Review of Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen

Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen
by Mark Rudd
324 pages, Morrow, $25.99

In mentioning to people that I was reviewing his book, I’ve been surprised to find Mark Rudd less widely remembered than I’d expected.  It appears that if you didn’t arrive in college by a certain point, you don’t know who he is, the drop off in recognition coinciding with part two of the tale told in his new memoir, Underground: My Life With SDS and the Weathermen.  Up to that point he was famous long ago, no doubt.  Chairman of Columbia University’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and its 1968 student strike coordinating committee, he was the very model of a modern student radical.  (Although just how archetypical is disputed: a photo caption in the book calls him “the prototype of the Doonesbury character, Megaphone Mark,” but in Boston the word was that the model was local writer Mark Zanger who’d gone to Yale with Gary Trudeau.)

The events at Columbia very simply set the standard for the student activism of the day.  SDS and the Columbia Student Afro-American Society (SAS) had mounted a campaign fundamentally challenging their prominent university’s role – from the global to the local.  They wanted Columbia out of the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), in Rudd’s words, “an obscure twelve-university consortium” that in the Vietnam era developed “such techniques and weapons as the use of chemical herbicides to destroy the insurgents’ jungle cover – the horrible ‘defoliation’ using highly toxic Agent Orange, and the use of airpower for counterinsurgency.”  And there “was even an IDA report on the suppression of ghetto insurgency.”   And the two organizations also opposed the school’s plan to build a new gym in Morningside Park, taking their lead from Harlem residents who considered it an unwanted encroachment upon their neighborhood.

Protests eventually led to the student take over of five university buildings.  There were over seven hundred arrests, several hundred injuries, and a student strike.  Columbia dropped both IDA and the gym.  Tom Hayden, SDS leader of an earlier day who had actually participated in the Columbia building take overs, wrote a Ramparts magazine piece calling for “two, three, many Columbias,” to echo Che Guevara’s call for “two, three, many Vietnams.”

After being expelled from Columbia, Rudd dedicated himself to helping spread the word through SDS, which was at the time the loosest of organizations.  Get five students willing to plunk down five dollars apiece for dues and you had a nationally recognized chapter and you could say and do what you wished.  But by 1968, there were many chapters where you would find a new flavor in the mix – the Progressive Labor Party.  PL were the Marxists your mother, J. Edgar Hoover, and the comic books you read as a kid all warned you about, humorless dogmatists who argued in terms that you knew must be (poorly) translated from some other language – Chinese, presumably, as they appeared to be Maoists.

PL did have the useful side effect of making some people curious enough to actually read Karl Marx and associates because they figured that no one would ever have heard of him if he was actually as ridiculous as these people made him out to be.  But as Rudd puts it, “The most pernicious effect of PL was that SDS regulars, myself included, became convinced that we needed a well-worked-out revolutionary theory – and dogma.”  And his crowd came up with a doozie: a manifesto called “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”  (after a Bob Dylan lyric) which gave the group the name that stuck – the Weathermen.

No one who took part is likely to forget the 1969 SDS national convention.  After having your picture snapped by photographers from every government agency that maintained an interest in such things and submitting to frisking (pretty much like an airport today, but unusual for the time), you entered the vast and gloomy Chicago Coliseum for a couple of days of theater of the absurd.  First up was a group from Ohio and Michigan – literally – they leapt up on their chairs in the midst of some procedural debate and start waving Little Red Books, chanting “Mao, Mao, Mao Tse-Tung!  Dare to struggle, dare to win!”  Rudd explains that the event was intended tongue in cheek, as a sort of mockery of PL, a possibility I had not previously entertained since it had seemed of a piece with everything else that happened at the gathering.

The Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), a faction that had developed in the organization’s national office, comprising the Weathermen and another group with which they had already split, controlled the agenda and brought in a representative of the Black Panther Party to denounce PL and when that maneuver went bad on them, they declared PL expelled from SDS.  But since it was not clear that RYM actually commanded more support than PL, rather than try to physically eject them, RYM opted to repair to an inner chamber of the Coliseum and the two conventions proceeded at odds with one another under one large roof.  (And separate friskings for each convention.)

