October 2004 Archive

Try to believe that a person as empty as Maureen Dowd plays the role she does in your political culture. Fatuous, vacuous, inept and inane, she's currently counting up Kerry's contractions. Everything changed on September 11. Everything changed except that.

WORLD SERIES NOTE: Here's a strange coincidence. The Cardinals have complained about their Boston accomodations at the Quincy Mariott this year. In my hero Bob Gibson's autobiography, he said that poor treatment at the Sheraton Motor Inn of Quincy helped to motivate him before his Game 7 triumph in 1967.

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The nub of the likely Democratic strategy is the so-called "provisional ballot." The 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA) requires that any voter whose registration is uncertain, or who is unregistered, can still cast a ballot "provisionally." Once the polls close, the voter's name is checked against public records to ensure its eligibility, and then his vote is added to the relevant candidate's tally. In theory, it is a sensible idea, giving a voter who is the victim of some bureaucratic snafu the chance to vote. But the Democrats hope to turn the intention of the law on its head. Provisional ballots are presumed unlawful unless demonstrated otherwise. Remember: These "provisional" votes wouldn't have been considered valid in 2000. Many of them surely should be excluded this year, but Democrats will create pressure to count them all no matter what.

As I said last week, my North Carolina county has been using provisional ballots successfully for several years. No one wants to vote a provisional ballot -- everyone wants to use a regular ballot and insert it into the tabulator to be certain that it will be counted. A provisional ballot may be rejected; it's only a last resort.

I don't see how provisional ballots could be an effective method of fraudulent voting. Filling out a provisional ballot must be done in person, it's time-consuming and it requires a signature. Where would one get an army of people willing to travel from precinct to precinct on election day, committing felonies and signing their names at each stop?

Provisional ballots are a good thing, but they're subject to human error and confusion like anything else. Since many jurisdictions will be using them for the first time, there will no doubt be difficulties somewhere. Problems with provisional ballots could of course be critical in an election as close as Florida in 2000, but everything becomes critical in an election like that. The paranoia is unjustified.

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Mr. Meyerson certainly appears to deserve his high partisanship score. He has been simultaneously more pro-Kerry than Joe Conason and more anti-Bush than Paul Krugman -- the most extreme of all 33 rated pundits. Unlike many Democratic columnists who graciously praised Ronald Reagan after his death, Mr. Meyerson ripped Reagan and Reaganomics and Reaganites and Reaganauts. Mr. Meyerson's record this year is of course unmarred by any columns which favor Republicans, but there was one crossover column critical of Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean. We'll see whether he can eventually challenge the two titans of partisanship in our rankings.

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Mr. Safire has particularly come under fire for his two most recent columns. Ben Fritz of Spinsanity criticizes him for his column on the John Kerry-Mary Cheney controversy:

Safire went even further, alleging to have specific information that the accusation was part of Kerry's debate preparation. "Members of Kerry's debate preparation team made Mary Cheney's private life the centerpiece of their answer to the question, especially worrisome to them, about same-sex marriage," he wrote. "Kerry was prepped to insert her sexuality into his rehearsed answer." But the pundit provides no evidence to back up this claim, which contradicts facts reported in the New York Times and elsewhere. Safire is conflating speculation about political motives with definitive fact.

Of course, Safire is free to speculate that the campaign is lying. But he should not present this speculation as fact, just as pundits should be honest about what they mean then they say someone "outed" a well-known figure in the gay community.

Meanwhile, Andrew Sullivan has taken issue with Mr. Safire on both the Kerry-Mary and fearmongering columns.

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I do not believe that citizens are lazy or stupid. The problems of the electorate are multiple and complex. But let me suggest one possibility among many why Americans appear to know so little about their own government and fail to participate in its running: We are fat and happy.

It has been the case for a very long time that it doesn't really matter who holds any particular political position--including the presidency. Both parties have operated within an acceptable normal political range. Both parties have supported the free enterprise system. Both parties have supported the classically liberal notions of individual self-actualization and political participation. Both political parties have supported the opposition's right to exist, to contend for power, and to run the show when in the majority.

