One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty "checking" voter registration cards from the recent primary election.
The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw next that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again. It was stopped in Brooklyn only thanks to an insider with a conscience.
As the polls tighten, Slate's veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can't bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.
Let me give this sage of journalism something he really deserves -- a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits' jitters are worth frothing about just now. Ask yourself these simple questions:
Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called "Bradley Effect." Maybe, maybe not, but that we're even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary, "Things No One Talks About," in Dissent magazine.
What I don't talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we'd heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn't, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.
In 1994 I wrote that the left activist and sage Jim Chapin considered New York's then-new mayor Rudy Giuliani a "progressive conservative" like Teddy Roosevelt.
David Brooks, who worshipped Giuliani, picked up the phrase, and now he's claiming that it would have fit John McCain, too, if only McCain had "escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times." That he didn't escape makes his campaign "unspeakably sad."
Hello? The hero of Hanoi, imprisoned by his Republican base and his chosen running mate? What's unspeakably sad is how long ago McCain's leadership and Brooks' judgment went wrong -- a surprise only to journalists who still fall for Brooks as they once did for McCain.