In the inner hall, Bob Avakian (who has himself now been underground for nearly three decades even though it’s not clear if anyone’s looking for him) delivered an amazingly fast speech retroactively outlining the principles of unity that had necessitated PL’s expulsion from SDS.  They included support for the revolutionary governments of China, Cuba, North Vietnam, and North Korea.  And when someone from the crowd shouted out “and Albania,” Avakian added “and Albania,” without missing a beat.  Now, that’s comedy – and they used to say that Maoists had no sense of humor!  Mark Rudd was elected national secretary of the truncated organization.  He announced the need to “bring the war home.”

For many campus SDS chapters, the first order of business that fall was a name change.  For the new Weatherman leadership, it was organizing for an October national action scheduled to coincide with the beginning of the trial of the “Chicago 8″ for alleged conspiracy to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention.  The more the Weatherman organized for it, the clearer it became that they intended to literally fight the police, and the more people decided to make other plans for that period of time.  Eventually only two hundred or so showed up for what had become known as the “Days of Rage.”

When a documentary film called Weather Underground appeared in 2003,  I went to see it with some hesitation.  It seemed a necessary enough film and yet wasn’t there still something of a glow of admiration for the Weathermen about it?  I was glad enough to find that most of the participants interviewed in the film now seemed to understand that their project had been insane. Still, I didn’t leave the theater thinking that these were a bunch of people whose political opinions I’d ever be likely to seek out.  There were a couple of exceptions, though.

I’d only met Rudd once, in 1968,  at a lower Manhattan, upper floor warren of antiwar offices in whose shared space he was, appropriately enough, running off something on the mimeograph machine, as radicals were wont to do “in those pre-Xerox, pre-digital days” he writes of.  (The book’s dates also suggest that it might really have been him that I spotted walking down Market Street, San Francisco with long hair and a beard a couple of years later; no conversation that time, however.)  But somehow I’d always had the vague impression of him sharing a certain arrogance common among some student leaders of the day – a perception that his book seems to confirm, as he notes that “In my speeches at rallies, I had taken to referring to [Columbia University] President Kirk as ‘that shithead.’”  So it came as a particular surprise to me that of all of the people in the film, the one who stood out as most profoundly chastened by the whole experience was Mark Rudd.

It is that same Mark Rudd you will find in the pages of “Underground,” which makes for a very useful book.  “Underground” gives you your fill of the background to the headlines – the “Wargasm,” the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, the Timothy Leary jailbreak, and all the rest – with no suggestion that it was all okay because the participants meant well.

Considering it the most important student organization to have come along in decades, Rudd writes that “The destruction of SDS … was an historical crime,” a judgement buttressed by the fact that no organization of comparable significance has followed it, either.  As an anonymous analyst wrote in his FBI file, “By their stubborn adherence to pseudo-Marxist/Maoist dogma which is out of step with the present realities, RUDD and his colleagues have alienated a large segment of potential and heretofore willing followers.”  Rudd writes, “I couldn’t have said it any better.”

After seven years underground, during which “rather than doing any useful political work we were just surviving,” he surfaced to surrender.  Due to the federal government’s own illegal tactics, all of the major charges against the Weathermen had been dropped and Rudd slipped into a quiet life as a math teacher in New Mexico where he has been politically active on the local level.  Today, he calls the 1974 Weather Underground proclamation, “Prairie Fire: The politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism,” “omniscient to the point of arrogance” and the infighting that went on in its wake “beyond absurd.”  There is, however, a clear line in his mind as to when he went “over the cliff” and he writes of the Columbia Strike with pride, even including a campus map.

There’s more of Rudd’s sex life in the book than some might really want to know, but then his line “My penis was a magic wand of liberation” may make it all worthwhile.  And overall, even though you never needed a Weatherman to know which way the wind blew, in  “Underground,” Rudd has, after all these years, reestablished himself as someone whose opinion it might be worth asking.

