My election days
How one citizen spent his time.
Democracy is messy business. Not nearly as messy as every other form of government (to badly paraphrase Churchill), but messy nevertheless. I arose at slightly after six on election day. This is far earlier than is my usual custom, I can assure you, but I had work to do that demanded an early morning start.
Several months ago, I provided some design work for the Republican candidate for state representative in my district, Jeff Szymanski. Szymanski, a school teacher, ran an admirable citizen-politician campaign. Among other things, he took no donations over two hundred dollars and walked door-to-door through the district nearly a dozen times. Meanwhile, his opponent - the incumbent - was a small cog in the Rhode Island Democratic Party Machine; a former Providence City Hall employee who filled the vacuum left by Patrick Kennedy's elevation to the next level of his dubious political career. Szymanski asked me to hold a sign and greet voters at my local polling places and I was happy to oblige.
By quarter to seven I was holding open a broken door for waiting voters at one local polling place. That was the prelude to five coffee-fueled hours trudging the parking lot in icy early November New England weather, offering campaign business cards to whomever was polite enough to take one. Returning home I made the last updates to Dan Belforti's campaign web site. Dan's campaign was wounded by the New Hampshire Libertarian Party's difficulty in obtaining needed signatures for ballot access, but he continued on as a write-in candidate - and also may have begun a promising sideline as a radio talk show host.
Shortly afterward, Michael Badnarik's campaign for president reached their goal of one million dollars in donations and as a result posted the Macromedia Flash animation I rushed to create for them Sunday afternoon. Their link to my site resulted in approximately ten times the usual amount of daily visitors. If you are reading this within a week of Election Day 2004, that link is likely the reason.
At poll closing time I was drafted into reporting the announced vote totals from another polling place to Szymanski headquarters. This took nearly an hour longer than planned as the election workers there were clearly baffled by the mechanics of the electronic ballot reader. The remainder of the evening was spent in a local coffee house watching returns. Whatever lack of success the Democrats are suffering nationally of late, their corrupt patronage juggernaut defeated one superior challenger after another all over the state. Szymanski, who deserved far better, lost by a 2-to-1 ratio.
President Bush wins by a few million votes. This is no surprise - incumbents win. It's the surest political certainly out there. Hours after the outcome became clear, John Edwards makes a speech that is the very picture of sore-loserism, and Dan Rather's CBS attempts to build an "Election 2000"-esque narrative.
I never did get to smoke my celebratory cigar. Perhaps tomorrow.
05.11.2004 © ljr