The Buckeye Ground Game

Fall in Ohio usually means changing leaves, a crisp breeze, and Ohio State Buckeye football. However, this fall, the best ground game in the state may not belong to the scarlet and gray.

While all of us, including yours truly, overanalyze polls and election models, there is something happening in Ohio and elsewhere across the nation that could be much more predictive of which man becomes the 44^th President of the United States.

One the main advantages of the protracted primary fight between Senators Obama and Clinton was that it laid the Obama organization for the important fall campaign to come. As the long primary process dragged on, Democrats gained in registration all over the country. Coupled with gains in Democratic registration, Senator Obama got at least a two-month head start on Senator McCain in the all important ground game. As polls tightened during the month of August, the mainstream media wondered why Obama was not using his superior resources to outspend Senator McCain on the airwaves. But as the pundits chirped, Senator Obama’s ground game was quietly being built behind the scenes.

Recent reports have shown that Senator Obama has more field offices than does Senator McCain in all of the battle ground states except for Florida. Topping the list of battle ground states with the most field offices is Ohio, with 57 field offices according to a campaign email on September 3. To find out more, I decided to visit one of these field offices over the Labor Day weekend. The Shaker Heights, Ohio field office, one of the main arteries for the Obama campaign’s efforts in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, was bustling with enthusiasm. I was told by a staffer that the Cleveland area alone had eight teams of eight full-time paid staffers, roughly as many as the Kerry campaign had in the whole state of Ohio in October of 2004. Many of these staffers are very young, but gained invaluable organizing skills in three, or in some cases, four or five primary states this past winter and spring.

As I hit the suburban streets to canvass, I was actively recruited to come back during the month of October and the weekend before Election Day. A little known Ohio law that was passed in 2006 has created an early voting period from September 30 to November 3. With the state’s registration deadline being October 6, this law has created a unique window between September 30 and October 6 where one can essentially have “one stop registration and voting.” Many believe that this period could give Senator Obama at least a hundred thousand vote advantage before a single vote is cast on November 3. Senator Obama’s campaign took advantage of similar laws during the primary season in states such as North Carolina and Montana, organizing its supporters to get out and vote early. This strategy allows for more micro-targeting on Election Day itself as many supporters have already voted and can concentrate all their efforts on getting others out to vote. This strategy also will be especially valuable in urban areas, where many voters may find it much more convenient to vote early and avoid Ohio’s infamous long election lines.

Meanwhile, Senator McCain will try to make up for lost time and attempt to match President Bush’s famous 2004 ground game. Bush’s voter outreach efforts were credited with bringing hundreds of thousand of new evangelical voters to the polls in Ohio and Florida. (Bush won Ohio by only 118,000 votes in 2004.) It remains to be seen whether or not McCain can overcome a lack of enthusiasm from his base and match these efforts in 2008. Sure, 90% of Republicans are behind McCain, but voting for McCain is not the equivalent of having the enthusiasm to go out and motivate others to vote for McCain. McCain’s selection of right-wing conservative Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate is an attempt to narrow this enthusiasm gap.

Overall, efforts on the ground will always fail to get attention when compared to polls and ad campaigns. However, like in football, politics is won in the trenches. As such, Obama’s ground team is ready for an all-out push to begin September 30, just three days after the scarlet and gray take their ground game into the Big Ten schedule.

Never forget! Never remember!

“When the president does it that means that it is not illegal. [...] If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president’s decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law.”

In an interview with David Frost in 1977, former president Richard Nixon attempted to justify his years of abusing government power with the argument that the government is always acting in the best interests of the people; therefore, it may need to break the law sometimes in order to help the people. For the argument to work, of course, the initial assumption must be beyond question: the government always acts in the best interest of the people.

This essay is about September 11. It is about how the government was allowed to break the law under the assumption that the government is right. It is about how September 11 allowed the government to break the law.