Should We Call it Bailout Stadium?

If you’ve ever yearned to see your favorite sports team play at a ballpark not named after a bank, the phone company, or a purveyor of dog food, relief may be in sight. At the very least, two Congressmen have, shall we say, started the ball rolling. Ohio Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich and Republican Texas Rep. Ted Poe have asked the Obama Administration to require Citigroup to cancel its arrangements to pay the New York Mets $400 million over twenty years for the right to call their new stadium Citi Field.

Now, annoying as the practice may be to some sports fans, naming rights deals have become pretty routine these days. San Diego fans, for instance, have to go to Petco Park to see the Padres and for two years the Houston Astros played at Enron Field (and no, it wasn’t renamed Felons Field, it’s Minute Maid Park now.) But what separates this deal from the routine, of course, is just how famously short of cash Citigroup is. So short that the Bush Administration ponied up $25 billion of taxpayer money to bail the bank out last October followed by another $20 billion in November. All of this while the bank released a plan to drop 52,000 employees – the nation’s largest layoff announcement in fifteen years – on top of a lay off of 17,000 earlier in the year.

So now that it’s become a ward of the state, does Citigroup have any plans to reconsider its spending priorities and save the $40 million for something maybe more central to its corporate mission like, say, banking? Not on your life. Eric Eve, Citigroup’s senior VP of global community relations assures us that the Citi Field deal “is a smart business decision,” and while acknowledging that “these are trying times for everyone,” he remained enthusiastic about being “able to see all of the nonprofit that we’re going to be able to bring to this field and enjoy these games” and “build and strengthen community relationships.”

The Congressmen saw it differently. Noting that the Treasury Department “forced Citigroup corporate executives to give up their private jet,” Kucinich suggested that it “also demand that Citigroup cancel its $400 million advertisement at the Mets field and instead begin to repay their debt to the taxpayers.”

If every cloud really does have a silver lining, then maybe a silvery glint in the current recession, depression, or whatever we wind up calling the situation is that in times like this it suddenly becomes much easier to recognize the fact that is we the people who are the ultimate source of corporate wealth. And with that recognition comes the idea that we ought to have some say in how corporate executives use that wealth. A year ago, the idea of limiting executive compensation was wild eyed radicalism; today it merits but a passing headline.

There aren’t a lot of corporations that have provided a stronger case for limiting executive compensation than Citigroup. According to the New York Times, when the bank brought Vikram Pandit on as its chief executive earlier in 2008, his total compensation package amounted “to at least $216 million.” The bank’s compensation committee explained its generosity as “recognizing that difficult economic conditions make rewarding key talent especially important.” (The Herald Tribune also noted that Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary under Clinton and adviser to Obama, “had been paid $17.3 million [by Citigroup] in 2006 and collected more than $150 million in the last eight years.”)

The Obama Administration’s $500,000 cap on executive compensation for bailed out companies is not retroactive, by the way, so a $20 million dollar a year naming deal may still seem like relatively small change for the top guys at Citigroup. Likewise, in the sporting world, it wouldn’t even match the annual salary the Mets’d have to pay for a top-of-the line hitter like Alex Rodriguez or Manny Ramirez. But for the rest of us, it’s still quite a bit of money. It’s four hundred $50,000-a-year jobs, for instance.  Citigroup employees who kept their $50,000-a-year jobs could probably afford to buy their kids tickets to see games at Citi Field instead of having to perhaps try to get them through the nonprofit organizations Citigroup looks forward to bringing to the ballpark and building relationships with.

The bottom line on all of this that a publicly subsidized corporation obviously has no business giving a sports franchise $400 million so that they can continue to pay athletes salaries as outrageous as the ones that corporate executives pay themselves. Of course, these salaries were just as absurd last year, but last year an argument that this type of splurging demonstrated that there was simply too much wealth in corporate coffers had no place in mainstream American political discussion. Things are different today.

