Why are the polls so close?

This says it better than I could.

A Look Back at the Paradigm Shift

What’s been happening this year?

I’ve been watching, you’ve been watching, as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton went nose-to-nose over the right to lead the Democratic party to victory in November, from sometime back in February to just the last couple of weeks, when the bow was neatly tied on party unity and the race to defeat John McCain began in deadly earnest.

Not without some surprises.  The Repubs picked Sarah Palin as the new running mate.  Well, that doesn’t come as so much of a shock — all you had to do was to think of the most cynical, vote-grabbing thing they could have done to win, and you’d have bet that they’d have picked a woman.  And for any woman to be thrust onto the stage and pushed into the limelight just because she’s a woman and therefore likely to grab votes, is an insult to women everywhere.  If that was done to Governor Palin, she should be outraged.  That she’s not, given her extreme right-wing views and her belief in a faith that tells women they should “respectfully submit to the authority of their husbands yadda yadda yadda…” Is, well… not too shocking either.

We come to the part of the story where the Culture Wars begin, for real.  There have always been two Americas, for as long as I can remember: the ones who believe in peaceful, intelligent solutions to world problems and the ones who believe that throwing our weight around on the playground will make us the biggest, baddest kids in the park, and therefore safer.

There have always been these two groups.  They were in my high school, mixed together, going to classes together, going to the same sporting events – though, now that I think of it, I’d put more of the former group in the marching band and more of the latter on the football team.  Which makes for an interesting analogy.  I’ll have to explore that another time.

Within these groups were subgroups.  Among those of us who were on the side of peaceful solutions to world problems were philosophical realists who struggled with the ideas of whether or not might makes right and whether or not one could claim victory at something if that victory was achieved by means contrary to your stated goals.  In other words, would it be right to gain power in order to pursue your agenda to save the world, if in order to do so you played by the enemy’s rules, and therefore created much of the damage that you started out to prevent in the first place?  At the attainment of such power, wouldn’t you have, in effect, become the enemy? Would you really be able to work any positive change from such a place?

We were a philosophical group.  Some of us swayed in the direction of “whatever it takes to win” and some of us toward the idea that victory earned in that way can’t be counted as such.

There are people of all stripes today who are wrestling with this question.  These groups still exist, and are interspersed throughout our society, working together, married to each other, sometimes in enclaves and sometimes not.  There are places like Colorado Springs, where you are more likely to bump into McCain voters, and places a few miles up the road like Boulder, Colorado, where the vast majority of the vote will most likely go to Barack Obama.  To my eyes, these groups are neatly polarized into the “might makes right” camp and the camp that believes we’ve got to lead through diplomacy and moral example.  (Although, the 2008 Democratic state convention was held in Colorado Springs, where only five years ago protestors – myself among them – were teargassed after joining 15,000,000 others around the world in demonstrating against the start of the then-imminent Iraq War.  Progress has been made.)

Let’s take a look back at what’s been happening in the Democratic party, however.  We’ve been forming a national identity.  We’ve been coalescing around the ideas that we want cleaner energy, that freedom and security both lie in the direction of independence from, rather than control over, foreign sources of oil, that to respect the planet is to respect and help ourselves, and that women, like men, must be able to choose what happens with their bodies.  We’ve dedicated ourselves to stopping the Iraq war and to providing health care for all of us, and we want to bring the economy back with new, green industries and make sure that our children are properly educated.

But there’s one big issue that been dividing the party.  It’s not the “Oh, Hillary’s a woman and Barack’s a black man” line down the middle, though that’s gotten all the press.  The real issue between Barack and Hillary was the way they campaigned, as an indicator of how they would approach change in Washington.

Sometime in the last 20 years, politics took a dramatic turn toward the negative, particularly in presidential elections.  Smear tactics became the norm.  People have become cynical and now expect them.  The republicans managed to take over both houses of congress during Clinton’s second term – and they didn’t do it because an actual majority of Americans supported them, but because they managed to take advantage of voter apathy and organize enough votes out of their base to put them over the numbers necessary to win.  The Democrats, seeing the Republicans’ wins over the years, have been drifting more and more toward the same set of anything-to-win tactics as the Republicans – including Scare Your Voters, Lie and Distort the Truth, Smear your Opponent and so on.  The problem is, when you adopt these tactics, you end up becoming very much like your opponent, regardless of your ideological differences.  Which is why the Democratic party kept drifting so far to the right for so long, trying to slice and dice the same group of voters that the Repubs considered their base, using the same tactics.  They ignored the left-leaning elements, to the point where most of the progressives in America felt powerless to take part in the political scene.

In 2004, along comes Howard Dean.  He energizes a hitherto-apathetic base by refusing to use smear tactics, by telling the truth, and by employing technology that allows people to connect with each other and to collectively build a movement for change from the ground up.

