From my
new blog Battlegrounds &
Ballot Boxes
In the opening post of this site I spoke about
battlegrounds: the places and ideas we fight over and how they are often ignored for the sake of the characters, heroes and villains real or imagined. That is only one piece of this blog: to focus on the story not the melodrama (though it will be tough).
The other part of
my blog deals with a word that tends to represent part of our world I don't like: Ballot Boxes. No not the
Black box voting machines, though and important issue, not what I am discussing here.
No I am not a
fascist. I love democracy and I am forever grateful for the ability to vote as a United States citizen. However, voting ... is not as important as people make it out to be. There is a reason voting is left to the states in the constitution while the free press is in the first amendment to it. In politics we put a lot of weight on voting - because that is how one wins. However, in a successful campaign it is only the final battle the one that is often pre-determined by earlier victories and losses - think Waterloo, Yorktown or Hiroshima/Nagasaki. These battles were really determined by other events - the ill-fated Russian Invasion, the French Alliance, and Manhattan Project. Decisions are made during the process, long before an election or in the case of the atomic bomb, before it was finished. It is the debate, the meetings, endorsements, donations, and speeches that win a campaign, the votes are the official way of registering the opinion you already told your best friend.
Campaigns are very similar. Voting should be the final expression of an opinion one has already formed an acted on. It can be as simple as talking to your co-worker or canvassing your neighborhood. Most people know that they are, modern politics balances on the economy factors outside the direct control of many of the incumbents and challengers that use them to get elected. These campaigns create no permanent agreement or consensus and leave the winner with little mandate. It is election and forums in Porte Alegre that is
Democracy at it's best - with large numbers of people involved in the activities of their government year round.
Ballot Boxes have become the symbol of Democracy, and nowhere has this been more elegantly portrayed than in the Iranian film
Secret Ballot, about an election worker in a rural area. The film is impressive in the realization that this important box is far less important than the relationships formed in the film and the act of voting itself. It is not the votes, nor box, that is powerful it is act of voting, because it is the symbolic representation of speaking your mind.
The
Dean campaign is successful not because it raises large sums of money and polls well (though that is a good news story) it is successful because it has been able to convince more volunteers than ever that you can make a difference long before each vote is cast. It has created social ties and political connections that allow the campaign to raise money and do well in polls. It's more fun to talk battleground states, and how Saddam affects Dean. But it is more accurate to talk townships and counties and talk about how Dean reacted to Saddam and how his supporters react to him.
It is this concentration on voting alone that has led this party to where it is. Like churches that pack it in on Christmas and Easter we have a hard time having loyal and dedicated members that come every Sunday and join the political version of bible study. This is how you obtain victory in the South and raise millions. This is how we will make our country better off than it was when we got it. We do it long before anyone votes at
Meetups, local Democratic Clubs, and blogs.