Kucinich and Poe are not the first to try to buck the corporate naming wave. The entire city of San Francisco has already weighed in on the question. In 1996, the naming rights to the city’s Candlestick Park, home to the baseball Giants and football 49ers, were leased to a computer networking company called 3Com. However, when the contract expired in 2001, 3Com Park reverted to Candlestick and in 2004 four members of the city’s Board of Supervisors, led by Board President Matt Gonzalez, decided to try to keep this from happening again. They placed a proposition before the voters to declare that “the City-owned sports stadium located at Candlestick Point … is hereby named and shall be referred to as ‘Candlestick Park.’” This, they said in the city’s voting guide, would be “an opportunity to send a signal that San Francisco remains on the front lines against the increased corporatization and commercialization of everyday life.”

On election day, 55% of the city’s voters sided with them, but by this time, the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had narrowly defeated Gonzalez for that office the prior year, had already acquiesced to a deal in which the 49ers leased the name of the publicly owned stadium and split the proceeds with the city. The 49ers did not reveal the exact terms, but said the city would net more than $3 million a year. Newsom characterized arguments that the naming deal represented a corporate sellout as “extreme and absurd.”

So the will of the voters notwithstanding, the City by the Bay is now the proud owner of a stadium called, for the moment, Monster Park. Newsom is, not surprisingly, unrepentant about his course of action. In fact, in a year when even corporate chieftains like Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit thought it politic to stay away from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Newsom attended the international corporate lovefest for the third year in a row. But given what’s going on in Washington, Newsom, who is known to be contemplating a run for governor of California, and all of the other politicians still looking for love from the Fortune 500 might just want to reconsider just what kind of, um, monster they could be creating for themselves.

Is Nuclear Power Worth Another Look?

In the early 1950’s, at the Dawn of the so-called “Atomic Age,” then President Eisenhower made a pledge to turn the awesome destructive power of the atom to peaceful means. Perhaps as an attempt in some way to redeem the United States for the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the administration felt it was America’s responsibility to develop nuclear energy as a source to provide “clean and inexpensive” electricity for all of the nations of the world.

A half-century later, amid cost overrun’s, a near-meltdown at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and tons of nuclear waste in this country with no where to go, the dream of nuclear power has all but died. Or has it? In the quest for clean sources of energy and decreased reliance on fossil fuels, there seems to be a renaissance of sorts for the nuclear power industry. Even once ardent foes are starting to take a second look at nuclear energy.

Why is the sleeping dragon of nuclear energy once again rearing its head? The old arguments in favor of nuclear energy are still the strongest. From a Greenhouse Gas standpoint, nuclear power plants are emissions free. They also do not produce any other harmful compound emissions such as sulfur dioxide, which is produced in abundance from coal-fired plants and other industrial processes and is a cause of acid rain and respiratory illness. Compared with fossil fuels and even natural gas, sources for uranium and potentially thorium are abundant mostly in “friendly” democratic nations. Advocates point out that despite using decades old technology, there has not been a single accident of any kind involving any of the nations on-line nuclear power plants in the more than 30 years since Three Mile Island. The nuclear industry has been quick to jump on the renewed interest in a nuclear solution to global warming and our energy appetite. Proponents say that a push toward hybrid and eventually full electric vehicles will increase the need for electricity consumption to recharge these vehicles, primarily in the overnight hours. They then argue that the costs to run nuclear plants for longer hours is less then for coal-fired plants. As a result of this logic, we are now seeing the first applications for the construction of new nuclear power plants in this country since the Carter administration.

However, before we go any further with this, we should all slow down there a minute. Just because there has not been a major incident at any of the currently operating plants since Three-Mile Island, doesn’t mean that there haven’t been many, largely unreported near misses. This includes a 2002 near meltdown in Ohio of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station. During refueling operations it was found that a buildup of boric acid had eaten a hole into the steel cap on the top of the reactor. A spokesman said that had the cap been eaten away merely one-third of an inchmore, one-third of an inch–a plume of radioactive steam would have engulfed the containment dome, and Ohio would have been the site of the Three Mile Island of the 21^st Century.

