Friday Sunrise

By Carrie Jacobson

On Election Day, I passed a church with a letterboard sign in front that read: Vote – It’s Your Duty.

I’ve been thinking about that for a while now.

I don’t believe that voting is our duty. I believe it’s our right. I believe that if we choose not to vote, we are wasting an opportunity – but it is our choice.

I think there’s a world of difference between having a duty to vote and having the right to vote. In fact, I think that the truth of America is what separates the two.

I love to vote. Yes, I am a sap, and I have been known to cry in the voting booth. It means a lot to me, voting. I am part of We, the People. I am part of this great populace that is hoping to make and see and be part of a better union, a better United States.

Today, on the main street of Wachapreague, Va., our new hometown, flags are flying from the lampposts. It gave me shivers to see that, and it made me happy again to be an American.

Flags on Main Street, Wachapreague

President Obama and family, celebrating victory.

By Bob Gaydos

After watching hours of election returns, skipping from channel to channel trying to get the latest results as quickly as possible, I have three lasting impressions:

• Fox News consistently beat everyone else in calling states for a candidate (usually Barack Obama) and signaling a bad night for Mitt Romney. They called Pennsylvania and Ohio for the president while the other, “more reliable,” networks played it safe.
• The “expert” talking heads spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the coming debate over the “soul” of the Republican Party. Again, Fox was out front.
• Obama delivered a victory speech that came close to being classified as a “barn-burner.”

I don’t expect to watch much of Fox again, so I’ll chalk its surprisingly professional performance up to an anomaly and move on to the other observations.

For starters, will someone please define what they mean by the “soul” of the Republican Party? A party whose presidential candidate told Hispanic aliens to “self-deport” and dismissed 47 percent of the country as not his concern? A party that would deny gays and lesbians the rights guaranteed to all Americans? A party committed in its platform to denying women the right to an abortion under any circumstances? A party dominated by aging white men whose favorite pastime seems to be figuring ways to keep other kinds of people from voting? A party focused on maintaining every tax break possible for wealthy Americans, but making it tougher for college students to get loans? A party that treats science as a theory and global warming as a myth? A party that requires its ultimate presidential candidate to lie his way through primary campaigns in order to capture the votes of the whack job far right that dominated those campaigns, then backtrack on all those positions once he enters the general campaign and has to attract normal voters and then re-backtrack to some of the early positions in order to hang on to the Tea Partiers, ultimately leading millions of Americans to conclude he’s a liar?

That party? If there’s a soul in there, it must be in pretty sorry shape. Besides, just who is going to have this debate over the GOP’s soul? No elected Republican or party official said anything during the campaign about the GOP’s glaring position outside the mainstream of American thought on virtually every social issue or the fact that ever-increasing numbers of Latinos, blacks, gays, women and young people identified with Obama and the Democratic Party and that those are constituencies who are voting in ever-increasing numbers while old, white men are just getting older.

Who in the GOP will dare to defy Karl Rove, whose genius has now been trumped twice by Obama? Or Rush Limbaugh and the cadre of media blowhards that riled so many Americans up against Obama with a litany of half-truths and outright lies? Is there a leader in the GOP that dares to say the Tea Party, which cost the GOP several Senate seats as well, has no clothes, or at least no influence with a majority of Americans? The talking heads kept saying this debate was coming, but no one offered a name.

My advice to the Republicans who are fed up with the last two elections is to form a new party starting with all the sensible Republicans who have left the party.

Which brings me to Obama’s rousing 2 a.m. call to action. After the obligatory thank you’s to campaign workers and a promise to meet with leaders of all parties to end the Washington gridlock, and thanking supporters for their votes, he harkened back to a message delivered by another Democratic president 50 years ago.

“But that doesn’t mean your work is done‘” he said. “The role of citizen in our democracy does not end with your vote. America’s never been about what can be done for us. It’s about what can be done by us, together, through the hard and frustrating, but necessary work of self-government.”

John F. Kennedy’s, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” was more dramatic, but it had already been used. Obama’s message, however, was the same — you, the people need to be more involved. If you don’t like the way things are being done, change it. The election is not the end; it’s the beginning.

A reporter covering Obama said the president did plan to try to work with Republicans, but also intended to take his message directly to the people, to take his show on the road, so to speak.

The talking heads all said it would never work. But they were still convinced Republicans — who lost the election — were going to sit down and have a heart-to-heart over their party’s soul.

