After calling for a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage without once mentioning the dreaded words “gay” or “lesbian,” President George W. Bush ended on a conciliatory note: “We should also conduct this difficult debate in a manner worthy of our country, without bitterness or anger. In all that lies ahead, let us match strong convictions with kindness and goodwill and decency.” This reminds me of Dame Edna Everage, who, after saying something horribly cruel about her bridesmaid Madge Allsop, habitually adds, “I mean that in a nurturing and caring way.”
The president’s announcement made official what was long anticipated: The culture war is now at center stage in the 2004 presidential election. To justify his decision, the president cited the recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that nothing short of marriage would do for same-sex couples, and an order by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to the county clerk to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. But while these events may have influenced the timing of the president’s announcement, the push for the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) began long before. Leaders of Bush’s right-wing political base had already been assured of the president’s support on the issue.
Meanwhile, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Democratic front-runner as I write this just prior to Super Tuesday, is once again displaying his penchant for seizing both sides of every issue. On the one hand, he opposes FMA just as he voted against the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) in 1996. On the other hand, he supports an amendment to the Massachusetts state Constitution as long as it allows for civil unions. Kerry (or rival Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., who also opposes both gay marriage and FMA) does have fair cause for wanting to thread this needle, since Karl Rove can be expected to do with gay weddings in 2004 what Lee Atwater did with flags in 1988. Or, as one friend of mine put it, Willie Horton is back, and he’s gay.
Anti-gay conservatives have had a field day. The stories predicting doom for the Democrats practically write themselves: Massachusetts liberals, a Boston convention, a Boston candidate — can you say four more years? Curiously, though, the president and Republican congressional leaders had until recently been in no hurry about an amendment. Conservatives are themselves divided on whether an amendment is needed and what it should say. Not only are prominent conservative voices such as columnist George F. Will and former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., opposed to FMA for reasons of federalism, conservative columnist David Brooks strongly supports gay marriage. In Massachusetts, the state constitutional convention recessed for a month after two days of debate and close votes on variously worded proposals. Prior to the president’s Feb. 24 announcement, and despite the media frenzy, lawmakers had paused.
With the election eight months away, a closely divided electorate and a Republican president who has the Democrats motivated like nothing in recent memory, that initial caution was warranted. Considering how the president exasperated his supporters on the religious right with his months of hedging on FMA, it would appear he doesn’t need a reminder that the culture war did his father’s reelection effort no good 12 years ago.
Let’s step back, as the president said to Tim Russert. The religious right’s anti-gay obsession discredits conservatism and risks alienating the GOP from the political center that it needs in order to govern. There is not enough space in one essay to address all the arguments and shibboleths that the right wing hurls at gays; that would take an entire book. Here I will merely survey some of the highlights (or lowlights), and offer some examples.
“Or the legal incidents thereof”
The Federal Marriage Amendment, introduced by Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., states: “Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups.”
Kindly notice what this proposed amendment leaves out. While purporting to be aimed at the defense of marriage, it entirely overlooks every single problem associated with heterosexual marriage. The amendment does nothing to stop no-fault divorce, or indeed prohibit divorce altogether, nor does it recriminalize adultery. Its aim is not to protect straight families, but only to attack gay ones.
Proponents of the amendment cannot even keep their stories straight. Some insist that the amendment would not prohibit states from passing civil union laws, while others want to ensure that all such “marriage lite” provisions, by whatever name, are barred nationwide. Under the Musgrave amendment, it is hard to see how any civil union could withstand a court challenge. If no state law can be construed to require conferring the legal incidents of marriage upon gay couples (who are barred by the amendment from marrying), civil union laws would be rendered null and void, since the legal incidents of marriage are precisely what civil unions are designed to provide.
Alternatives to the Musgrave wording are now emerging. The struggle that will likely ensue over competing texts will work against the president’s call for prompt action. One goal unites the rival camps: A desire to stop any more smiling gay couples from emerging with marriage certificates from city halls across the country.
Interpretation and “judicial tyranny”
Conservatives have made much of the distinction between judges who interpret law and judges who “legislate from the bench.” To listen to them, you would think that the judicial process was purely mechanical. As University of Michigan law student Steve Sanders describes this notion: “You take the relevant inputs (facts, precedents, statutes, whatever), ‘apply’ some law, and out pops objective, principled justice. A few more advances in Westlaw and we might not even need human judges.” As Sanders observes, “This provides cover for conservatives to appoint their own judges — many of whom are committed not to some tedious process of cranking the legal machinery, but rather to making law that reflects their policy preferences.”
What the cries of “judicial tyranny” conceal is the fact that people have legitimate differences over interpretations of constitutional principles, the application of laws, and concepts of justice. Calling a judge “activist” is not the same as refuting his legal argument. As Sanders, who maintains the Web site Gay/Lesbian Politics and Law, observes of the recent Massachusetts SJC ruling on same-sex marriage, “I have yet to hear a conservative political or legal commentator engage the history, findings, or logic of the actual Massachusetts opinion.”
Why is it judicial tyranny when a court ruling doesn’t go your way? Was Brown vs. Board of Education a case of judicial tyranny? How about Griswold vs. Connecticut, the landmark ruling on contraception? I can understand the passion about Roe vs. Wade, but how can a ruling like Lawrence vs. Texas (overturning sodomy laws), which harms no one and lifts people up, be called tyranny? Why should one group’s fundamental rights be subject to a majority vote, when everyone else takes those rights for granted? I realize that there are sharply different views about what rights are fundamental — different interpretations of the due process and equal protection clauses, for example — but that’s just my point: One side does not hold a monopoly. Ideological differences do not improve their pedigree by being dressed up as matters of judicial philosophy. The legal issues involved in the gay marriage dispute are complex, and must be carefully examined rather than bypassed with a hasty amendment that seeks to cut the Gordian knot.
Shoddy scholarship and pseudoscience
Anti-gay advocates should be embarrassed by the quality of what passes for scholarship coming from their side. A case in point is the Spring 2002 issue of Regent University Law Review, which is entirely devoted to attacks on homosexuality. In one article, Dale M. Schowengerdt, faulting the work of gay-marriage expert William Eskridge, acknowledges, “No one will argue that homosexuality has not existed” — then cleverly cites the condemnations in Genesis 19:1-29; Romans 1:24-27; 1 Corinthians 6:10; and 1 Timothy 1:10. Not surprisingly, he leaves out 2 Samuel 3:2-5; 1 Kings 11:3; Deuteronomy 22:13-21; Ezra 9:12; and Mark 10:9 — which concern the right to take multiple wives and concubines; the requirement that nonvirginal brides be executed; and prohibitions of mixed marriages and divorce.
