From a certain perspective, there is an understandable and even admirable elitism at work. Romney truly believes in his own abilities and — unlike George W. Bush, who was handed every professional success in his life — has justification for his confidence. He is a highly intelligent, accomplished individual.
As the St. John Progressive Missionary Baptist Church vans pulled up to the C. Blythe Andrews library polling place to let congregants out to vote, a line already snaked out the voting entrance. A table was set up on one end of the libary’s parking lot where volunteers served fried fish and hush puppies. A DJ blared gospel music that could be heard blocks away. It was after-church Sunday, the first and only Sunday of “Souls to the Polls” in most of Florida, and the second day of early voting. Here in Tampa, early voters, and black voters in particular had already made their statement.
Despite setbacks such as Gov. Rick Scott’s HB 1355, which undercut voter registration drives, reinstated harsh felony voting restrictions and his notorious purge program, voters turned out in record numbers this past weekend: over a half-million people cast early votes statewide by Monday morning. In Hillsborough County, 36,702 early votes Saturday and Sunday—roughly 2,500 of those cast at the C. Blythe Andrews site in Tampa’s historically black College Hill neighborhood. As of last night, over 55,000 voted early.
These numbers far outweighed the historic 2008 election here, when less than 17,000 turned out for the first weekend of early voting, 1,248 at Andrews (then called College Hill Library). Back then, those were considered remarkable numbers. This year, they’ve almost doubled that, despite the odds against them.
After dismal voter turnout numbers in 2010, the year Scott was elected, Get Out The Vote advocates re-tooled and put together an aggressive canvassing strategy that made sure people were registered and “knew their status”—making sure their address was updated, and that any felony convictions were cleared up. In 2008, African-American voters were self-motivated, hype about the prospect of not only electing the first black president, but also finally undoing the eight years of economic and political ruin of George W. Bush.
“I don’t think there was a GOTV strategy in 2010,” says Belinthia Berry, a political strategist who works with the NAACP and the National Coalition of 100 Black Women, who was on hand for the Souls to the Polls outing at Andrews. “This year we really made a conscious effort to actually canvass, knock on doors—people actually know GOTV now, pushing people to vote, as opposed to 2010 when I didn’t even know. Nobody knocked on my door or pushed me to vote.”
Florida Early Voters Show Up in Huge Numbers Despite Suppression Effort – COLORLINES.
SATURDAY, OCT 27, 2012 03:00 PM EDT
TOPICS: BARACK OBAMA, ELECTIONS 2012, FRANK RICH, MITT ROMNEY,ENTERTAINMENT NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Ever since the days of Barry Goldwater, many liberals have assumed — or naively hoped — that each national defeat would teach Republicans that they had overreached, and pull them back from the extremes. Instead, the opposite has happened: The lesson of every loss, even the routs, has been “we were not conservative enough.”
May I have a receipt with that?
The issue of electronic voting machines without a paper trail is an aspect of the voter fraud debate that has largely been ignored in the national discussion by the same party that seeks to implement identification laws.
On Nov. 6, citizens in 16 states will cast their ballot for local and presidential elections. According to a report issued by Common Cause, Rutgers School of Law and Verified Voting Foundation, these states lack the safeguards needed to protect the election system not only from fraud, but also from technological malfunctions.
via The Big Picture: Is Voter Fraud Viewed Through Condensed Lens?.
The hysteria that characterizes these commotions [Tea Party rallies against President Obama] convinces me that the current American political scene, so heavy with anxiety and unhappy conscience at the moment, is riper now for psychoanalytic inquiry as an efficacious human science than it has ever been…
—Hortense Spillers, “Destiny’s Child: Obama and Election ’08″boundary 2 39:2 (2012), p. 9.