Also, let’s not forgot the continued nightmare of nuclear waste disposal. The Yucca Mountain Repository was supposed to be paid for largely by the industry when it opened in 1998. It is still stalled and will likely remain so for some time. Outstanding liabilities aside (the industry sued the federal government for breach of contract and won), if the facility opened tomorrow, experts say it could only house the waste that has already been generated by existing plants, which waste sits in “temporary” concrete drums. Plus, there are infrastructure and waste transport issues with a central repository that have never been fully addressed.

Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and their contemporaries, the best and brightest minds of the 20^th century, saw what they had wrought in the aftermath of Hiroshima. They proposed the idea of nuclear energy in the hope that the same destructive forces they unleashed upon the planet could also be turned to some good. It was a noble idea. However, as metaphorically foretold in Godzilla and many other “Giant Atomic Monster” movies of the era, nuclear energy is a beast, a tiger by the tail, which can never be fully controlled.

If not nuclear, then what? The major technological hurdle to get over for wind and solar is their problems with intermittence. In other words, how to keep the energy generating when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. The major technological hurdle to nuclear power is still how to keep the beast caged or how can we ensure that another Chernobyl can never happen. An additional hurdle is figuring out what can we do with the tons of waste and byproducts that can be turned into weapons of mass destruction by a rouge state or non-state terrorist actor.

When looking at the problems of nuclear power versus other alternatives, I know which problem I would rather throw my money at. Despite what some politicians, big utilities, and other special interests would have you believe, nuclear power is expensive, dangerous, currently relies on outdated technology, and ultimately depends on humans to run it properly. Humans can and do make mistakes, and the consequences of “operator error” at a nuclear plant are far worse than any level of any accident involving any other current energy source. It will take much more research, money, and time to find a way to eliminate all of the problems with nuclear power. Instead, we should concentrate our efforts in developing alternatives for coal-fired electricity with renewable energy from the wind, the sun, and the earth herself.

If the minds of the best scientists of today are impelled in the same way that those who worked on the “Manhattan Project” were a half a century ago, which result do you think is more practical or more likely? Maybe President Eisenhower was right. Maybe we do owe the world something for its first, and thankfully only, Atomic War. However, lets not pay that debt by looking backwards at nuclear, but rather forward to renewable technologies like solar and wind. Sleeping dragons, like dogs, should be left to lie.

Whither Reaganomics?

Author’s note: Today’s is the first post in the Blue Economist column on the subject of “Blue-State Economics: Viewing Our Most Important Policy Debate Through Progressive Eyes”

On one level, there’s little shock value to be derived from the near total absence of Republican mischief making in the current, lame-duck session of Congress: They did, after all, just get their watches wound in the national election. However, taking a slightly longer view, it’s not clear that this same measure of electoral defeat has stopped them before. Past democratic transitions have been marred by a bull-headed intransigence on the part of the defeated. This has been born of equal parts denial, ideological certitude, and base whipping. Just ask Bill Clinton.

If all is quiet on the right flank in Washington these days, it may just be that the Republican agenda makers, especially on the domestic side of the ledger, have awakened to the bankruptcy of their ideas. However, it is a far more likely scenario is that the right is lying in wait for the sort of substantive policy shifts that Barack Obama has already promised and was assailed for during the campaign. Once this assault has whipped their own base into a frenzy of disdain, Republicans can renew their time-tested formula of overwhelming the national agenda with catch phrases and vitriol. This will inevitably cast the Democrats in a weak light, despite their power.

It is worth considering how things got this way.

The modern discipline of economics is surprisingly neutral on questions of political discourse: Progressive income taxes may be defended on the principal of “diminishing marginal utility,” by which a dollar taken from a wealthy person and given to a poor person has a net-beneficial effect on all of society’s collective happiness, to pick one random but unusually topical example. Another example is where environmental regulations may be defended on the principal of “internalizing social costs,” wherein the non-monetary repercussions of a firm’s activities are converted into monetary ones through fines and regulations. In addition, minimum wage laws may be defended as having negligible effects on the employment of unskilled labor, since the unskilled labor in question is already being used in its smallest possible quantities by the firms employing them.