Schowengerdt quotes fellow Eskridge debunkers Peter Lubin and Dwight Duncan, who criticize Eskridge’s footnoted references to what they consider obscure civilizations, saying, “Bullied by footnotes, the reader’s critical faculties surrender without a fight.” Oddly enough, this observation is made in one of Schowengerdt’s 136 footnotes.
On the uniqueness of heterosexual marriage, Schowengerdt writes, “No other combination but man and woman involves the unique sexual complementarity of the one-flesh union upon which the survival of the human race depends.” Reading this, one would think that the entire human race were about to “turn queer” and stop reproducing, despite considerable evidence to the contrary.
Regent’s president and chancellor, the Rev. Pat Robertson, is known for regularly proclaiming his close personal relationship with God; praying for Supreme Court justices to die; and defending his erstwhile mining business associate, indicted war criminal Charles Taylor of Liberia. In 1998, Robertson warned that God would punish Disney World for hosting “Gay Days” by sending a hurricane to hit the park in Orlando, Fla. As God would have it, however, Hurricane Bonnie that year turned away from Orlando and hit Virginia Beach, where Robertson’s ministry and university are headquartered. In 2003, Robertson’s televised prayers on “The 700 Club” failed to divert Hurricane Isabel. Perhaps God was watching another channel.
For many years, a primary source for anti-gay statistics has been psychologist Paul Cameron, who was expelled by the American Psychological Association in December 1983 for using unsound methods and misrepresenting the work of others. His Family Research Institute publishes pseudoscientific reports claiming that gay parents harm children, gays rape and murder children, and gays have a dramatically shorter life expectancy. His “research” has been used by syndicated columnists, members of Congress, and Defense Department officials. In November 1997, former Education Secretary William Bennett stated, both on ABC’s “This Week” and in the Weekly Standard, that the average life expectancy for gay men was 43 years. The source of this bogus fact was Paul Cameron.
A work of questionable scientific merit that has been seized upon recently by the religious right is “The Man Who Would Be Queen,” by J. Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern University. Bailey’s errors include accepting old stereotypes of gay femininity and relying on wildly unrepresentative samples, such as the men he found at Chicago’s gay dance bars. The book was praised by John Derbyshire, a virulently anti-gay contributor to National Review.
One argument that is often made against gay people is that homosexuality is unnatural, existing nowhere else in nature. This was disproved by Bruce Bagemihl’s 1999 book, “Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity,” which surveys scholarly studies documenting homosexual behavior in 450 animal species. Yet when we show that homosexuality is observed throughout the animal kingdom, our opponents turn right around and say that doesn’t make it right. “Since when is animal behavior the standard for humans?” we are asked. I quite agree, but will these people please make up their minds? Speaking of unnatural things, there is nothing natural about technology, medicine, literature or the arts. The argument from nature is really just a ploy designed to obscure the fact that homosexuality is indeed normal for a small portion of the population.
Those preparing to apply gay-related scholarship to matters of public policy should first consult the Gay Directory of Authoritative Resources, a listing of experts working in various gay-related policy areas, published by the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic Studies.
Defending a sacred institution
Both President Bush and Sen. Kerry have talked about marriage as a sacred institution, but the government is not charged with defending the sacred. That is the job of religious leaders. When the sacred needs politicians to defend it, the sacred is in big trouble. The surest way to protect the sacredness of something is to keep politicians as far away from it as possible.
The moral authority of some religious leaders is seriously called into question by some of their own statements. In a 1986 pastoral letter on homosexuals, Vatican doctrinal chief Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger deplored anti-gay violence, only to justify it: “[W]hen civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.” Thus we have the princes of the Church making excuses for thugs.
But this line of argument is not only used against gays. When a record number of women in Spain were murdered by their husbands and boyfriends in 2003, the Spanish Roman Catholic bishops responded with a pastoral letter that fingered the sexual revolution as the culprit.
Opponents of same-sex marriage like to say that we are trying to overturn six millennia of tradition. But this steady-state portrayal of marriage ignores the fact that notions of marriage, courtship, love and sexuality have varied considerably over the centuries and across cultures. Women used to be treated little better than chattel; does the fact that this was a long tradition make it preferable to the standard of equal partnership that we have today? Apparently so, according to the Southern Baptist Convention. In 2000, the Southern Baptists, citing biblical authority, adopted a revised summary of their faith that declared: “A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.” Unfortunately, the same biblical author cited by the Baptists, Paul, also instructed slaves to obey their masters. As usual, the fundamentalists conveniently pick and choose which holy passages they care about, while acting as if the rest of us don’t have the same privilege.
The fundamentalists, of course, are free to believe what they like, thanks to the First Amendment’s “wall of separation between Church & State” described by President Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. What they are not free to do is impose those beliefs on the rest of us. Endless rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, the present dispute is not about sacred marriage as ordained by churches but civil marriage as ordained by government. That being said, the moral arguments against homosexuality have been addressed and refuted rather thoroughly by ethics professor John Corvino in a series of articles that are available on the Independent Gay Forum.
Invoking the popular will
Rep. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., said on Fox News on Feb. 15 that 60 percent of Americans oppose gay marriage. But the day before the president’s announcement, the National Annenberg Election Survey released a poll showing that a plurality of Americans opposes the Federal Marriage Amendment, by a margin of 48 percent to 41 percent. Setting aside dueling poll numbers, 60 percent (or 64 percent, another recent figure) is short of the two-thirds needed in both houses of Congress and the three-fourths of state legislatures needed to ratify a constitutional amendment. To be sure, if you had a simple majority of public support in two-thirds of all congressional districts, and all members slavishly voted according to the polls, it could still pass the House. But there was a lot more than 60 percent public support for an amendment to ban flag burning, and it hasn’t happened.
An effort to rush through an anti-gay amendment depends more on stoking fear than on engaging reason. The anti-gay right has long traded more in grotesque caricatures than arguments, as with the Christian Coalition videotape shown at rallies in 1996. According to author Bruce Bawer, that video “cut back and forth between idealized Hallmark card images of wholesome-looking brides and grooms … and Gay Pride Day shots of screaming, bare-chested leathermen.” One reason for the radical right’s hurry over FMA may be a recognition that the more Americans are familiar with ordinary gay people, the less effective the scary images will be.
Many conservatives, to show the popularity of their position, mention DOMA and the 38 statehouses that have passed similar laws for their states. So what problem is the proposed constitutional amendment supposed to solve? Until a federal court rules the 1996 law unconstitutional, no state is required to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state. So even if you support amending the Constitution to resolve a social dispute, it clearly is premature right now. As The Washington Post editorialized on Feb. 13, 2004, “[A]mending the Constitution to reverse court decisions that have not been issued in cases that have not been filed is wrongheaded.”
