Interview: Sean C. Ewing on seeking public office

Never down, never out

Interviewed by Moristotle

The first yard signs we saw in our neighborhood for the November 7 election of three City Councillors in Mebane, North Carolina advertised Sean C. Ewing. It was his first run for a governmental office, and he was opposing the three popular incumbents whose terms were ending. All of the incumbents had served at least two terms already, and two of them had served at least six terms. Sean seemed to be in for an uphill battle.

As the World Turns: Control the throne

A new strategy for Democratic government

By Ed Rogers

From my most recent novel, Unwanted President:

Adam Weishaupt realized that the real power was with those who controlled the seat of power, not with the one who happened to be sitting on the throne. [p. 71]
    [President] Benton forgot the rule of rules: the power is always in the dark behind the throne. [p. 277]

Be prepared to fight for your right to vote

With so many Americans in the McCain/Palin camp showing themselves to be red-hot rednecks, we well-behaved, hopeful Americans need to be ready for what might unfold on Election Day. We haven't forgotten the debacle in Florida eight years ago, or the serious findings of vote theft and disenfranchisement in Ohio four years later (see Robert F. Kennedy, Jr's Rolling Stone article, "Was the 2004 election stolen?"). It is impossible to doubt that similar things will be tried this year. After tolerating an illegitimate "president" Bush for eight years, it would be heart-breaking (and nation-destroying) to endure four more years of such "leadership."

The New York Times reports, in today's editorial, "Sorry, I Can’t Find Your Name," that

Republicans have been pressing for sweeping voter purges in many states. They have also fought to make it harder to enroll new voters. Voting experts say there could be serious problems at the polls on Nov. 4.
    When voters die or move to a new address, or when duplicate registrations are found, a purge is necessary to uphold the integrity of the rolls. New registrations must also be properly screened so only eligible voters get added. The trouble is that these tasks generally occur in secret, with no chance for voters or their advocates to observe or protest when mistakes are made.
    A number of states — including the battleground state of Florida — have adopted no match, no vote rules. Voters can be removed from the rolls if their names do not match a second list, such as a Social Security or driver’s license database. But (like the U.S. mail) lists of this kind are notoriously mistake-filled, and one typo can cause a no match. In Ohio, Republicans recently sued the secretary of state, demanding that she provide local officials with a dubious match list. As many as 200,000 new voters could have been blocked from casting ballots. The Supreme Court rejected the suit, but Republicans are still looking for ways to use the list on Election Day.

The editorial warns us to be prepared to fight for our right to cast a ballot and recommends that voters vote early if their state permits it. "Any voter who finds that their [sic] name has disappeared from the rolls will then have time to challenge mistakes."

The editorial concludes [emphasis mine] that

If voters find on Election Day that their names are not on the rolls, they should contact a voters’ rights group like Election Protection, at 1-866-OUR-VOTE, or a political campaign, which can advocate for them. They should not, except as a last resort, cast a provisional ballot, since it is less likely to be counted.
    There is a desperate need for reform of the way voting rolls are kept. Until then, election officials, voting rights advocates and voters must do everything they can to ensure that all eligible voters are allowed to vote.

I plan to vote early myself, as many, many Americans are doing—they're that angry¹ and that concerned. I'm hearing that the lines for voting early are getting pretty long, but they're surely a good deal shorter than what we'd experience on November 4 if we haven't voted (or attempted to vote) before then.

By the way, the comments from Times readers on today's editorial are extremely moving.
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1. A friend tells me that some white people in her neck of the Pennsylvania woods who still use the n-word are so mad they're going to ignore Mr. Obama's skin color and vote Democratic...if they're not prevented by one or another dirty trick.

Rove's legacy

In his August 14 op-ed piece in The New York Times, David Frum seems to me to have captured accurately what Karl Rove has mainly been about:

[Rove courted] carefully selected constituencies with poll-tested promises: tax cuts for traditional conservatives, the No Child Left Behind law for suburban moderates, prescription drugs for anxious seniors, open immigration for Hispanics, faith-based programs for evangelicals and Catholics.
      These programs often contradicted each other. How do you cut taxes and also create a big new prescription drug benefit? If the schools are failing to educate the nation's poor, how does it make sense to expand that population by opening the door to even more low-wage immigration?
      Instead of seeking solutions to national problems, "compassionate conservatism" started with slogans and went searching for problems to justify them. To what problem, exactly, was the faith-based initiative a solution?
      This was a politics of party-building and coalition-assembly. It was a politics that aimed at winning elections....

"Was"? According to Jim Rutenberg's New York Times report on August 13 of Rove's "interview with The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial page is a favored outlet for...^*Bush and his aides," Rove said of his leaving Bush's employ "that he had no intention of getting involved in the 2008 presidential race"—except, of course, for an occasional oracular pronouncement:

In his exit interview today, which was with the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigot...Rove had a parting shot for his political nemesis, telling Mr. Gigot that he believed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the Democratic nominee but called her a "tough, tenacious, fatally flawed candidate," and predicted a Repuplican victory in the 2008 presidential race. It is the sort of political boasting that had become...Rove's hallmark.

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* The ellipsis indicates the omission of "Mr.," a term of respect I cannot bring myself to use for these moral midgets, these loathsome liars.