However, as adaptable as such progressive claims would seem to be to the underlying principles of modern economic thought, the academy is at the same time populated by individuals so ubiquitously and inflexibly conservative as to render them the frequent butt of both merriment and derision at the hands of their would-be colleagues in the other social sciences. “An economist engages someone else’s ideas about the way the world works,” wrote one columnist in a recent edition of The New Yorker, “the way a bulldozer engages a picket fence.”

This phenomenon is largely attributable to the coincidental (and misguided) desire on the part of professional economists to be regarded as objective, physical or “hard” scientists–more like chemists and biologists–and less like their messy-headed brethren down the hall in Psychology and Poly-Sci. If the practitioner has to be clean, then the practice has to be clean too. This in turn means that the rich (progressive) texture of policy debates must melt on contact with the paradigm to prevent it from looking unresolved. The anguish of jobs lost to technological change, the qualitative detriment of polluted air, the elusive tabulation of the spoils of a war on poverty–all of these are matters dismissed with a smug wink and the back of a hand.

As the paradigm has polarized itself to the right, so too has the rhetoric from conservative think tanks been tailored to a world where the cleanliness and simplicity of an answer is its highest virtue. This exists in a perfect synergy with the rank-and-file’s inability to regard any complex idea as anything but a threat. Surely the good people at Americans for Tax Reform don’t really intend for their government to be “drowned in the bathtub”–surely Grover Norquist has been to enough school to know that bridges in the host city of the Republican National Convention will, absent a government that’s just been drowned in someone’s bathtub, fall unceremoniously down. However, with a simple paradigm to claim as their own, the Norquists of the world have all the excuse they need to reduce a messy world to painfully simplistic causes that play perfectly with the low-information voters in swing districts.

It would be tempting to presume a January 20th expiration date on such laments, to believe that some sort of corner has been turned. But the bitter reality of the matter is that Mr. Obama’s performance was at its shakiest when he found himself confronted by a self-appointed Ohio foot soldier so perfect for the slick-sided provincialism of the modern conservative economics that he was drafted by the McCain campaign as its chief spokesman before the sun had set. It won’t get any easier from there.

The Democrats will not win an economics argument in this country on the basis of raw numbers alone; they never do. Now that the electoral battle has been won, the Democrats must take a big-picture approach to winning the larger war. Selling complex, messy ideas like progressive income taxes (to say nothing of the restoration of a modicum of governmental oversight) will require a fresh infusion of street-smart packaging to match such hate-button phrases as “death tax.” To do so will be to fight fire with fire. If the Obama administration dismisses such efforts as quotidian (or, worse, elitist), or if it presumes victory before the fact on the strength of its mandate, they could surely suffer the same fate as wide-eyed Democratic administrations in years past. The good news is that they’re already winning this P.R. battle with cool-headed, pragmatic appointments and centrist views. In other words, they’re winning it the same way they won the election.

Age and The Electoral College

Senator Obama continues to dominate in our latest Electoral College projection. If the election were held today, we would project Senator Obama to defeat Senator McCain by a margin of between 311-227 electoral votes and 378-160 electoral votes.

State	Electoral Votes (EV)	Obama-McCain (%) (538 and Pollster)	Total Obama EV		Percent Seniors (>= 65 Years Old)
PA	21	7.5	264		15.2
CO	9	6.2	273	Likely Obama	10.1
VA	13	6.1	286		11.8
OH	20	4.7	306	Lean Obama	13.5
NV	5	4.6	311		11.1
FL	27	1.8	338		17.0
NC	15	1.3	353		12.2
MO	11	0.6	364	Toss up	13.4
ND	3	0.6	367		14.6
IN	3	-0.9	378		12.5
GA	15	-3.4	393		9.9
MT	3	-4.0	396	Lean McCain	13.9

As you see in the above table, we also looked at the percentage of the population in each battleground state that is over the age of 65. Based upon the data above, we are able to make sense out of what states McCain is currently targeting.