If far-right leaders were truly committed to the democratic process instead of trying to provoke a stampede, they would be content to allow different states to make their own decisions, as DOMA provides. But their real opinion of the electorate comes out when they don’t get their way. Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, wrote on Oct. 30, 2000: “It is already bad enough that so many uneducated, ill-informed and, when it comes to the candidates, just plain stupid, voters are going to be in that booth Nov. 7. We don’t need any more of them, thank you. This Republic is fragile enough as it is.”
Luckily, as with Anita Bryant and her anti-gay “Save the Children” campaign in 1977, the radical right’s concerted attacks against gay families are not only energizing their base — they are energizing gays and our allies as well.
Acknowledging that gays exist
Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution writes: “Something really new, without historical precedent, is happening in America. Today, for the first time, a majority is coming to realize that homosexuals actually exist: That we’re not just heterosexuals who need treatment or jail. This realization will, must, and should drive change in a society whose institutions are premised on the notion that homosexuals do not actually exist.” Rauch argues: “Now that we know that homosexuals exist … the extension of the nuptial contract to them is not a sundering of tradition but an extension of it.”
Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review Online: “The real source of the challenges of gay life is the problem of sexual difference. It is terribly difficult to grow up with a different sort of sexuality than most of the world around you. Marriage does not cause this problem, and it cannot solve it.” But the problem for gays is not in the difference itself but in the social stigma and legal discrimination directed at the difference. Jonathan Rauch, who has debated Kurtz on the issue, characterizes Kurtz’s position thus: “I don’t believe homosexuals can handle marriage responsibly. And they should never be allowed a chance to prove me wrong. Sorry, gay people, but that’s life.”
Gays do not need Kurtz’s patronizing assurances of “compassion for the sorrows and difficulties of gays,” sorrows that he seeks to perpetuate by denying our families legal recognition and protection.
This is not a purely abstract matter — real lives are affected by treating gay families as strangers under the law. One problem that can only be rectified by federal recognition of gay relationships is that of binational couples, of which I myself am a member. Bruce Bawer, a gay American writer whose partner is Norwegian, emigrated to Norway in 1999 because that was the only way he could be with his partner. “Obviously my partner and I are far luckier than most international gay couples,” Bawer writes. “His homeland recognizes same-sex unions, and I have a job I can do anywhere. Nonetheless, the stresses — and expenses — we’ve endured in order to live together legally would have torn many couples apart. The logic underlying civil recognition of marriage is that it strengthens social stability; U.S. immigration policy would seem to be driven by a sadistic zeal to destabilize gay families.”
In Washington, D.C., where I live, a recent report by the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance shows that there are 212 rights and responsibilities associated with marriage under District of Columbia law. Some of these could be conferred upon gay families through domestic partnerships or civil unions, assuming that the U.S. Congress does not stomp on any effort by the District’s elected officials to do so. On the other hand, federal law, according to a recently updated report from the General Accounting Office, has 1,138 benefits, rights and privileges contingent on marital status. None of those may be gained through domestic partnerships or civil unions. Anything short of full marriage will leave gay families separate and unequal.
There is an unintended consequence as well. The various legal alternatives to civil marriage that are springing up across the country do indeed create a “marriage lite” that competes with marriage. Many such alternatives are open to straight couples as well as gays. As a result, some couples will inevitably accept fewer protections in exchange for fewer responsibilities. William Eskridge writes: “[P]eople who seriously value long-term, mutually committed relationships as the best situs of human flourishing and childrearing ought to be concerned that these new institutions make it easier for couples to enjoy many state benefits without as much state-supported obligation. These laws not only make marriage less special, but they lessen the difficulty of divorce. That should trouble the religious traditionalist and the gay marriage proponent alike. Thus, if traditionalists truly want to preserve marriage — not just homophobia — it’s time for them to join forces with the gay-marriage activists in a common cause.”
Once more into the breach
Few can remember the nomination acceptance speech given by President George H.W. Bush at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Few can forget the speech given by his defeated rival, Patrick J. Buchanan, from the same podium. Many factors contributed to Bush 41′s defeat that year, but one factor was the angry, fanatical face that Buchanan had put on the Republican Party, in stark contrast to the president’s more moderate image and rhetoric.
Buchanan’s targets were many: Abortionists, women in combat, environmentalists, activist judges, and opponents of public funding for religious schools. As he had done so often as a columnist, however, he reserved particular scorn for gays. “Yes, we disagreed with President Bush, but we stand with him … against the amoral idea that gay and lesbian couples should have the same standing in law as married men and women … There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
The choice it makes on whether and how to fight that culture war is also critical to the kind of party the GOP will be. After doing his damage in 1992, Pat Buchanan ended up bolting the party some years later and mounting a third-party candidacy. The fundamentalist Christian right — the constituency of Judge Roy Moore and other apocalyptic preachers — will never be satisfied short of remaking the entire country in their own theocratic image, which is impossible in a pluralistic Western democracy. Yet continuing to let itself be held hostage to these fanatics will be ruinous to the party’s long-term mainstream appeal.
Some of the most energetic Republican activists in recent years have been the Log Cabin Republicans, whose viability as the nation’s largest organization of gay and lesbian Republicans would be called into question by passage of FMA. In a press statement following the president’s announcement on Feb. 24, Log Cabin called the proposed amendment “a declaration of war on gay and lesbian families” and vowed an all-out fight against it.
There is nothing conservative about demonizing a group of honest, hard-working American taxpayers and making them strangers in their own land.
To those who persist in denying the reality and legitimacy of gay people’s lives, our sexual orientation is a psychological condition, a pathology, a sin, a crime, a behavior, a choice — anything but a constitutive part of who we are, the same as with heterosexuality. From this perspective, our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not God-given, as it is for everyone else, but instead belongs in the hands of doctors, ministers and prosecutors. The fact that we are still standing after such an onslaught is a tribute to our strength, our American grit and our determination to be full citizens.
On Feb. 12, 2004, two days before their 51st anniversary, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin were the first same-sex couple granted a marriage license by the San Francisco county clerk. Lyon and Martin are pioneers of the gay rights movement, and those of us for whom they began paving the way five decades ago were electrified by the image of this venerable couple, 79 and 83 years old, respectively, officially sealing their union at last. For them and the thousands of couples who followed them, there is no going back. A court may invalidate the licenses, but a powerful idea has been given life that can never be taken back.