While some may argue that these common values are breaking down now, the average American just doesn't see--largely because the status quo bias of journalism keeps such talk out of serious discussion. As long as the economy works and no one is taking political power by force, we the people are happy to spend our time worrying about making money and buying things. As long as these pursuits remain uninterrupted by more than a recession from time to time, we the people just cannot be bothered with politics. Everything appears to work just fine.

It's a safe bet you will hear more about provisional ballots before Election Day--and a lot more if the election goes into overtime again. The provisional ballot could become this year's equivalent of Florida's infamous punch-card ballot, and it could decide who wins the presidency.

This is the ninth year I've worked at the polls in my precinct; one of my jobs has been to determine when a provisional ballot is called for and to help the voter use it. In our county, we've used provisional ballots for several years before HAVA required them.

For butterfly ballots and hanging chads, discerning the voter's intent was very difficult. But the main issue with provisional ballots is whether the voter is legally registered or not, which should not be that complicated for the great majority of voters. The question of whether provisional votes in the wrong precinct should count will no doubt vary from one jurisdiction to another, but that also doesn't seem very complicated. In Mr. Fund's article, Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell "says that allowing voters to cast ballots outside their precincts would lead to chaos and invite 'stop and shop' multiple voting." That doesn't make any sense -- filling out and signing provisional ballots in multiple locations would be committing an easily-proven felony.

Provisional voting is merely an attempt to deal with the inevitable election day snafus and provide a mechanism for legitimately-registered voters to vote successfully. Provisional ballots could indeed be decisive in a close election -- and there's nothing wrong with that.

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But his seven October columns so far have contained a whopping 163 Democratic-leaning references against only 2 individual references in the other direction. The titles suggest pre-election mode: Bush's costly gaffe, Bush errs in ceding the future, 'Global test' tactic turns against Bush, Cheney proves his irrelevance, Cheney's fading credibility, Personal hedge and Bush's dodge and duck.

Of course, Mr. Oliphant goes way back with John Kerry, and his daughter is a member of Mr. Kerry's staff. Given all of that, it's remarkable that three pundits have been even more positive toward John Kerry -- Harold Meyerson, Joe Conason, and Paul Krugman.

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Positive	Negative
Kerry (86)	Kerry (93)
Democratic (24)	Democratic (29)
John F. Kerry (18)	Democrats (18)
Democrats (17)	John F. Kerry (18)
Edwards (10)	Edwards (14)

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Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry's choice of words are betraying their readers.

When I criticize Mr. Krugman, it's not because he doesn't spend equal time criticizing Democrats and Republicans; it's simply because he's gone almost five years without criticizing Democrats at all.

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O'REILLY ON THE VERGE: In April I noted that Bill O'Reilly had been very non-partisan to that point, going so far as to say that "I suspect that Mr. O'Reilly has an independent streak which will continue to keep him out of the Lying in Ponds Top Ten." Oops. With a series of one-sided Republican columns in the last month, Mr. O'Reilly is knocking at the door, only a point behind Cal Thomas for 10th place in the current partisanship rankings. His weekly column comes out today -- we'll see if he can be a factor in the Top Ten.

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Why is that significant? The GOP editorials give us an idea of what genuine partisanship looks like in the Lying in Ponds rankings. There's nothing wrong with such a high score for explicitly partisan Republican columns -- there's no deception involved. But the similarly high partisanship scores of pundits such as Ms. Coulter and Paul Krugman demonstrate that they are not the independent analysts that they pretend to be.

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There was a time when Claribel and Etta Cone threw off their turn-of-the-century inhibitions and cavorted around bohemian Paris with a scrappy bunch of outcast artists and writers who only much later became famous.

With an insatiable love of beautiful objects, they snatched up paintings, drawings, lithographs, fabrics and sculpture over four decades. Their enthusiasm for the financially struggling Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso helped ensure the artists' success, and it popularized their work in the United States.

. . .

With an exhibition that opens next Sunday at the N.C. Museum of Art, this state will get its first look at some of the masterpieces the sisters bought -- an astonishing collection of 3,000 pieces valued at $1 billion.

Ed, the great-great-nephew of the Cone sisters, makes an appearance at the end of the article.

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