Imprison Voter Suppression Conspirators

Picture from National Voting Rights Museum

As television network and cable reporting on the collapsing economy diminished last week, John McCain gained an inch or two on Barack Obama. Three cable news shows I watched on MSNBC on Friday – Hardball, Countdown, and Rachel Maddow – devoted substantial coverage to the dirty tricks and voter suppression efforts of McCain’s campaign. The reporting is critically important. But, in the end, it probably helped McCain simply by dropping the economy as THE STORY.

FOXnews, of course, last week devoted a good deal of its daily reporting to ACORN. "Anything But the Economy" should be the phony news outlet’s new motto. You want to know the McCain message strategy? Watch FOX. They execute campaign orders with the scary discipline of practiced propagandists.

But even smart, open-minded or progressive media have difficulty focusing on more than one thing at one time. They want THE STORY. And post-debate last week, THE STORY was, in some order or other, McCain campaign dirty tricks (racist robocalls), Republican efforts to keep American citizens from voting, McCain’s poor debate performance, electoral college predictions, etc.

The stock market was up slightly by the end of the week, and the outrages of the McCain campaign stole the shows. They were enough to make it less than THE STORY. And that’s helped McCain, if only by a small amount. Which means there’s no incentive for the McCain camp to reign in their extremist messaging.

This presents the Obama campaign with a dilemma. Take the focus off the economy, and McCain will gain. Leave the anti-democratic and racist tactics of the McCain campaign unaddressed, and McCain will gain.

This time, though, the Obama campaign has something no Democratic campaign has had in recent presidential cycles: a late lead with a cushion. Its state-by-state advantage in the contest for electoral votes means it can concede a brief, short-term advantage to McCain by doing some things that diminish the reporting of economic news. Very, very important things. Like demanding that a special prosecutor investigate the Department of Justice’s raw, illegal and undemocratic investigation-by-press-leak of ACORN.

I’m going to take advantage of the cushion to make a simple point about the authoritarian and democracy-threatening voter suppression efforts of the Right.

I’m aware that when McCain made his preposterous "destroying the fabric of democracy" claim against ACORN in last week’s debate, he knew what he was doing. He was distracting voters from the economic distress. And he was stealing the language of condemnation aimed by Obama and others at McCain’s voter suppression schemes. As bad as the McCain campaign has been, it’s not always stupid. The "fabric of democracy" remark was used tactically to diminish the impact of any coverage the voter suppression efforts might receive. Voters will be confused about just who is ripping said fabric.

I’m aware of McCain’s little play, but I don’t care. McCain’s tactical prophylactic is thin. So here’s my simple point:

In a democracy, voter suppression should be made a high crime on a level with treason.

In fact, I don’t think a system can even be called a democracy unless it treats as a great and terrible crime the suppression, intimidation or exclusion of citizens from elections. When voter exclusion is tolerated, voting can become little more than a pretty curtain drawn across the muscled efforts of authority to have its way no matter what the citizenry might prefer.

But in America, exclusion has a cultural and political advantage over inclusion. It took 140-plus years for women to earn the franchise. It was 1965 before formal and legal barriers to African-American participation in elections were removed by the Voting Rights Act. Demonizing a group by color, religion, geography or even political preference and then taking steps to keep the demonized group from voting – where’s the news? It’s been done since the founding of the nation.

How people of the Right manage to square their avowed love of democracy with actions that subvert it isn’t really that big a mystery. In the conservative worldview, only certain people – Calvinists knew them as the Elect – should be regarded as full citizens. The non-Elect aren’t full citizens because they are less favored by God or the town fathers. In authoritarian minds, suppressing the voting rights of their neighbors becomes essential to protecting legitimate authority within a democracy. The successful disenfranchising of the non-Elect is then taken as a sign that God or more earthly authority looks down upon the victims of suppression. It’s a neat little self-justifying merry-go-round of logic.

To all you conservatives busy caging votes, passing along voter purge lists, contributing money to pay for racist robocalls, hiring private-duty cops to patrol the polls to intimidate would-be voters, rigging voting machines and on and one, I say this: you belong in prison.

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