I haven't posted a diary yet about what happened yesterday, other than to the brave members of Congress who forced yesterday's public and permanent airing of America's dirty laundry of voter suppression into the Congressional Record. I'm still pondering, reflecting, and trying to decide where to go from here individually and collectively with those who are like-minded. It has been a teaching moment for my children, two of who are young adults who voted in their first presidential election on November 2 and need to understand fully why voting still matters even though their chosen candidate lost and many of their friends are calling them now chumps for even bothering with voting at all.
I have a very serious question, having read a lot of the diaries from yesterday. My question is directed to those who are upset because folks are venting their anger at John Kerry -- ranging from mild dismay to people who state that they essentially refuse to give him so much as the back of their hand ever again to people like me who, if John Kerry is again presented by the Democratic Party as a candidate for the party's nomination for President, I will vote against him and if he is actually nominated, will actively campaign against him -- and calling them unfair.
This is not a rhetorical question. On July 15, 2004, John Kerry stood before the 95th Convention of the NAACP and made the following statement:
Don't tell us that in the strongest democracy on earth, a million disenfranchised African Americans and the most tainted election in history is the best we can do. We can do better...and we will. . . .
He then made a promise, specifically to African-American voters, but ultimately, to everyone:
That is why we cannot accept a repeat of 2000. This November, thanks to the efforts of the NAACP and heightened vigilance across the nation, we are not only going to make sure that every vote counts; we're going to make sure that every single vote is counted.
He broke this promise, utterly. A promise that nobody begged him to give, to my knowledge - it was completely voluntary.
To me, he broke it at least three times:
He broke it when he conceded "because it won't change the outcome" while votes were still being counted for the first time in Ohio, necessary because there were thousands of (primarily) Black and poor folks still standing in the rain at 4:00 AM Ohio time to cast their votes and still tens of thousands of provisional ballots waiting to be counted, a testament to the utter success of Kenneth Blackwell's legal gaming of the system and abuse of his public trust. Nowhere in John Kerry's promise did he condition it on his ability to actually win the election. That was an after-the-fact caveat that he added on November 3.
He broke it again, when he chose to speak only through his handlers except to through those same surrogate voices sign on to the "fair and square" mantra even as Conyers' investigation was just beginning in Ohio, without a single public word of support for what was happening -- and when I say public, I mean public, the same was as his promise was public. Not through operatives and surrogates speaking for him (all of who were careful to chant the public mantra of "its over") until he jumped on both the John Conyers' and Cobb lawsuit bandwagons at the last minute, still having never made a public statement about his promise to African American voters before the election to ensure that their votes would count, and be counted. Kerry's public endorsement of these investigations as a way to fix a broken, corrupt election system would have given them what they otherwise utterly lacked - legitimacy amongst mainstream voters, and the press. As a result, they became the functional equivalent of a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.
Kerry broke his promise again (actually drove the nail into its coffin is a more apt descriptor) when he sent out a form letter passing the buck for Congress' failure to ensure that all votes were counted in 2000, on the eve of what he knew was going to be, at a minimum, members of the CBC again rising on the floor of the House to raise hell about the targeted suppression of Black and poor voters in the state of Ohio in 2004 -- suppression of HIS voters, 88% of the time, where African American voters were concerned -- without a single word of public support for them or any statement that he believed that what they felt they needed to do was right, was American, was needed if our fractured nation could ever reassure the poor and the colored and the dispossessed that they can and should participate in our democracy, and that yesterday's objection deserved a fair hearing even if it would not change the ultimate outcome of the election.
One of the things I will write about more at some point, is something that struck me forcefully during yesterday's mandated Congressional debate: in my opinion, the most rhetorically effective words uttered by any Republican yesterday, in terms of words that did not make them look either stupid, hard of hearing, or just plain willfully ignorant, were the words of John Kerry himself about this election. Over and over again, John Kerry's name was used time and time again by Republicans to support their cause. John Kerry became the Republican's Exhibit #1 for their claims that the accusations of voter suppression described in the objection lacked factual merit; that even making such accusations was harmful to the country and its moving forward against everything from a shaky economy to terrorism; and for conclusion of most on both sides of the political aisle that it was "not worth Congress' time" to sustain the challenge since there was "important work" to be done. John Kerry's own abandonment of his promise to African-American voters became a key weapon in the arsenal of rhetoric used (apparently successfully, if the comparative media silence is an indication) to delegitimize the efforts that the brave folks in the CBC and their few friends undertook to get the truth out, to raise hell, and to ensure that this time, the stench of corruption that surrounds George Bush's ascentions into the White House in 2000 and 2004 is permanently enshrined in the Congressional Record for the benefit of history, undeniable ever again.
Because after all, if John Kerry had thought that all the votes really hadn't counted and hadn't been counted, he'd have said so, right?
John Kerry made a conscious choice to absent himself from not only the United States Senate yesterday but the country itself. To run as far away as he could, from what he knew was going to happen. Some feel that was the right choice for him. I don't. Not only was it his job to be there (since last time I checked there is at least a theoretical expectation that Congresspeople will show up on January 6 to fulfill their constitutional duty to certify the election), I felt he owed it to those to whom he had made a promise.
Before folks start going off on tangents again, and that's everything from the tangent of "tin foil hat" to "Diebold conspiracy" (since I'm addressing neither) let me say again what I've consistently said. This is not about Kerry winning or losing Ohio and I don't care that he lost the election except for the depressing thought of another 4 years under King George (although lets be honest: how can anyone ever possibly know who exactly won Ohio, given that it is impossible to quantify how many did not vote and did not have their votes -- including provisional votes forced upon them -- counted even though they tried, simply because of how effectively the GOP machine made the process of voting in certain communities, primarily of color, the psychological equivalent of an unanesthetized root canal? Aren't you assuming when you insist that Bush won that there really were not 118,000 people out there who might have voted differently if they could have? For example, there are 1.3 million Black people in Ohio; 382,000 Black people in Cuyahoga County alone. You target suppression at that populaton alone and you can still make a pretty good start on a 118K vote difference) For me, raising hell about this issue is not about Kerry winning in Ohio, and never was(after all, at least as far as African-Americans go, if the national average was replicated in Ohio, for every 100 voters suppressed, Dubbya himself lost 12 votes -- and I'm just as upset on their behalf.) My beef is, and remains, was about voter suppression, paritcularly targeted as it has been historically at African-American voting populations.
Fighting about Ohio was to me, always about the principles of what this country claims to stand for. It was about principles and a promise.
Make no mistake: To me, Kerry broke the latter, and showed that any of the former he has are utterly self-serving.
So can someone please explain to me why it is exactly that African-Americans who voted Democrat like myself should not be enraged at this man, should excuse his breaking his promise from July and should just shut up and dance going forward where John Kerry is concerned? That is not a rhetorical question: for those that believe that Kerry is still trustworthy and deserves understanding because of his chosen approach to what happened yesterday -- how much consideration are you giving to his very express, yet very broken, promise? Aren't you, by defending him, really saying that it was OK to break it? Because it didn't really matter? Why doesn't it matter?
Again, these are not rhetorical questions.