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You are here: Home / Elections / Election 2014 / Open Thread: “Democrats: Vote or we’ll kick your ass”

Open Thread: “Democrats: Vote or we’ll kick your ass”

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vote sez mlk sargent
(Ben Sargent via GoComics.com)

Am I an irredeemable “partyist” if this sounds kinda attractive?… From the NY Post:

Democrats are telling voters that they had better head to the polls — or else.

The New York State Democratic Committee is bullying people into voting next week with intimidating letters warning that it can easily find out which slackers fail to cast a ballot next Tuesday.

“Who you vote for is your secret. But whether or not you vote is public record,” the letter says.

“We will be reviewing voting records . . . to determine whether you joined your neighbors who voted in 2014.”

It ends with a line better suited to a mob movie than a major political party: “If you do not vote this year, we will be interested to hear why not.”…

***********
Apart from exasperation at the Both Sides liars & idiots, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

Reader Interactions

40Comments

  1. 1.

    JMG

    If you don’t vote, we’ll spend more time nagging you about it on the telephone next election. Hardly a threat to chill the blood in the age of Caller ID.

  2. 2.

    Keith G

    Under the heading of putting my mouth where my money goes:

    I am a grateful beneficiary of the ACA. Therefore, I have been a vigorous advocate for it. My health insurance company is a local, community-based nonprofit. They have conducted consumer focus groups to get input from their members/customers in order to improve their process. I have participated. I have been contacted by that company and then later by a reporter from our big city newspaper asking if I was interested in being interviewed for a story about the impact of the ACA at the local/personal level.

    I emphatically believe that liberals who support the ACA need to take every opportunist to speak up and fight for ACA support. It is important that stories of people like me are reported.

    I have been a HIV patient for two decades. A career change left me without the public school teacher benefits that helped me stay well. For seven years, I received very good, but still limited, medical care through the HIV program of our county hospital district. I now am very happy with the silver plan that covers me (purchased through the federal marketplace since I live in Texas). I qualify for federal subsides for the premium payments and other out of packet costs are mitigated through Ryan White Act funding. The formulary costs of my monthly prescriptions are a tad over $3,000 my share is 30% of that. Even with the ACA, if my chronic (and deadly if not treated) disease did not have the type of support like that provided by the Ryan White Act, I would be in deep crap.

    That is basically the story that the reporter will probably be hearing. My dilemma is, how much of me should be exposed? I think stories lose a bit of their punch when the source is anonymous. There is something weird about advocating for something, but then saying, “But don’t use my name.”

  5. 5.

    Betty Cracker

    While I would like to personally punch non-voting slackers in the throat, the campaign described above seem spectacularly ill-advised.

  8. 8.

    raven

    I posted this already but I was in the local paper Friday. I was interviewed at early voting but I thought the young lady was doing a research paper. She asked me what my perspective on voting was and I told her that when I came home in 1969 I was only 19 and couldn’t vote in a presidential until 1972. She got my name wrong (ok by me) and said I came home in 72 but besides that she got the point across.

  9. 9.

    catclub

    @Betty Cracker: If the NYPost is against it, or describing it in the worst way possible, It probably is working, and they would hate that.

    Plus, voting is a repsonsibility. In the constitution, why not tell people they should vote to show they are good citizens.

  13. 13.

    cckids

    @Betty Cracker:

    While I would like to personally punch non-voting slackers in the throat, the campaign described above seem spectacularly ill-advised.

    I agree. The encouraging calls & in-person visits we get from our union troops here in NV work better, if only to pleaseGodmakeitstop.

    In 2012, my daughter had just turned 18 & was eager to cast her first vote for President Obama. She wanted to vote in person, on Election Day, because she was 18 & excited about voting. We got daily calls & twice-a-week visits to our door from the Dems asking if she was likely to vote & did she know where the polling places were, etc, etc. Election Day itself, we’d had 2 visits by noon (she’d just gotten up because of working till 2 am the night before. After the second visit, I basically stood over her while she dressed & shoved her out the door to go vote.