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OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham
October 27, 2012
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27 OCTOBER 2012
“Florida’s Black Political Landscape”
Lia T. Gaines, The Center for Enterprise Opportunity and President of the West Palm Beach NAACP
Executive Director, The Center for Enterprise Opportunity (CEO) a private, non-profit corporation which whose chartered purpose and mission is to improve the economies in distressed communities by lending to small businesses and sponsors of community development initiatives; President, West Palm Beach Branch NAACP; Former Chief of Staff to Maude Lee, the 1st Black Commissioner, PB County Board of County Commission; Graduate of Howard University Law School and, partner in “Occupy the Community” is a non-partisan coalition of community-based organizations committed to Educate, Employ and Empower the Community. Lia is a long-time passionate, smart activist and organizer throughout FL
The Center for Enterprise Opportunity’s (CEO) mission is to serve as a sustainable business development and finance institution for low and moderate income entrepreneurs, small and emerging businesses and community development projects by working to fill the overall need for capital.
(The Root) — Little about the GOP candidate appeared to qualify him for the White House as he sweated freely over foreign-policy debate questions Monday night. Clearly ill-suited to be commander in chief, Mitt Romney fidgeted in his chair, fudged his Afghanistan position and, in the cross talk over Iraq, seemed on the verge of proffering another $10,000 bet on whether his position had changed.
Despite losing two of three debates, Romney has going for him a poll-obsessed media keen on a close race sustaining their $2.5 billion flow of TV ads. Plus, he can count on reflexive support from the dominant population backing his party. And what exactly is the makeup of the GOP?
Alas, in this year of our Lord 2012, the Republican Party structurally is 97.9 percent non-African American, fielding only 47 blacks among the 4,411 delegates at its Tampa convention!
With blacks constituting some 13 percent of the electorate, the GOP, win or lose, is likely to register a popular vote that is 99.5 percent non-African American. And this near lily-white party operates in a diverse republic — with a black president, who attracted 43 percent of the white vote in ’08.
Posted by Chauncey DeVega at 10:15 am
October 25, 2012 34 COMMENTS
What is White Privilege? Mitt Romney Losing Two Debates But Gaining Support Among White Voters
White privilege is the bundle of unearned advantages that come with being categorized as “white” in American society. Those of us who study race and politics often have a hard time convincing white people–and some others overly identified with Whiteness–of how this dynamic impacts our society.
On Tuesday, Mitt Romney was embarrassed by Barack Obama in a debate about foreign policy. There, Romney was a child trying to engage in a fist fight against a grown man, and subsequently had his behind, almost quite literally, handed to him. Obama thrashed Mitt Romney in the prior debate as well. Thus, a puzzle and conundrum: Mitt Romney has gained support among white voters after both horrible performances .
“Well, I think they’re more political than either you or I,” Chris Matthews said about conservatives. “I think they hate Obama. They want him out of the White House more than they want to destroy al-Qaeda. Their number one enemy in the world right now, on the right, is their hatred, hatred for Obama. And we can go into that about the white working class in the south about looking at these numbers we’ve been getting the last couple days, about racial hatred, in many cases. This isn’t about being a better president, they want to get rid of this president. That’s their number one goal and they’re willing to let Romney go to the hard center, even to the left on some issues, as long as they get rid of this guy.”
“Romney went in there tonight with 16 ounce gloves. He didn’t want to look too ferocious, he just wanted to win. And the way he wanted to win was not making himself into the right-winger that the right wing that’s supporting him really are,” Matthews also said.
Chris Matthews: “Racial Hatred” Makes Right Want To Get Rid Of Obama | RealClearPolitics.
Read morehttp://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/10/29/121029taco_talk_editors#ixzz2A5Z61I45
The morning was cold and the sky was bright. Aretha Franklin wore a large and interesting hat. Yo-Yo Ma urged his frozen fingers to play the cello, and the Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, a civil-rights comrade of Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s, read a benediction that began with “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the segregation-era lamentation of American realities and celebration of American ideals. On that day in Washington—Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009—the blustery chill penetrated every coat, yet the discomfort was no impediment to joy. The police estimated that more than a million and a half people had crowded onto the Mall, making this the largest public gathering in the history of the capital. Very few could see the speakers. It didn’t matter. People had come to be with other people, to mark an unusual thing: a historical event that was elective, not befallen.
via The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker.