This is our Rosa Parks moment: an act of civil disobedience that dramatically exposes an injustice. The gay couples going to San Francisco City Hall, and their counterparts and supporters across the country, follow in the footsteps of the participants in the Montgomery bus boycott. They are helping our nation, in the words of Dr. King, to live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. It would be most unwise, and a stark departure from its origins, for the party of Lincoln to stake its future on holding back that tide.
“Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.”
– President Barack Obama, May 1, 2011
1.
This is how history breaks in 2011. I was watching AMC’s “The Killing” last night when my daughter walked into the living room around 11 p.m. and said, “Osama bin Laden is dead.”
“What? Are you sure? Where did you hear this?”
“It’s online.”
The texts and calls and tweets and Facebook posts and cable news ticker feeds piled up from there, morphing into that familiar buzzing audiovisual din. Our other atmosphere.
At first there was no actual news, just rumor and speculation. Finally the Sunday night shows were interrupted by reports that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida mastermind and America’s most wanted criminal, might finally be dead, nine-and-a-half years after the worst-ever terrorist attack on American soil.
On NBC’s East Coast affiliates, the announcement of an impending presidential address cut into the final moments of “Celebrity Apprentice,” starring would-be Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. (Take that, you combed-over bigot.) Obama did not appear for another hour. After he spoke — confirming that bin Laden had been killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by Joint Special Operation Command forces working with the CIA — NBC and CBS returned to previously scheduled programming. ABC and the cable news channels stuck with the story. “The minute I heard that the president was doing an announcement at 10:30 and breaking into TV, I sort of guessed, I thought, ‘They got bin Laden,’” New York Sen. Chuck Schumer told New York’s WABC. “They wouldn’t break into TV for any other reason.”
Fox News Channel somehow managed to deliver comprehensible audio over the collective, bloody grinding of teeth, even when relaying a statement from ex-President George W. Bush congratulating Obama: “This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001.”
“This will probably prove to be one of the most significant, if not the most significant accomplishments of the president,” NBC News White House correspondent Chuck Todd told anchor Brian Williams, in a bloc of live MSNBC coverage that displaced a taped program titled “Sex Slaves UK.”
On ABC, Debra Burlingame, the sister of Charles Burlingame, pilot of the hijacked flight that struck the Pentagon, told anchor George Stephanopoulos, “This has been a long time coming. It’s been rough because it pretty much dominated my life, all of these national security issues. And we’re not out of the woods yet, George, but this is really big.”
Yes.
So big that after a certain point, a New York-based TV columnist can no longer sit in his living room, typing on a laptop while stealing glances at a TV. Next stop, ground zero.
2.
The Cortlandt Street R train stop deposits riders on the perimeter of ground zero, in front of the Century 21 department store on Church Street, meters away from a chain link fence festooned with banners detailing the splendors that will appear on the former World Trade Center site: Freedom Tower. Reflecting pool. High-end retail shops.
At first the street seemed unnervingly quiet. Yes, it was 1:30 Monday morning at the the start of a work week, but this was supposed to be V-E Day all over again, at least in theory. Where were all the people?
Two blocks away, as it turned out: Klieg lights. Waving flags. The distant roar of a crowd’s cheer building and cresting:
“HhhhhhhhhhRRaaaaaaAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!”
How many people were there? Thousands, I’m told.
They’d stuck bunches of red and white roses into the fence and taped up signs: “Thanks, Barack!” “USA WINNING.” There was a scrawny young man in a red, white and blue top hat, and a tearful man with a hand-lettered sign that read, “He’s dead,” and a man holding an iPhone with a viewscreen spelling out, in huge letters, “OBAMA 1 OSAMA 0.” One woman came dressed in an Old Glory jumpsuit complete with hoodie.
“It feels like the world’s guiltiest criminal is now gone from this earth,” said Eric Brehm of Columbus, Ohio, who was visiting New York with his girlfriend, Megan Sander. “I’m happy for the people of New York and happy for the world.” Sander recalled watching the second plane hit on TV almost a decade ago. “My boss’ sister was a flight attendant on that plane,” she said.
A number of celebrants wore American flags as capes. “It’s an amazing night,” said one flag-caped celebrant, Juan Rodriguez of Cliffside Park, N.J. “I feel like I can breathe again.” He said the flag around his shoulders once belonged to his grandfather, who served in the Pacific during WWII.
Archie Archipolo, who grew up on the Lower East Side and has lived in lower Manhattan for over a decade, recalled the madness in this neighborhood nine-and-a-half years ago. “The Red Cross set up a station with bottles of water. There were tanks in the streets.”
Archipolo was wearing a VFW cap that belonged to his grandfather, who served in the 1st Division of the U.S. Army during World War II. He was there with his girlfriend, Danielle Cristiani, and her godson Max Sperling, a teenager who was 5 when the towers fell. “It was like a war zone down here,” Sperling recalled. “But it was so quiet that first night.”
“We lost friends, cousins that day,” Archipolo said. “Everyone did. Now I think we’re on the way back. But we have to be careful. It could happen again any time. It might not be as big as it was before. It could be some guys strapped with C-4.”
A young Navy officer in dress blues and a sailor in white joined a drunken civilian teenager atop a lamppost at the corner of Church and Vesey and led the crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
3.
What didn’t come through in the TV feeds and newspaper stories was the peculiar character of the crowd: half in-the-moment, half outside of it.
There were engaged, ecstatic — and over time, increasingly tipsy — revelers. There were news vans and trucks with broadcast-quality cameras and bright lights and rumbling generators. There were roving reporters with notepads and hand-held digital tape recorders. I saw people collecting video and audio with their iPhones. One woman circled the outer edge of the crowd, holding her iPad slightly above her head, getting a smooth tracking shot around the edges of the gathering and double-checking her framing by glancing up at the screen.
In some sectors of the designated celebration zone — a two-block area ringed by cops and barricades — witnesses to history appeared to outnumber participants.
Then again, the distinction between participants might be a false one. Nowadays just about everybody has the ability to record his or her life at any time, for any reason, via digital stills, video, audio. And there was a whole lot of recording going on last night. Three young men in kilts climbed on top of a bank of pay phones and gave an impromptu bagpipe concert; the strobe-flash illumination of shutterbugs was so intense that they might as well have been performing on the floor of a disco. There were people taking video and still photos of cops, construction workers, Marines, sailors and civilians wrapped in American flags or carrying signs. There were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures. And there were people taking pictures of the people taking pictures of the people taking pictures.
Clouds of pot smoke occasionally wafted through the scene, and as the celebration wore on, it became harder to move through the throng without accidentally kicking an empty beer bottle and sending it clattering down the street.