    It worked!

  14. 14.

    Keith G

    @Betty Cracker: Ill-advised? It’s freekin stupid, sets a very bad precedent, and seems loaded with the possibilities of really bad unintended consequences. Why not just do the work on the front end? It’s so lazy.

    The [New York Democratic] committee — chaired by former Gov. David Paterson — defended the scare tactic, calling it standard practice throughout the country.

    Not in my part of the country.

  16. 16.

    Betty Cracker

    @catclub: I agree that voting is a responsibility and would be all for fining people who don’t vote like they do in Stralya. However, a specific party threatening to out non-voters seems like a great way to incur backlash for heavy-handedness, IMO.

  17. 17.

    Betty Cracker

    @cckids: My kid is already excited about voting in 2016. I don’t think I’ll need to light a fire under her ass since her first vote will be in a presidential year, but I’m prepared to do so for every election from that one until I croak.

  18. 18.

    RaflW

    This is the sort of headline that makes me want to scream. I need to go back to my baseless travel dreams and leave this f’d up election cycle to the, ummm, professionals.

    Obama has lost more House seats than any president since Eisenhower
    Ezra Klein, Vox

  19. 19.

    Roger Moore

    @John Weiss:

    A better solution, I think, would be to fine every eligible voter who didn’t vote. Works pretty well for Australia.

    It would also be great to make Election Day a national holiday so everyone had a good opportunity to vote. Oh, and provide enough resources so there aren’t endless lines at the polls. The right to vote will remain largely theoretical if voting is so inconvenient that people have trouble availing themselves of it.

  20. 20.

    Another Holocene Human

    Holy shee-yat, anybody else seen the news on Carl DeMaio? Running for Congress in San Diego. SICK PUPPY. I hope he loses so bad now. GROSS.

  21. 21.

    Another Holocene Human

    @Betty Cracker: Didn’t some GOP whizzes accidentally troll their own base with this shit last round?

    I got one of those “your neighbors voted like this” cards and tossed it out. Mixed race census tract FTW. They must have paid for the cheapo zip-targeting.

  23. 23.

    Another Holocene Human

    @orogeny: It’ll probably work on authoritarian pricks like GOP voters. “Oh noes, I’d better fit in or I’ll lose sales at my scammy-social climbery tax shelter business and I’ll be kicked out my lunch circle!”

  26. 26.

    Davis X. Machina

    @Keith G: You personally might be in deep crap, but every inch of that crap brings the glorious day closer when the health insurance industry is wiped from the face of the earth, and universal single payer triumphs.

    Of course, it might take a while.

    No revolution without martyrs, comrade!

  28. 28.

    Shana

    Getting ready to go out to eat with hubby when he gets home since we still are in the midst of kitchen remodel. They put in the upper cabinets today and will work on the lower ones tomorrow. I, meanwhile, will get up at 4:30 tomorrow in order to get to my precinct at 5, set up the table with sample ballots, etc. then go inside to observe the opening of the polls, returning outside once that’s done and spend most of the day greeting friends and neighbors, answering questions, handing out sample ballots, chatting with the volunteers who are helping at my precinct. I do this every year since we have elections every year in Virginia.

    BTW, here in Fairfax County the Monday before and Election Day Tuesday are always school holidays. The official reason is teacher education, which does happen, but since lots of schools are polling places it works out well for everyone, except working parents I guess.

  29. 29.

    SuperHrefna

    @Keith G: Don’t expose more of yourself than you feel comfortable with. Of course that means some introspection about your precise level of comfort – would you be ok sharing your name? Sharing your photo? Or just sharing your story? Whichever level you are comfortable with stick with that.

    I am in despair about the Dem’s email strategy this year. Afte last month’s constant barrage of abusive email it has got to the point where I just delete them all unread. Right now being a democrat feels like having a family member with borderline personality disorder, it’s that same sick mix of idealized praise and vicious abuse. I can’t stand it.