He becomes the unexpected frontrunner early in the race, but is knocked out of the running by a series of last-minute, cynical attacks from the campaign of John Kerry, which, though untrue, nevertheless worked.  Dean lost New Hampshire, and Kerry got the nomination.  A large, very networked, very disappointed organization was left behind and was virtually ignored by Kerry’s campaign.  Kerry didn’t understand Dean’s way of organizing, and he certainly didn’t understand why all those people had come together to support Dean in the first place.  It was because Dean was saying the things that people were thinking, and he was listening to the people that talked back to him.  He was simply speaking the truth.  He was giving people a chance to take part in the conversation and he was refusing to use negative tactics against his opponents to win people over to his side.  He was awakening the parts of the population that had been avoiding the political process because they didn’t feel they had any real representation.  Kerry’s campaign and the older, established parts of the Democratic party didn’t understand this, but they did understand how to fight dirty and try and undermine your opponent in order to win.  They attempted to appeal to the more conservative set of voters that had voted in the previous elections, instead of appealing to those voters who hadn’t voted because there had been no one to represent them.  Because, after all, when you campaign with those kind of tactics, the people who are most likely to respond to them are the ones more likely to respond to fear – and the Repubs are always better at fear.  When you use those kinds of tactics, you inevitably push the dialogue farther to the right.

When John Kerry won the nomination, and proceeded to botch the general election, there were a whole crowd of disillusioned people who had just watched a smear tactic take down their champion.  In the intervening years, this group of people grew and became more organized and came back to try again, morphing into the campaign of and the movement behind Barack Obama.  Howard Dean may not have taken his country back in 2004, but he did begin to take back the party.

This year, the dialogue has been between two people who embody the old and new ways of doing politics. Hillary represented the politics of the old, where the ends justify the means, and doing anything to win is all right, as long as you win.  Barack represented the organized and interested base, who wanted access to and input into the way things are done in Washington, and who wanted the way that politics were done in this country to change from top to bottom, starting with the way we talk to each other about the issues.  If, on the national stage, we could put a man who spoke clearly and intelligently about the problems facing us, and refused to resort to tearing his opponent down in order to win votes, we just might have someone who thought like us and represented us.  Putting such a man in office, who has kept a running dialogue going with and between his supporters, might mean that we were putting a man in office who would indeed govern that way, as a participant with the people rather than an insulated politician listening to a closed circle of influence.  Hillary appeared as though she would have ignored that base, and we would have been denied, for at least another four to eight years, the kind of access we need in order to change the way government works.  It was the most clear in their respective campaign slogans, from Barack’s “Yes we can” to Hillary’s supporters’ chant of “Yes she will.”

It was one of the hallmarks of Barack’s campaign that he was working to create change every step of the way.  He didn’t expect to win when he started out.  But people responded to that willingness to change the dialogue as he went, with every step pushing it more toward civility and honesty.  More people gravitated toward this message than toward Hillary’s politics-as-usual, and I think the major deciding factor in getting Barack the nomination was this fact.  People weren’t just being promised change – they were seeing change.  Politics was being changed right before their very eyes.  The race for the democratic nomination became a real one, a substantive one – one in which every step toward that goal, for the Obama campaign, was in itself a victory.  Obama’s speech on race, the fact that his campaign has been funded solely by individual campaign contributions – primarily from ordinary people giving only what they can afford, the “open convention” at Invesco Field, all were powerful milestones that have changed the face of politics in this country.  The fact that he is the first black man to be nominated seems almost incidental.  But the most powerful change is that he got there by energizing the base that wants to see and contribute to positive change in the world, not the one that feels we must lash out in fear.  He spoke to all the people who have been disenfranchised and got them into the process again.

Because now – even more than in 2004 – we see each other.  Oh, yes, we have seen.  We know what we can do.  And even if Barack were to lose this election, we would still be here, having learned from yet another defeat, still organizing to win in 2012.  Or – who knows? – In some other way.  Because we must win at some point.  We have the numbers.  The question is whether or not there are sufficient numbers of us to get out and vote and overwhelm the numbers that will be driven to the polls by whatever scare tactics or drastic smears that the McCain campaign has planned for the last minute.

And make no mistake, those will come.  This election is not about issues for the Republicans- it’s become blatently about getting the numbers through whatever means necessary – lie, cheat, steal, and scare people into voting your way.  One wishes that the Democratic nomination race had been the race for the actual presidency.  Because here’s where the man that we’ve selected – and we – get put to the test.  Can we do it?  Can we organize enough votes to get out there and put him over the top?  Will he stay on message enough to sway more voters to his side?  Will he continue to create change in the way politics are done, at every step along the way, and force the race to be substantive?  Will he call the Republicans on their tactics and their blatant untruths?  Or will we get blindsided in our optimism again, having underestimated the power of the easily swayed to react in great numbers to an attack launched to generate fear?

This is, after all, a Republican opponent we’re talking about, not another Democrat.  They are only interested in winning, not in how they do it.  The Democratic message is that the “How” is part of the win.  If you win by distorting your opponent’s words and attacking them, trying to stir up fear in the voters in order to get them to vote for you, you may as well be running on the Republican side.  On the other hand, to call your opponent on a lie when they are lying is not an attack – that’s just telling the truth.  What the Obama campaign needs to do now is get back on message – tell people that we can’t have this kind of campaigning with lies and deception any more; that it’s indicative of how the country will be run if that side were to win.  Create change with every step of the way and draw more people to us with every step of change.