First, let’s look at the Likely Obama states:

Pennsylvania vs. Colorado

Many, including myself, have questioned why McCain has given up on Colorado, but double-downed on Pennsylvania. There are of course several reasons, including Pennsylvania not having early voting and having more than double the electoral votes as Colorado. However, the fact that Pennsylvania is the second oldest state and Colorado is the fourth youngest state undoubtedly played a large role in this decision.

Ohio vs. Nevada

Again, there are many reasons outside of age that led McCain to target Ohio while ignoring Nevada (such as electoral votes). However, demographic trends, including the fact that Ohio is in the upper-quartile of population above 65 years of age and Nevada is in the lower quartile, definitely seems to have played a factor in this decision.

What other states could surprise?

Florida and Georgia

In opposite directions, the states of Florida and Georgia could surprise. Based upon age alone, Florida, which has the oldest population of any state, could swing toward Senator McCain in ways that are not being factored into the weighting of current polls. In addition, Georgia, could end up being a toss-up state if younger voters come to the polls in record numbers. We already know that African Americans are surging in turnout in Georgia. If younger voters join in, Georgia may surpass states like Missouri and Indiana in likelihood to go to Senator Obama.

11/2 Swing State Power Rankings

With only two days left until Election Day, Demockracy is pleased to give its updated ranking of the top five swing states. Today’s rankings will be based on where the candidates were yesterday and where they will be today:

5. Missouri

Obama held what was most likely his last Missouri rally in Springfield, Missouri last night. While probably not a tipping point state, Missouri currently looks up for grabs.

4. Pennsylvania

McCain and Palin both visited the Keystone state again yesterday, and McCain will be there again today. While Obama still seems to have a significant advantage here, an upset here is probably McCain’s only realistic shot at 270 electoral votes.

3. Virginia

Sarah Palin and John McCain did a swing through Virginia yesterday, and Hillary Clinton will be there today. If Obama wins Virginia and Pennsylvania, McCain’s path to 270 will be virtually impossible.

2. Florida

John McCain will hold a Miami rally tonight, and Joe and Jill Biden will make three campaign appearances in Florida today. Florida appears to be the real stake-in-the-heart state that the Obama campaign wishes to drive into the McCain campaign’s electoral heart.

1. Ohio

Joe Biden spent most of yesterday in the Buckeye state, and Barack and Michelle Obama will spend the full day there today, with stops in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. In addition, Sarah Palin will also make three Ohio stops today. Ohio looks to be ground zero again.

10/31 Swing State Power Rankings

In honor of All Hallows Eve, today’s Swing State Power Rankings will focus on the five states Demockracy believes will be most likely to keep us up past the bewitching hour on Election Night with dirty tricks, hanging chads, and provisional spooks…

5. Pennsylvania

Unlike most swing states, Pennsylvania does not have early voting. Therefore, polls could be flooded. Long lines and dirty tricks may ensue.

4. Missouri

Missouri is known for Election Night chaos. In 2000, polls were held open for several hours to accommodate those who still hadn’t been able to vote. These problems resurfaced this February on Super Tuesday.

3. Colorado

As one of the top-tier tipping point states and one of the last competitive states to close its polls, Colorado has the potential to keep us up with fright! If the election is not decided by the time Colorado begins to tabulate their votes, expect all eyes to turn to the Rockies.

2. Ohio

After 2004, how could Ohio not be near the top of the list? A maldistribution of voting machines caused seven or eight hour lines in some areas. For instance, many students at Kenyon College didn’t get to vote until 2 am, AFTER Ohio had been called for George W. Bush. Why? There was one working voting machine for thousands of voters. Ohio has a new Secretary of State this year, but election irregularities would not be a surprise. Obama has called thousands of lawyers to the Buckeye State.