  30. 30.

    HRA

    I got that GD letter. It had G and my voting record on it. The header was Voting Engagement Project New Yorkers Together 80 Pine St., 37th Floor, New York, NY 10005.
    I tried finding them online and asked friends if they had received a letter, too. They only exist on this letter and no one else I know received this letter.
    G and I do vote. We do not vote when we have no choice. An example was the NYS election for governor.
    Right now we are not voting tomorrow. G had stent surgery and is not allowed to leave the house for a few days. I am the caretaker for him.
    I hope they do call. What I say to them will not be for publication.

  31. 31.

    Steeplejack

    DVR Alert!

    It’s 1920s diva night on TCM. NotMax already has mentioned the Clara Bow movie It at 9:30 p.m. EST.

    That’s followed by Gloria Swanson and Lionel Barrymore in Sadie Thompson (1928) at 11:00 p.m.

    Then TCM is showing (for the first time) the early Ernst Lubitsch film The Wildcat (1921) at 12:45 a.m. EST. “A charismatic lieutenant newly assigned to a remote fort is captured by a group of mountain bandits, thus setting in motion a madcap farce that is Lubitsch at his most unrestrained.” (IMDB) A long article on it (with pictures) is here. Other sources say it’s not very good, but it might be worth a look for its star, Pola Negri, who was a superstar in the silent era but couldn’t make the transition to sound. She spoke English with a thick accent, and also the Hays Code cracked down on her sexy “vamp” roles. Her movies don’t show up very often on TCM.

    That movie is followed at 2:15 a.m. EST by G.W. Pabst’s four-star classic Pandora’s Box (1929), starring Louise Brooks. Highly recommended.

    The rest of the night: Lillian Gish in Way Down East (1920) at 4:45 a.m., Marion Davies in Show People (1928) at 7:15 a.m., Greta Garbo in Torrent (1926) at 8:45 a.m., Alla Nazimova and Rudolph Valentino in Camille (1921) at 10:15 a.m.

  32. 32.

    Bob In Portland

    This is the world you live in:

    In the last decade it has become more and more obvious that we have in America today what the journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin have called two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre—and its entirety . . . visible only to God.1

    And in 2013, particularly after the military return to power in Egypt, more and more authors referred to this second level as America’s “deep state.”2 Here for example is the Republican analyst Mike Lofgren:

    There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.3

    I believe that a significant shift in the relationship between public and deep state power occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in the Reagan Revolution of 1980. In this period five presidents sought to curtail the powers of the deep state. And as we shall see, the political careers of all five—Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford and Carter—were cut off in ways that were unusual. One president, Kennedy, was assassinated. Another, Nixon, was forced to resign.

    To some extent the interplay of these two forms of power and political organization is found in all societies. The two were defined by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία).”4 The two represent not just different techniques of government but different cultures and mindsets, in fundamental tension with each other.5

    This tension increases, and predictably tips toward violence, if a well-organized open community expands beyond its own borders and is increasingly occupied with the business of supervising an empire. It is repeatedly the case that progressive societies (like America) expand. As their influence expands, their democratic institutions, based at bottom upon persuasive power among equals, are supplemented by new, often secret, institutions of top-down violent power for the control of alien populations abroad, often speaking different and unfamiliar languages. The more the society expands, the more these institutions of violent power encroach upon and supplant the original democracy.

    As a result these nations also experience a deeper and deeper politics, much of it a contest between these two types of power. One special feature of American deep politics since World War Two is that much of it has been characterized by a series of conspiratorial deep events: emblematic of the ongoing conflict between these two forms of power and their corresponding mindsets. One is the acknowledged public mindset of openness, egalitarianism, and democracy. The other is the global dominance mindset committed to maintaining and expanding American hegemony. In domestic policy we often analyze the two cultures as liberals versus conservatives; in foreign policy, doves versus hawks. (Yet American liberals when they reach power, such as Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, have also been deeply entwined in the militarization of American politics and its global expansion.) But with the recent expansion since 9/11 of extra-constitutional agencies like the NSA, it is time to supplement these horizontal distinctions with a vertical one: between those agencies constrained by constitutional checks and balances (the public state) and those not so constrained (the deep state). Although the deep state as we have defined it has always existed, its recent radical expansion has brought it into occasional conspiratorial conflict with the public state, even with the president.