If you stood back and squinted at the crowd, hundreds of rectangles of electronic light seemed to bob like embers on a dark wave. People were showing each other their iPhones, sharing Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, uploaded and downloaded photos, YouTube clips, streaming video from CNN. They were discussing the coverage, repeating what they’d heard, saying what they did or didn’t believe.
“They should show pictures of the raid, pictures of the body, a picture, something,” a man holding a bottle of water told a man holding a tall can of Budweiser. “They have to show proof that he’s dead, that it’s him they shot, otherwise the tinfoil hats come out.”
And yet despite the anxiety and intense self-consciousness, there was a bustling energy to the gathering, with undertones of joy, relief and hope — plus a brute satisfaction than somebody finally tracked the son of a bitch down and put one in his brain. Songs and chants erupted and faded, some merely patriotic, others belligerent: “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “America the Beautiful.” “You ess AY! You ess AY” “Nah nah NAH nah!/Nah nah NAH nah!/Hey HEY-YYYYY/Good BYE!” One especially wasted young man lunged at a TV camera and yelled, “Iran is next! I don’t care what anybody says! Iran is next!”
Jonathan Jirack, formerly of Pittsburgh, left his apartment near ground zero around 2 a.m. bearing a hand-lettered sign that read, “We cheer for [PEACE SYMBOL], not death.” He walked through the crowd for hours holding it over his head. “I saw the gathering on TV and I thought, ‘I need to go down there and try to put an asterisk on the event,’” he said. “I understand the jubilation. I can feel it. But a lot of people are watching this thing on TV, and I’m afraid what we’re putting out there can be manipulated or misinterpreted.”
“That’s noble,” said Kevin Caslava, a San Diego-born writer who has lived in New York off and on for a decade, indicating Jirack’s sign. “But you’ve also got people here chanting, ‘Fuck Osama,’ so it’s not like what you’re describing is the only subtext out here.”
They argued politely about the sign — Jirack insisting that most of the people here were more relieved and happy than bloodthirsty, even though it might not come across that way on TV, and Caslava was taking a more skeptical view.
“Look, I get it,” Caslava said. “I feel a deep-rooted satisfaction, but also a sense of, ‘Should I be cheering because a man got shot?’ I’ve traveled a lot, and I’ve met people who argued for bin Laden as a freedom fighter, as somebody who had reasons for what he did. When you hear them talk, intellectually you understand the reasons, even though you have a visceral hatred of what happened in this country, right here on our own soil. Deep inside us, there’s a very strong voice for war. You try to be rational, but there’s that voice inside that says, ‘Fuck this.’ That’s the voice I’m hearing here, mostly.”
“And,” he added, “when you’re watching news from Middle Eastern countries and you see people holding up signs in Arabic, how do you know what they’re saying? If you can’t read Arabic, you can’t know. You might think what’s on that Arabic sign was a message of peace when it’s actually something like, ‘Fuck all y’all!’ How do you know that somebody in another country where they don’t speak English won’t look at your sign and just not understand it at all? Or misinterpret it?”
“That’s why I put the peace symbol on there,” Jirack said.
4.
Back in Brooklyn again after a brief subway ride in an R train car filled with mostly sleeping people and other awake persons — fellow pilgrims to ground zero who thought the timing of Obama’s announcement was a bit too convenient, that maybe the president delayed the raid, or delayed announcing the news, until tonight because it would put a lid on the celebrations.
“They were building up to this raid for weeks,” a man said. “He didn’t give the go-ahead last night. Why? Because if he’d done it last night, Saturday night, around the same time as tonight, the word would have gone out when half the people in America were already half-drunk, and then what would the TV have shown? It would have been insanity. So he waits until late Sunday night. Everybody’s happy, but they’re tired. They want to celebrate, but they also gotta go to work in the morning.”
“Not everything is a conspiracy,” another rider said.
“They’re very precise in how they manage the country,” the first rider said. “They got shaping P.R. down to an exact science.”
Home at last. The kids were zonked out. On CNN, Steve Bernstein, whose brother Billy died on 9/11 when Cantor-Fitzgerald’s World Trade Center offices went up in smoke, said that when he heard about bin Laden, “I felt like my brother could finally rest in peace. I felt the same way.”
Then the newscast cut to correspondent Ted Rowlands reporting live from “a hookah lounge in Anaheim, California” at 2 a.m. Pacific. His topic: the reaction of Muslim-Americans. He sidled over to one side of the club and approached a couple of attractive young women. “Leila,” he said, extending his microphone to one of them, “as a Persian-American, give it to me: What is your reaction to Osama bin Laden being killed?”
“We’re elated that someone who is the biggest symbol of terrorism is finally gone now,” Leila said. “And I can’t wait to see his picture now, to be honest with you.”
Rowlands led the camera crew toward the back of the club, where the owner was waiting for him. Ninety minutes earlier, Rowlands explained, the owner — a U.S. armed forces veteran — had been the victim of a drive-by egging. There was still a splotch of yolk on his shirt.
“This is Mohammed, the establishment’s owner,” Rowlands explained. “He was actually hit in the neck by an egg.”
“Good job, U.S. Army, and Marines, everybody, Obama, we’re glad that’s over with,” Mohammed said.
Rowlands followed up: ”Does it help? Do you think this is the beginning of the end of discrimination here in America, or no, is it an ongoing thing?”
“It’s gonna be an ongoing thing as long as we have a lot of the biased media and ignorant people out here,” Mohammed said. “Hopefully, this brings a little closure … We’re happy that he’s dead, we’re happy that he’s gone.”
I glanced down at my laptop. In my Twitter feed was a link to a wire story saying that Osama bin Laden’s corpse had already been buried at sea.
It’s crunch time. There’s only a week to go in this seemingly interminable 2008 presidential election. The consensus from the national polls is that Democrat Barack Obama enjoys a lead in the mid-to-high single digits and he looks to be strong in key battleground states as well. Obama’s lead at this late stage contrasts starkly with the position in which Al Gore and John Kerry found themselves, respectively, during the closing week of the 2000 and 2004 elections. Though many superstitious Democrats around the country refuse to let the thought even enter their minds, much less pass from their lips, the truth is that the 2008 presidential election is, at this point, Barack Obama’s to lose. That said, today we ask a very simple question: What should Obama and his campaign do now to close out his presidential bid?