I suggest a search party.

bob@zestoforange.com

By Jeffrey Page

It’s over, thank God. Years after the Republicans decided that Barak Obama would be easy pickings in 2012, it’s over. And after the crowd of GOP candidates grew so thick it looked like the E Train during rush hour, it’s over. Finally it was just Romney, and as Mitt went down to defeat, he took some very annoying people with him.

The major pin to fall of course was Mitt himself. Unless he changes his mind about ending his political career – and remember, he has changed his mind about everything else – we no longer have to listen to his non-answers. (Yes, but which income tax deductions would you end? he was asked again and again, and never said anything of substance.) In doing so, Romney inadvertently proved that a majority of people in the United States will not be bamboozled by a candidate waging a campaign that says nothing, answers nothing, and ultimately is nothing. Romney’s form of a careful, nonspecific campaign for fear of offending someone recalls a line by E.E. Cummings: “A politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man.”

And a Romney episode that shocked me but seemed to run out of steam fairly quickly was the case of the boy with the bleached hair. Years ago when he was in prep school and before he adopted his Ozzie Nelson persona, Mitt spotted a fellow student on campus with chemically blond hair. With a group of likeminded Neanderthal vigilantes – not even one-on-one – Romney attacked the other boy and cut off his hair. Such an act identifies you for life and maybe you ought not run for president if you were part of the gang because America doesn’t like cowards who attack in packs.

Goodbye Mitt.

By now, it has likely dawned on Nan Hayworth, the one-term backbencher, that you can’t win an election by saying nothing more than your opponent doesn’t live in the district. Nor can you romance the Tea Party while flirting with everyone else at the dance with a hint that you’re really pro choice.

Goodbye Nan.

What should have been apparent to certain national Republicans is that sometimes you actually have to be civil if you hope to accomplish something. The example is Angus King, the former Republican governor of Maine who jumped into this year’s contest as an independent for the Senate seat being vacated by the moderate Republican Olympia Snowe.

His move could have been orchestrated by George Washington Plunkitt, the Tammany boss of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who once declared (in another context) “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

King took ‘em and won, despite being trashed by the GOP. Now he has a decision to make: Will he caucus with the Republicans or the Democrats? Take a guess.

As noted by Zest writer Jean Webster last week, a man named Joe Walsh ran for a congressional seat in Illinois. His opponent was Tammy Duckworth, a career soldier who reached the rank of lieutenant colonel and who lost her legs in combat in Iraq. It’s hard to run against someone gravely wounded in combat so Walsh declared total war on Duckworth. He said she was not heroic enough and, in one of the ugliest quotes of the year, said: “What else has she done? Female? Wounded veteran? Ehhhhh.”

Duckworth: Elected. Walsh: Back under his rock.

Todd Akin and his “legitimate rapes?” Gone.

Tammy Baldwin, the openly gay candidate for senator from Wisconsin? Elected.

Florida. Admit it. At times Tuesday night, you experienced the sickening feeling that, as in 2000, this election would wind up in the hands of state officials in Florida and that the state Supreme Court would rule one way and the U.S. Supreme Court would rule another way, and that Obama, with a minuscule Florida lead, would be the new Al Gore.

But then came Virginia, Pennsylvania, the fabled Ohio, and suddenly you understood that Romney was going home to Boston, that President Obama was going home to the White House, and that Florida didn’t matter.

By Gretchen Gibbs

In the last few days, interspersed with election talk was everyone’s account of how they weathered Sandy. While mine was not a dramatic tale, living it was difficult. I had no power between Monday evening and Sunday morning around 2. That meant no heat, no water, no light, no phone, no computer. I went to bed at 7 and got up at 5.

What was most significant to me was not the cold and the dark, the isolation and the boredom, but the books. In those five and a half days, I read four books.

I used to be a reader. As a kid, I made weekly trips to the library, coming home with two or three volumes, some of them hefty. Reading took me to places outside my own constricted and sometimes difficult family. A good novel was my haven.

Now I listen to books on tape when I drive. I read the Times and a couple of magazines. I belong to a book club and try to read the monthly assignment, though I don’t always finish. Besides that, I hardly read at all.

With my electricity back, I’m trying to figure it out. Why did I stop devouring books? Partly the seduction of the computer, which takes up way too much time. Roku television is also seductive. Partly that I started writing myself and became a more critical reader. Lots of books don’t appeal anymore. But in the storm I recaptured that delightful loss of self into an alternate universe that hooked me as a kid. I don’t want to lose that.