  33. 33.

    Gravie

    I got so freakin’ sick of the “woe is us, all is lost” barrage of emails — especially from the DSCC — that I wrote and told them that their weeping and moaning did not make me want to give money, not at all. Exactly the opposite. It depressed the heck out of me and made me want to just tune out. They said they would take me off their email list. They didn’t. This is a level of obtuseness that really makes me wonder about the future of the party.

  34. 34.

    pseudonymous in nc

    This is the problem with what Atrios calls the ‘professional left’, the people who get paid to run campaigns and then blame the voters when they don’t show up. They read something about nudges, and it turns into this shit.

    The more I see them in action, the more I think they shut down Howard Dean’s 50 State Project because it was a threat to their ongoing position.

    It almost makes the jobs of GOP election ratfuckers look attractive.

  35. 35.

    rikyrah

    I vote because my father would have been 42 years old, if he had stayed in the state of his birth before he would have had the chance to vote. I vote because my grandmother, who had her Masters Degree before she married in 1905, couldn’t pass the ‘ Literacy Test’ in the Police State known as Jim Crow Mississippi, in order to register to vote. I vote because I know my history. I vote because there is always a choice, no matter how slight. I vote because perfect candidates don’t just happen….and waiting for unicorns and ponies is a waste of my time. I vote because I know the influence of government over my life, no matter the level. I vote because it is my responsibility as a citizen.

  36. 36.

    VidaLoca

    The Wisconsin AFL-CIO tried something like this in GOTV literature targeted at union members, in the 2012 recall election. We all know how well that worked out.

    The problem in that election — and I’ll go out on a limb and speculate that it’s the same problem in the New York election — is that shitty, manipulative tricks like that can’t make up for the fact that the candidate they’re fronting for is incapable of motivating voters on the basis of their own record and platform. If they were you would not need shitty, manipulative tricks.

    The New York Democrats are making themselves look like a bunch of desperate losers. Meanwhile the New York Republicans evidently can take the same set of voters, sell them on a political program that is bankrupt on its face, and get them to march singing to the polls to vote against their own interests. The Democrats can’t be bothered to figure out how it’s done: “fucking voters, how do they work?”

    ETA: also, too, what “pseudonymous in nc” said.

  37. 37.

    billb

    There is nothing to ‘vote for’ , We get one shiny corporate shill or another. BHO=RMoney. Do we get to vote to close the NSA, NO. Do we get to vote to NOT build 1 trillion dollar fighter jets that can’t fly, NO.
    We are sheeple and our simple minds are not allowed to actually run ‘our’ country. Sit back and let the War Machine do it’s will, killing whomever stands in our way. In the ‘name’ of democracy etc. Let it go, you will not make a difference, the totalitarian state is already in charge. Have a brew and kick back. Be glad we are not in front of their billion dollar weapons.

  38. 38.

    CalD

    I got a mailer like that. I live in CT. But I always vote. I didn’t find it to be in any way threatening.

  39. 39.

    BillinChicago

    @orogeny: My thought exactly. Far be it for me to give you the Balloon Juicers advice on blogging, but if there is something printed in the NY Post, and you are not starting with the assumption that it is a lie or a fraud, you’re doing it wrong. And if there is any basis to this at all, smells like a typical GOP dirty trick.

  40. 40.

    Sondra

    @Keith G:

    Bravo. I work every election and you’re right. If we do the work on the front end we will not be desparate on the back end. Sometimes it takes me more than one phone call to get out a voter, but I’ve found that it’s better to help them learn to vote in every election than to nag them with 10 calls a day in the last few hours.

    It’s kind of like the old “give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” saying.

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