Joining us to impart their advice and analysis are three Democrats who have advised presidents and presidential candidates. Kenneth Baer, a former senior speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, is the co-founder and co-editor of the progressive quarterly Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He is also the head of Baer Communications, a Democratic speechwriting and policy-consulting firm. Democratic strategist and media consultant Steve McMahon is a partner in the firm McMahon, Squier and Lapp. A former aide to Sen. Ted Kennedy, McMahon has worked as a strategist and consultant on three presidential campaigns, most notably Vermont Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and, later, Dean’s successful race for Democratic National Committee chairman. Laurie Moskowitz is founder and principal of Fieldworks, a firm that specializes in voter contact and ground mobilization. In 2000, she directed the Democratic National Committee’s national field effort that helped produce Al Gore’s national popular vote victory.
Tom Schaller: We are a week away from the election. Obama seems to have a lead of 5 to 7 points, depending on which polls you look at. I’d like to open the conversation by asking what the key priorities of the Obama campaign, or really any presidential campaign with that kind of lead and a few precious days to go, should be.
Kenneth Baer: I think right now it’s not to become complacent. This campaign, more so than other campaigns, has generated a huge amount of excitement. Look at it like potential energy. The trick is to convert that potential energy to real energy on Election Day. You just can’t get people saying, “My vote is not going to matter, Obama is up 10 points, I don’t need to go out and vote. It’s cold out, it’s rainy.” [You can't have] staff people who are like, “I don’t need to work that hard, we’re going to win this anyway.” Just really keeping motivated, that’s the big challenge.
Steve McMahon: Obama’s got a great lead on paper. There are an enormous number of new voters, which were all pretty much signed up by the Obama campaign. So he has the opportunity to expand his lead even further. But if he gets complacent at all, it’s dangerous. The best thing to do when you’re winning is to keep doing what you’re doing because that’s the reason you’re winning. He needs to be aggressive, he needs to continue to draw out the distinctions between himself and McCain. He needs to continue making people comfortable with the notion of Barack Obama as president of the United States and I think he’s done a really good job doing that to this point. As the McCain campaign reaches into the toolbox and discovers they’ve got nothing left to throw but the kitchen sink, it’s important for Obama to stay on his game and not be distracted.
Schaller: Laurie Moskowitz, I assume the one group in a campaign that’s definitely not ramping things down at this point is the field crowd, the get-out-the-vote people. They’re just going into high gear, right?
Laurie Moskowitz: Yeah, the field group is basically staying up all night, putting their organization together. And that’s what it comes down to at this stretch, is having the organization that can turn all these new voters out, that can find these people on Election Day. To make sure all the people who have already voted are taken off the rolls so that we can marshal resources and make sure that we have targeted lists on Election Day and that it all comes together in one sort of final orchestration that makes it all work.
Schaller: There was a lot of criticism of John Kerry four years ago that he didn’t tell us what the national message was until a week after the campaign. It was apparently something called JHOS — jobs, healthcare, opportunities, security. But people criticized him for not articulating that properly during the campaign. And then of course there was the Osama bin Laden video. What kind of message do you want to deliver in the last week?
Baer: I think this is something where for a Democrat who has been involved in campaigns in 2000 and 2004, we’re in a strange situation where we have a candidate who started his campaign with a message and has kept that message consistently for the entire length of this campaign. Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s about, it’s about the change we need. That message has been fleshed out a bit over time, but it’s basically been the same thing. And it’s working. It’s a man and a message and a moment all coming together. The advice to the Obama campaign is continue what you’re doing. One of the more important components to that is to make sure that the campaign continues to be on the offense. For the last two weeks, the Obama campaign needs to be setting the terms of the debate and not John McCain, and it has to be proactive, not reactive.
McMahon: To my way of thinking, the JHOS, or whatever it was, wasn’t really a message at all. What it was was a series of issues and issue positions that didn’t really ladder up to anything that was clear to voters. I think what the Obama campaign has done so well is what, frankly, Republicans usually do well, which is they’ve set a frame for Barack Obama’s campaign and for what he represents and everything that they do ladders up to and reinforces that frame. And the frame, as Ken pointed out, is change we need. And it’s very, very clear to people that Barack Obama wants to take the country in a new direction. And it’s very clear that he wants to take it in a direction that is fundamentally different than the direction the president has taken us on. And it’s also pretty clear because they’ve set a frame for John McCain early in this race that they’ve stuck to very, very religiously and that is he’s John McSame. He’s going to just give us four more years of George Bush.
If you look at the polling numbers, that frame has stuck on John McCain. That’s really what he’s struggling with and the fact that he’s now trying to carry around Sarah Palin, who after initially looking like perhaps it might be an interesting choice that could change the dynamic of the race, turns out to have been a reckless and dangerous and erratic choice that people have figured out. They’re now wondering what kind of judgment John McCain has.
Schaller: Let me rephrase this question for Laurie. Is it easier to do field work in a race like this where your candidate has been consistent?
Moskowitz: It definitely makes it easier because I think people know what they’re voting for. They know what they’re going out and casting their ballot for and that’s a much easier choice for people to make. I think in some places where people are seeing polls and they’re so overwhelmingly for Obama, people do start to think, “Oh well, it just won’t matter if I get to the polls that day.” You have to convince them that’s not the case, that it actually does matter.
Schaller: We know that Obama, with all this money, has bought this huge chunk of time, I don’t know if it’s the night before or Sunday night, but he’s going to have this 30-minute segment. We’ve seen this done in the past. How do you handle that, Steve? What would you do? It’s usually this very glossy, biographical thing. Do you think he will do the traditional thing with that or will he do something different?
McMahon: I actually think it’s the precursor to his State of the Union speech. What I mean by that, I think what he wants to do is frame the race and frame for people what it would look like and what it would feel like if Barack Obama became president of the United States. And so my suspicion is there will be less bio and it will be less like a commercial and more like a serious, thoughtful speech that talks about the challenges the country faces, that expresses the optimism and aspiration that we can address together as Americans in a bipartisan way and meet whatever challenges we face. It begins to set a frame for Sen. Obama becoming President Obama. It also gives him an opportunity, if there are any lingering issues out there that he needs to resolve or address — which, by the way, I don’t think there are at this point — it gives him an opportunity to address those. It’s a great luxury to have the ability and the financial resources to do a half-hour before the election. And it’s something that’s going to make this race even more difficult for John McCain to close. The financial resource advantage has been enormous. And that half-hour on every major network in prime time is going to make it even more difficult.
Moskowitz: Having him out there looking so presidential is just a huge factor in this. For the people who still are undecided, for them, it’s feeling comfortable with him. I think putting him in that presidential state is just the way to go. I think it’s a great tactic and a luxury we [Democrats] haven’t seen.