I hope others had the same experience. I went to the Albert Wisner Library in Warwick several times during the five days, partly for warmth, partly for my email, and each time I was impressed by the crowds. All the parking spaces were taken, and the line of cars on the drive rivaled the lines at the gas stations. Inside were groups of teens chatting and giggling, others like me getting their emails, frantic families calling on their cells for a hotel to stay at (“And would you take a dog?”), people checking out stacks of DVDs, and people actually reading. Lots of people reading books.

Perhaps Sandy will not only make us more aware of global warming, but help us examine how we spend our time.

President Barack Obama walks on stage with first lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia to deliver his victory speech on election night at McCormick Place in Chicago. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

By Emily Theroux
Why did Mitt Romney lose the 2012 election he was so certain he could win by appealing almost entirely to angry, aging white men?

America, it turns out, isn’t nearly as uniformly white as its white residents have long imagined it to be. Women, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians (as well as young voters of both genders and all ethnic groups) had a much larger say in this election than the Romney campaign calculated. Barack Obama’s “noisy, messy, complicated” democracy of 300 million people bears what he called, in his brilliant victory speech, “a mark of our liberty” in the very contentiousness that so polarizes us.

“The story of this election is that the Republican Party has not kept up with the changing face of America,” MSNBC’s Chuck Todd proclaimed just after the nation’s first black president won reelection.

The improving economy played a part in Obama’s stunning victory, as did the success in Midwestern states of his auto bailout, his foreign-policy experience, and his quick, effective, and compassionate response to Hurricane Sandy. Romney’s consistently high negative ratings (over everything from his obvious mendacity and persistent flip-flopping to his unsavory “vulture capitalist” career, obsessive secrecy about both his wealth and his taxes, refusal to provide any substantive details about the policies he might pursue as president, and repellent, robotic personality) certainly made voters less likely to trust him or view him as “presidential.”

“But make no mistake,” Todd opined. “What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces.” The white portion of the electorate dropped to 72 percent, Todd noted, and the president won only 39 percent of that vote. Among other demographic groups, however, Obama rode the crest of an unstoppable wave of change.

• Obama carried 93 percent of black voters  (now 13 percent of the electorate).
• Obama won 71 percent of Latinos (10 percent) nationwide; about 70 percent of the Latino vote in Colorado and Nevada; and 60 percent in Florida, despite the large number of Cuban-American Republicans in the state’s population.
• The president won 73 percent of Asians (3 percent of the electorate).
• Despite predictions that youth turnout would be depressed because young voters were believed to have become disillusioned with the president’s policies, voters in the 18-29 demographic represented 19 percent of the 2012 electorate (up from 18 percent in 2008); Obama won 60 percent of that age group.

The American people won this election, fair and square. Despite a GOP strategy of blatant racism and xenophobia, a broad-based voter suppression machine that put Jim Crow to shame, the “caging” of targeted groups from voter rolls, actual election fraud committed by a shady voter-registration firm used repeatedly (and under different names) by the Republican National Committee and various GOP candidates (including Romney) since the 2004 election, and a coordinated voter intimidation effort in swing states, Democrats and left-leaning independents toughed out enough attempts to thwart their votes that they were able to outnumber Republicans in Pennsylvania, Iowa, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, and, thus far, Florida — every other battleground state but Indiana and North Carolina.

There simply weren’t enough white voters remaining in the electorate to dominate the vote in the nine swing states. A working coalition of single women, African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and young voters collaborated to defeat Romney and Republican Senate candidates in state after state.

Twenty years ago, said Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, “an establishment candidate like Mitt Romney would have trounced Obama.” As bigoted and uncharitable as O’Reilly was about the black, Latino, and female voters who “feel that the economic system is stacked against them” and “feel they are entitled to things,” O’Reilly had a point.

Romney won 61 percent of the white vote last night, said Todd. The last candidate to win with that high a percentage of the white vote was George H.W. Bush in 1988. Since then, the share of the white vote in the general electorate has shrunk, and 61 percent of a shrinking slice of the electoral pie no longer puts GOP candidates in the White House.

“The white establishment is now the minority,” O’Reilly lamented. “The demographics of the country have changed. It’s not a traditional America any more.”

