure to provide an adequate number of machines was an accident. Everyone knew there would be a massive turnout. Everyone knew how may voters the machines could handle per hour. The arithmetic was really simple. Could you prove this was intentional disenfranchisement? That is what is being documented right now in Ohio to be used in legal challenges.
The rest of the work day continued with answering phones from people who wanted to vote and as the clock was running down they began to feel that they had played it too close on the clock and might not make it. We did out best to get people to their precincts before they closed. Once the polls closed the calls dropped off but did not stop. People called wanting to know if it was too late to vote, which it was. One voter told of how, at the end of the day, he was fired from his job.
We had heard some of the exit polling and were upbeat about the outcome at that time, around 7:00 PM. We went over to the Kerry headquarters to watch the results but by 1:00 or 2:00 AM it seemed like there would not be a result that night so we went to bed only to wake to our disappointment the next day.
I have had very mixed feelings about my experience. The eight days of election work in Ohio was one of the most exhilarating experiences of my life and I would not trade it for anything. I do believe that this was the most important election of my lifetime and it was no time to be on the sidelines and I had the opportunity to go to Ohio, the epicenter of the election. I am proud that I did. In addition, I was profoundly disturbed by the outcome of the election. I do believe it was a disaster for the country and that in future years people will come to recognize it for just that. After licking my wounds for several weeks I am slowly returning to political work, which has to start now. I personally feel that I will not give the Republicans or Bush a single inch of benefit of the doubt.