Baer: It’s interesting listening to you two guys because I’ve actually been puzzled by what he would do with the half-hour. It sounds like, Laurie and Steve, the Obama campaign is going to put him out there in an Oval Office sort of setting and speak directly into the camera. I thought they would just do the heavily glossy production laying out the case. Do you know things I don’t?
Moskowitz: There won’t be any Greek columns.
McMahon: No, I’m just guessing, but as we say in Texas, we’re fixing to find out.
Schaller: This election for the most part has been a referendum on Obama and whether voters feel comfortable with him. I think we’ve seen in the last month, particularly since the bailout crisis, that voters have become comfortable. If you’re Obama, do you talk about your opponent if you’re ahead at this point or do you just talk about yourself?
McMahon: I think the race first was a referendum on George Bush and second it was a referendum on Barack Obama. And by that I mean, Sen. Obama became the nominee in the midst of a fairly vociferous desire for change. And I believe he leveraged that very, very effectively. And what the McCain campaign did, beginning with the celebrity ad up to about three or four weeks ago, was it made it a referendum on Barack Obama and I think he passed that test in the debates and by his behavior and by his steady response to the financial crisis. Obviously the financial crisis made it a challenge for both candidates, but Barack Obama rose to the challenge and John McCain didn’t. I don’t think he needs to or should address Sen. McCain. But I do think that it’s smart for him to talk about a new direction and how the president, who’s not very popular at all right now, took us down a road that it’s going to require great determination and a willingness to work together to get back on track. I think that every time he does that, he benefits and hits Sen. McCain without ever having to mention Sen. McCain’s name.
Baer: I think that you can’t look too far past Nov. 4. The McCain campaign is really trying to land some punches and they’re throwing everything, including the kitchen sink, and some of those are going to stick. I always believe, and maybe this is an early lesson I learned, that you always need to be on the offensive. Always, always, always. Attack, attack, attack. I don’t mean personal attacks, but be on the offensive in terms of the debate. And if that means engaging John McCain directly, that means engaging John McCain directly. He is the nominee and everyone knows that. You just can’t let up the pressure. The race is not an 8- or 10-point race right now. It’s not going to end up being that way. This is going to tighten, this is going to be a close election or it’s going to feel close or be close on Election Day. You really need to keep up the pressure.
Schaller: Laurie, I wonder if attacking or, inversely, being attacked is good for mobilization even if it’s just at the volunteer level. Does it ratchet up the level of intensity of the people in the field?
Moskowitz: Well, I certainly think that attacks in general ratchet things up in the field. It would depend on what it is, how the campaign responds. There are so many what-ifs in that scenario. You know, can it help? It could. I think Kenny’s right in the sense that the campaign can’t let up. We don’t want them to and we can’t afford to. This isn’t going to be a landslide. We’ll take whatever we can to mobilize people. But I think all these attacks they’re throwing at Obama just help us motivate people and make them even more eager to get out here and win this election.
Schaller: Speaking of the field stuff, we hear so much reported about this amazing apparatus that the Obama people have put together. Laurie, what exactly have they built and how is it going to perform? Given the early voting, I guess it’s already performing.
Moskowitz: It’s definitely real. It’s phenomenal. And I think, whether it’s a buzzword or not, it’s organic. This is the sort of field operation that everybody always dreams of in the sense that this is really people from the ground up taking initiative, seizing opportunity and being allowed to have the tools and resources at their disposal to do what they need to do. The Obama campaign should be given great credit in sensing the momentum that was there on the ground and empowering people to do what they wanted to do, whether that’s having a local office in every little town that people could go to and participate, to using different technology, to figuring out what works best in their neighborhoods and really allowing the staff on the ground a lot of leeway in developing the plan and not dictating from the top down. Of course there are goals, there are things they measure. They know how many voters they need to turn out, but how they get there and the way that they can motivate people and the types of tools they have at their disposal, it’s definitely a new operation the likes of which we’ve not seen before.
Schaller: In the past Democrats were relying on union labor in the last week or they had to rely on 527s like Kerry did. Is it that it’s more command control from David Plouffe this time around, is that one of the features that makes it better? Or is it that they have a lot more money and people are just excited about the candidate and that makes them work hard?
Moskowitz: No, it’s not more command and control. Again, there’s framework, there’s structure, there’s goals. But again, they’ve really let the people on the ground dictate how they reach those goals. They’ve provided them with a slate of tools to use. They’ve really amped up their technology in terms of what lists people can call off of. They’ve definitely given people sweet things like platforms for auto calls so a state director can literally connect to their voters directly and not go through a vendor; they contact voters off of their computers. The other half of it is they just have the energy and the enthusiasm of their volunteers and they let them run things locally. So you might have a true volunteer, not a staffer, who’s running a county and reporting to a staffer, that person who could be a local teacher or a local lawyer running something. It just doesn’t matter; as long they’re willing to take the responsibility and contact voters, they’re included in the operation.
Schaller: Steve and Kenny, is this the wave of the future? The campaign figures out the strategy but leaves the tactics to the locals? We sort of saw this with the Bush campaign’s use of the evangelicals and the 72-hour program four years ago, so I gather that this is the new mobilization method, right?
Baer: Well, maybe. There’s something very exhilarating about the Obama candidacy on many levels. One, obviously, is the historic nature of it. The barriers he’s breaking. That makes it very exhilarating. But part of it that’s exhilarating, is that you just don’t know if it’s going to work or not. This is the field program that you’ve dreamed of. The type of candidacy you dream of. It feels like “The West Wing.” We have an incredibly inspirational candidate with a clear message who just does the right thing; people feel good about it and all that, but it’s exhilarating partly because we don’t know if it’s going to work. It’s a huge gamble.
We know the safe thing is to identify super primary voters, people who vote a lot, find them, identify them and drag them out to vote. That’s how you win. Registering a million new voters like they’ve done nationwide, hundreds of thousands in swing states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, and then finding them again and getting them to vote when political science tells you that voting is a habit, that people who vote previously are the ones that will vote prospectively, that’s a high-risk strategy, and it’s exhilarating. Because if it works, we’ve just done something great. It’s great for democracy. I hope it works. And there’s every indication it will work. But it really is a huge step, it’s a gamble. Then again, the Obama campaign hasn’t been successful because it’s done the tried and true. It’s been successful because it has done things differently.
Moskowitz: I think what’s also interesting about their volunteer base is the willingness of these people to contact other voters, other people in their community. Sometimes you can have candidates who inspire people, they make people feel good, but then that’s not necessarily translated in the ability to actually turn people out to vote. I’m even seeing it in some of the races I work with around the country; you can turn out a ton of people for a rally but then when you ask them to go door to door, they don’t necessarily want to do that. The Obama folks are doing that. They’re going door to door, they’re getting people to vote early, they’re making phone calls from their homes, they’re doing it all with enthusiasm and excitement and dragging people with them along the way.