An anonymous comment following the Daily Beast’s story about Mitt Romney’s “bust” of a “victory party” elaborated on the point:

“The most telling aspect of Romney’s election night gathering is (that) just about every single person in the audience was white. The GOP is going to have to learn that they will not win if they do not court our racial minorities, and to court them means to give up on their racial bias. It’s politics, people; you are supposed to represent your constituency, and if you do not do that, you are going to continue to fail.”

This country’s been way too white for way too long. It was engendered as a melting pot, but an unequal one. Now, with the reelection of America’s first black president, the path that leads away from a government of, by, and for old, wealthy white men is well on its way to being leveled. This societal upheaval has inspired a great, ragged cry of protest from the privileged few who are being inexorably replaced — not by revolution or the “reparations” they’ve imagined being expected to pay, but by the births of “non-white” children (whose “right to life” remains the near-universal obsession of the very people who most resist immigration, integration, and assimilation).

I call them “world children.” The urban block I live on is a virtual “United Nations” of racial and ethnic backgrounds. My neighbors’ son, Sir William, 7, is French-Canadian and African-American. Becky, 8, who adores my dog, Zoe, and dresses her up in costumes, has a Mexican mother, Remedios, and a Honduran father, Jesus. Amanda, 10, is Afro-Caribbean and Dominican. MacKenzie, 6, and Natalia, 4, are Irish, Portuguese, Cherokee, and black. Jovaughan, 9, and his little sisters, are Haitian; while Elijah, 5, and Joelle, 2, have an African-American father and an Irish mother.

My baby grandaughter, Dulcinea,1, is Italian, Scotch-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Palestinian. My husband’s two grown children, Kailey, 26, and Alexander, 23, are French-Canadian, Irish, and Jewish.

These children are the future of an electorate that, by 2040, will cross the invisible threshhold from “majority white” to “majority other.” No longer “illegal” or “alien,” their varied and blended ethnicities may one day succeed in eradicating the scourge of racism from a country where everyone, after all, is originally from somewhere else.

By Bob Gaydos

“Do you think there are a lot of dumb people in the world?” Ketchup Bob asked Writer Bob.

“Wow, good question.”

The two friends were having some oatmeal (Writer Bob) and coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, ruing the fact that neither had bought stock in the company since this store was swamped with people desperate for coffee and no electric power at home, thanks to Hurricane Sandy.

There was a follow-up question: “Would you rather be smart and worry about all the things there are to worry about in this world — war, bigotry, hatred, disease — or would you rather be dumb and happy in your ignorance?”

This one was easy for Writer Bob. “Smart, any day,” he said, hoping to sound humble, “because, to me at any rate, it means being aware of yourself and the world you live in. Being aware that you always have choices and they can ultimately produce either conflict or contentment. It also means you can recognize opportunities when they present themselves and choose to follow where they lead. Knowing that is an empowering feeling. It also can produce what we call happiness, I think. End of philosophical answer to down-to-earth question.”

“That awareness,” Ketchup Bob added, “can also be vital in deciding how you fit into society, what you can do to contribute to the world, what your gifts are, music or science or art, for example, and how to best use them.”

This conversation was already getting too deep for morning coffee and Writer Bob, so he changed the subject.

“How come some people act so much older than they are?” he asked. “They seem to relish just being old. They act like it’s all over and they’re just waiting for the inevitable. I was with a group of people the other day and someone remarked, as a joke, that at least he wasn’t as old as the guy sitting next to me. The guy was someone most people probably would describe as an old man, but I had a hunch. As we were leaving, I asked him how old he was. I was right. He was several years younger than me — and you. I’m not bragging, just wondering.”

“I don’t know,” said the youngish-looking Ketchup Bob, “maybe it’s a mindset, a lack of motivation. Some people just seem to give up, like they have nothing to live for, nothing to contribute, so they don‘t care about their health or how they look. People tell them that they‘re old, so they act how they think old should act.”

“Are we back to smart or dumb again?”

“I don’t know. It may be more about faith and hope.”

“And awareness. I think in order to carry on with a purpose in life you need to be aware that faith and hope aren’t just high-minded words. I’m not talking about a blind, follow-the-leader kind of faith, but something inside that tells you there is a reason for your being here and it’s not just to be miserable and use up the oxygen. That there is hope, as well as life, after 50.” (Give me a break; I’m not telling.)

“Well, if you believe that, then you will have motivation to live, to enjoy life each day you have and to be as vigorous and productive as you can for as long as possible.”

“So is that smart or dumb?”

“I’d say damn fortunate. See you next week.”

bob@zestoforange.com