Election Day - Prologue
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 11/04/2008 - 06:59It all boils down to this. Over the next eighteen hours, or so, voters will stream to the polls across our country to select our forty-fourth president. All ready millions of votes have been cast in early voting. Nearly two million people have voted already in Georgia, a state where 3.3 million voters in total voted in 2004. The early voting lines in Florida where so long that the Governor ordered the polls be open an extra four hours each day. In all thirty-one states currently have early voting and many are reporting record turnout and long lines for the early voting.
Shortly, the polls will open in Connecticut, a state that does not currently have early voting. As soon as I finish this blog post, I will go and vote. I plan on Videoing my vote, and Twittering my vote to Vote Report. I will then stand at the polls to talk with incoming voters about the state legislative candidates as well as the ballot questions in Connecticut.
A lot of attention has been placed on the Presidential election, yet there are also congressional elections, and state legislative elections. Here in Connecticut, the state legislative races should be especially interesting to watch. Last year, our state legislature passed a bill enabling public funding of state elections. You can get details about the program at the State Election Enforcement Commission’s Citizen Election Program website. It has certainly livened up the races here in Connecticut.
My wife is working for Common Cause, which is partner in the 866-our-vote voter protection project. She will be tracking and dealing with voter suppression issues in this election.
When I finish my poll standing, I will hop on a train to Washington DC, where I will be joining a group of nprbloggers to report on election returns. While I expect to write a little on the nuts and bolts of the Connecticut results as well as any issues with voter suppression, I intend to write a bit about the larger issues, the issues of narrative and if and how this is changing our country.
Stay tuned. Leave me any thoughts you have. No matter what happens, it will be an historic day.
Sisyphus '08
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 12:59It is approaching noon on the day before the U.S. Elections. I’ve read emails, written blog posts, joined in on conference calls, gone door to door, yet I’m sitting with a feeling of unease. Have I done enough? Have any of us done enough? Have we focused our energies where they are most needed?
What will happen tomorrow? Will Sen. Obama become the first black person to be elected President of the United States? Will Sen. McCain pull out some miraculous comeback? What about all the other elections, the congressional elections, the state legislative elections, and the ballot questions? Will they bring about significant change?
Even if Sen. Obama is elected, how effective will he be in bringing change to our country?
My mind wanders to Dec 31st, 1999. Year 2000 was just moments away. I watched as one timezone after another celebrated the New Year without any disruption and somehow, it feels similar. So many of my friends are doing everything they can in preparation for a major change. I share some of their hope, but I also suspect that we won’t see as much change as people hope for.
Yes, we may see a bright charismatic young new President, but I expect that Sen. McCain will still get an incredible number of votes. Perhaps over sixty million votes. Perhaps more votes that President Bush received in 2004. Some people will celebrate. Some people will mourn. Some will be jubilant. Others will be angry and complaint about voter fraud and people who shouldn’t have voted voting, votes not being counted and so on.
Then, over the coming days, we will return to our daily lives. We will forget about the election as we struggle to make ends meet and the question will perhaps become deeper. What has all of the politics leading up to this election really done? Has it made our country better? Have people’s minds been changed about important issues? Are we changing the way we live to make our country and our world better?
I will get up tomorrow morning, and I will vote. I will stand at the polling place and talk with voters that haven’t decided how they are voting in the State Legislative races or on the ballot questions. I will hop on a train to Washington to cover the election returns. Then, like Sisyphus, I shall watch the bolder of politics roll back down the hill for the next batch of candidates to start pushing back up.
Walking through the fallen leaves
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 12:23
Fiona Interviews State Rep Candidate Marc Garofalo
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 09:29Every Sunday evening, Fiona and I do an Internet based talk radio show on BlogTalkRadio.
Last night, Marc Garofalo, who is running for State Representative called into the show and talked a little bit about the campaign.
You can listen to the whole show on BlogTalkRadio. I've also extracted that part of the show where Fiona interviews Marc, which you can listen to here.
We've been doing the show for a few months and have been developing a great archive of discussions. Hopefully, this will help Fiona take it to a new level as she works on interviewing skills and hopefully it can provide a little boost to Marc in his campaign.
It’s the Narrative, Dummy!
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 11/02/2008 - 10:17The extra hour that we gained last night gave me more time to work on my novel for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Between that and reading Neil Postman’s Building a Bridge to the 18th Century, I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of narrative, of sense making, of how all the information bombarding us daily helps us understand ourselves and those around us a little better.
I would like to suggest that this may be the most important part of Sen. Obama’s campaign. All of the social networking tools trying to raise money and get out the vote are just more of the never-ending stream of information bombarding us. However, they are a valuable tool if they help people establish their own understanding of who Sen. Obama is and how it relates to their lives.
It is because of this that I’m most interested in some of the user generated content that has been created around the campaign. Several months ago, this video appeared on YouTube casting the presidential campaign in terms of PokeMon
More recently, somehedgehog wrote Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly. It provides a humorous insight into politics that makes sense to Dungeon and Dragon players.
This came into even better focus during a show on National Public Radio yesterday talking about Hunter S. Thompson’s coverage of the 1972 campaign. One person quoted a McGovern campaign official saying something to the effect that Thompson’s coverage was the most factually inaccurate coverage, but at the same time showed better understanding of what was really going on in the campaign.
So, as people argue whether or not the guilt by association attacks by the McCain campaign, or the discussions of economic policies of the Obama campaign make for better politics, the real question remains, how do we understand all of this in a narrative that helps us better understand who we are and how we can be the best we can be. Joe the Plumber was an interesting attempt, but I still think that a level 8 paladin with Grassroots Organizing and Oratory/Colgate Smile proficiencies has done a better job in helping people find how his campaign relates to all of our stories.