Schaller: It’s been reported that Obama is delegating some of his staff to help in certain down-ballot races. Is that a sign of confidence or is it a sign of overconfidence? Should you be conserving every last resource or is Obama really trying to build himself that governing majority he talked about back in January and February?
McMahon: I don’t think it’s a sign of overconfidence. I think he is trying to build the majority he is talking about. Remember, the people who are on Barack Obama’s staff are not going to turn out the vote for a member of Congress or a congressional candidate without making sure that Barack Obama is covered. I think it’s just a way to spread the field and make Republicans have to defend more than just John McCain, make them have to defend Republican incumbents and challengers all over the country. If you talked for a second about what the Dean vision of the DNC ought to be, an operation that empowers or enables the grass roots to occur in 50 states at the same time and not just in 18, the Obama campaign has actually taken that idea and blown it out as well. He’s organized; even in places where he’s not necessarily competitive, they’ve got campaigns. They’re going to make a difference in getting him closer perhaps, getting him over the top and getting a lot of Democrats closer or over the top along the way.
Moskowitz: Steve’s absolutely right. They’re not going to go do this where it doesn’t help them, but I think it will help build him some goodwill. There are going to be a lot of new people, if all these new people turn out; they’re not necessarily schooled to vote down the ballot and I think for some of these congressional races especially, and certainly with the ballot initiatives, having people vote down the ballot is really, really important. I think for him it is a way to have it both ways. Build a governing majority, build goodwill for himself and also make sure that some of these House races and ballots that are on the line get pulled over the top because you can help. I think it makes complete sense for them to be doing it.
Schaller: Ken, you’ve written about realignments. Are these the type of things you need to do to have some sort of fundamental shift?
Baer: That’s a good question. It’s a question of is a realignment something that you can instigate on your own, something operationally that you can make, or is it something that just happens? Realignment, we know, happens not at the election that it started, but two or three elections after and you look back and say there was a significant partisan shift. Looking at the more reliable polling, at the demographics, you’re not seeing the type of huge partisan shift that would show that this is realigning election. I think it’s a repudiation of the past eight years and of the Republican Party and we’ve got to see what happens next. If states like Virginia or North Carolina or Colorado start behaving differently, then we will see 2008 as possibly a realignment or just the beginning of a new political era. One thing to keep in mind is that two-thirds of Americans were not alive the last time a Northern Democrat won the White House. It could be the end of an era — or it’s an anomaly of some kind. It takes real skill to screw up the country like it’s screwed up now. And George Bush had that skill. It could just be, listen, we need someone else. And then you go back to this normal partisan attachment, normal partisan behavior.
Schaller: We know that Obama raised $150 million last month, $66 million the month before. It was just reported today, he’s already raised $36 million in October so far. That totals up to over $200 million, which is roughly equivalent to what Hillary Clinton raised, if you don’t count the loans she gave herself, in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. It’s definitely more than what McCain raised in all of 2007 and 2008 combined. You get a call a week before the election and the Obama campaign wants to know, they have so much money, they want to know what they should do with that money in the final week. What do you tell them?
McMahon: I tell them give it to Ken.
Baer: Hire Steve.
McMahon: I would encourage them, if they have that kind of resource available, to be generous with the party committees, because, again, you’ve got races all over the country that are unexpectedly close. And the DCCC could certainly use an infusion of hard money that they could then go give directly to a campaign or that they could spend on behalf of a candidate, and I’m sure Chuck Schumer over at the Democratic Senate Committee would feel the same way. And if they wanted to share a little with Howard Dean, who could then take it to some of the down-ballet races around the country, I’m sure he’d be very grateful. There are a lot of things they could do with it to generate goodwill and also to generate a bigger electoral victory for Democrats on Nov. 4. And that’s what I’d encourage them to do with it, once their needs are taken care of.
Moskowitz: Well, that and of course more lawn signs. No, I completely agree. These operations, this is sort of the brass tacks. This is rubber meets the road for the party. We can win a lot more races with more resources. That’s a great answer. I wholeheartedly agree.
Baer: I look at it differently. I’m sort of torn. Not really where the money is sent to or what avenues it goes through. But, to me, it seems like it’s a fundamental question of do you keep expanding the map in order to make McCain stretch his own resources or do you absolutely lock down your 270? And that to me is a tough, tough question. It looks like now the Obama campaign is going into West Virginia. That’s expanding the map. It’s a cheap way to expand the map because West Virginia shares a media market with Pennsylvania and Ohio, but at what point do you say, let’s just lock down our 270 or 300 electoral votes and let’s not waste money going after Montana or Georgia or South Dakota, that’s sort of really on the bubble but may actually be in play?
Schaller: We’ve reached the final question. We’ll go in reverse alphabetical order so Laurie can go first this time. Give me one must do for Obama in the last week and one definitely do not do for Obama in the last week.
Moskowitz: One must do? Seal the deal now. Make sure you have people on the streets getting them out. They’re already doing it. They know they need to do this. It is what closes the deal at the end of the day. One must not do? How do you say this? Do no harm. Get through, keep the strategy strong, keep on the offensive, do everything you need to do, cross your t’s and dot your i’s. Hold your breath for the last day.
McMahon: The must do is stay hopeful, stay optimistic and continue to inspire confidence in people all the way through to the end. You want to make sure all your GOTV stations are covered, and for the one must not do, don’t go to church at Rev. Wright’s church on Sunday before the election. Just stay away for another week.
Baer: Yeah, that’s very good advice and I think there is an infinite universe of things that would be hard for us to guess that could happen. But I think the one thing that’s a must do is stay on the offensive. Keep framing the election. The Obama campaign needs to be in charge of this narrative and what this campaign is going to be about. One thing not to do, don’t talk to your transition team. Don’t even think about Nov. 5 right now. I think there are people whose jobs are to do that, but just in the last days, especially, stay focused and get over the line. And then get ready to govern.
Schaller: That’s some great advice all the way around. It will be a fascinating last week and a potentially momentous election.
Patrick McHenry 
Perched on another's shoulders, Ryan Burtchell, of the Brooklyn borough of New York, center, waves an American flag over the crowd as they respond to the news of Osama Bin Laden's death early Monday morning May 2, 2011 by ground zero in New York. President Barack Obama announced Sunday night that Osama bin Laden was killed in an operation led by the United States. (AP Photo/Tina Fineberg)(Credit: AP) 
Ken Mehlman 