Fear is a powerful ally of tyrants. It allows them to rule with near-impunity, as every action made by a tyrant can be justified by the needs of security. The events of seven years ago created a tremendous amount of fear in the United States. A nation that is afraid will accept restrictions on its liberties, as long as those restrictions are made in the name of security. In the months following the September 11 attacks, our national slogan became, “If have nothing to hide, then what’s the problem?” Our Constitution is based on an explicit respect for privacy for its own sake. Privacy never has to be justified; privacy is, and it is up to the people who want to take it away to explain themselves. After September 11, the dynamic changed completely: the onus was now on us, the private citizens, to justify why we need privacy. If a person were to exercise his or her constitutional right to privacy, the assumption was immediately that such a person had something to hide.

After all, it’s entirely patriotic to acquiesce to authority. This is what we learned after September 11. The phrase “In a post-9/11 world …” became a ubiquitous, omnibus assertion that, somehow, the rules of law, order, and liberty had fundamentally changed that morning. Everyone was under suspicion, and anyone who appeared outside the norm was especially suspect.

And most of us didn’t question our leaders. The New York Times happily published Judith Miller’s stories of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though her only sources were government officials … who later turned out to be lying. The Fourth Estate, whose job it usually is to criticize the government, accepted what the government said. Voices of dissent — like Phil Donahue’s — were silenced. Donahue’s 2003 MSNBC show was the network’s highest-rated program, but it was pulled, anyway. Donahue was extremely critical of a war in Iraq at a time when being critical of the government was passé. The Dixie Chicks were booed and assailed in 2003 for daring to criticize George W. Bush. And let’s not forget that every critic of the Iraq policy was lambasted for not being patriotic, or for wanting to help the terrorists, or both.

Remember that? That’s the 9/11 legacy.

Remember also that Our Government initially fought tooth and nail against a commission to investigate the causes of the September 11 attacks. Know also that the USA PATRIOT Act was not written and passed in a mere month. The legislation was already extant, just waiting for the right time to come out of the closet. Nothing gets written in under a month, especially not legislation as voluminous as the USA PATRIOT Act. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig tells this story:

The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.

Imagine that: someone, somewhere within the Justice Department had written a daringly authoritarian piece of legislation and was waiting eagerly for just the right time to pull it out. The public wouldn’t accept such a gross abuse of power and trampling of its rights during peacetime. But once a war started and the public was scared … ah! That’s just the time to start being authoritarian! Hitler used fear in the same way. His own people burned down the Reichstag, Hitler blamed the communists, then used the resultant fear to not only get himself elected chancellor, but be granted new powers.

George W. Bush’s Justice Department has repeatedly argued that the president has additional war-time powers not to be found in the Constitution. Alberto Gonzales even went so far as to suggest that federal judges should not have oversight over wiretapping, since “a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

The troubling thing is, we’ve been here before. Our nation’s resolve is tested every time there is a crisis. It is then, and only then, when we will be fully able to see how well our Constitution holds up to stress, and whether or not all our talk about liberty means something. History shows that, by and large, we consider the Bill of Rights to be a bunch of empty platitudes. Every time this country has faced a crisis, we have limited the rights of our people, and those limitations have been wholeheartedly accepted. There was widespread censorship during World War I and World War II, and everyone was okay with that. Japanese internment? Let’s do it! COINTELPRO? CREEP? Why not!

September 11 put us once again face to face with a crisis. Either we could continue to exercise our liberty and approach the problem rationally, or we could, as a nation, freak out, get scared, and let our leaders do whatever they wanted in the name of protecting us from another attack.

Guess which one happened.

We let our constitution get torn to pieces. We let our government hold people — even U.S. citizens — indefinitely, without a trial. Those people had to go to court to fight for rights that they already had. We let our government torture people then say that it wasn’t torture. George W. Bush gave it a fuzzy name; he called it “enhanced interrogation techniques.” We let our leaders pretend that they cared a whit about the soldiers they sent to die in their war, but based on the extreme lengths this administration has gone to deny medical care to veterans, it doesn’t look like this administration cares. It wants disposable meat.

September 11 was the day that we surrendered control of our country to a bunch of used-car salesmen. On September 11, Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney decided to violate the memories of those who died in the World Trade Center for their own selfish political purposes — sometimes together, sometimes separately — every night since then, always with smiles on their faces.

Never forget!

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