1. Florida.

2000. Hanging Chads. Supreme Court. December. Enough said…

10/28 Swing State Power Rankings

Based on campaign visits, polls, and the visceral reactions of Demockracy writers, we’ll be doing state power rankings for the final week of the campaign. Here are the rankings for Monday, October 27:

5. Pennsylvania

Although not competitive in the polls, three out of the four presidential candidates visited here Monday. This alone guarantees the commonwealth a spot in the top five. However, because of recent polls, we can’t legitimize putting it any higher.

4. Colorado Over 100,000 showed up strong for Senator Obama in Denver on Sunday. Although Senator McCain has reportedly pulled some resources out of Colorado, it still remains relatively close. Obama was here in an attempt to seal the deal.

3. Florida

Florida appears to be trending back to McCain and is again a true tossup state in our eyes. Having 27 electoral votes, its sheer size keeps it near the top of the list. Joe Biden will making two stops in the sunshine state on Tuesday.

2. Virginia Virginia continues to lean heavily toward Senator Obama. With 13 electoral votes, it is the largest Bush state that looks very likely to turn blue this year. Senator Obama will be here on Tuesday to try to put this state away.

1. Ohio Ohio jumps to the top of our list day, largely because Obama launched his “closing argument’ speech/message in Canton, Ohio on Monday. This fact, combined with relatively tight polls that are trending slightly in Senator Obama’s favor, give Ohio the top spot for today. We believe that all the signs are on the wall for Ohio to be one of Obama’s final stops next Sunday or Monday.

‘Voter Fraud’ Is a Fraud

2007 was a time of change. U.S. attorneys, for example, were changed in some states. Why? That’s a question that has resulted in lots of testimony, legal proceedings, investigations, and the resignation of former attorney general Alberto Gonzales. Once the dust cleared, it looked like David Iglesias of New Mexico, and others, were fired from their posts because they refused to prosecute Democrats close to election time and they refused to investigate “voter fraud.”

Voter fraud is when individual voters attempt to vote more than once, usually by falsifying registration information. Republicans claim that they are very concerned about this, and as a result, they had party operatives standing by at polls to challenge the legitimacy of some voters. They also went through state voter rolls and flagged suspicious entries. Of course, they only did this in swing states like Ohio, which indicates just how much they care. Voter fraud is, to use a metaphor from yesteryear, pure bromide. When pressed, Republicans have not been able to point to a single, actual, verifiable instance of voter fraud occurring anywhere in the country. It’s not that it doesn’t happen: it just happens on scales so small that it’s very difficult to catch. We’re not talking thousands and thousands of people all falsifyng voter information. It’s one guy here, one guy there.

What does happen, though, is large-scale voter suppression of the type we saw in Ohio in 2004. That, however, was managed by our public servants, the ones who are supposed to be protecting our voting rights. J. Kenneth Blackwell was simultaneously Secretary of State in Ohio — putting him in charge of voting in the state — and co-chairman of the Ohio committee to re-elect George W. Bush.

Third parties are, in most states, allowed to challenge the legitimacy of a person’s vote at a polling place. This was a favorite tactic of the Republican Party in 2004: party officials stood by at the polls, suggesting that particular people had questionable registrations. Poll workers issued the questionable voter a provisional ballot, meaning the vote would be counted only after the voter’s registration had been investigated.

Government officials also engaged in widespread “purging” of voter roles, often eliminating legitimate voters. Now, the Republican Party wants Ohio’s voter registration information so that it can determine for itself who should be purged. They took the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which issued a one-page order today lifting a temporary restraining order that directed the Ohio secretary of state to provide the Ohio Republican Party with voter registraiton information.

This is not precedent-setting, nor is it a ruling on the merits of the case. Overruling an injunction merely means that the court didn’t think that the case had a high likelihood of winning based on the merits.

Meet Joe the Plumber

He was mentioned at least 25 times in the Wednesday’s debate, so we thought Demockracy users would like to meet the real Joe the Plumber:

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