Known to most as “Motor Voter,” the Act was among the earliest pieces of national legislation signed by President Clinton, and was intended to expand the accessibility of voting rights. Motor Voter required public processing centers (Secretary of State and DMV facilities, schools, libraries, etc.) in each state to make voter registration paperwork available to their patrons. Since the federal enactment, most states have adopted the legislation as their own, though several (Illinois, for example) had initial qualms about the higher rates of fraud that could result. Unfortunately, they may have been right, though they could never have predicted how.

—

In North Liberty, Iowa, a suburb of Iowa City, Cindy Diouf is a school principal and active community member. Cindy and her husband, Ivon, met in Senegal at a Peace Corps training event in the mid-90s-she was an American volunteer stationed in Guinea, and he was working at the swimming pool where the volunteers had come to relax. They fell in love during Cindy’s years in Africa, and were soon married and beginning their life together in the U.S.

Only recently, after several long worrisome years, mounds of paperwork, and time and money spent in deportation proceedings, did Ivon finally earn his U.S. citizenship and the family-whose lives have become yet another example of an unforeseeable outcome of Motor Voter-is finally able to lead a quiet life.

The Dioufs ran into this snag on an early Tuesday in a November not unlike this year’s. They were recently married when Cindy walked across the street to perform her civic duty and cast a voter’s ballot. When the polling judge couldn’t find her listed under her maiden name, Cindy gave her new married name and saw that both she and her husband were listed as registered voters. Excited, she ran home and brought Ivon back with her, showing him the list and encouraging him to cast his vote. Ivon, who had only earned his permanent resident status¹ at that time, was unsure but wanted to do the right thing. Because he saw his name on the list, he wondered if this civic responsibility might be expected of him, so he voted. Alas, the very thing he and Cindy believed to be proper turned out to be what one Houston attorney would later call “a death sentence.” That is, registering to vote and-worse yet-voting as a non-citizen of the United States.

As impossible as it would seem, this happens to many immigrants without their knowing that they are ineligible. It can occur either as part of an application for a drivers license or state identification card, or as part of community “get-out-the-vote” efforts.

At Secretary of State or DMV facilities in states with active Motor Voter protocol, the attendants are required to offer voter registration as part of the process of obtaining a state ID. Because of the time-constrained and uniform nature of these interactions between individuals and facility attendants, crucial details are often overlooked-such as the applicant’s immigration status. Many immigrants present their foreign passports when prompted for their identification, and are still asked if they would like to register to vote.

If the individual’s uninformed answer is “yes,” he or she is presented with a voter registration card, told to check a box, and shown where sign. This box-often filled with an ‘X’ by the attendant his or her self before being given to the registrant-reads (on most states’ registration cards):

“I swear or affirm that: 
- I am a U.S. citizen 
- I will be at least 18 years old on or before the next election 
- I live at the above address 
- I am not on parole, probation or serving a sentence…”

plus an additional bullet point that varies by state, occasionally reading, “I certify under penalty of perjury of the State of ___ that all the information on this form is true and correct,” and other times outlining the fines and jail sentences imparted to those who present false information on the form.

This is the government’s fail-safe to ensure that a voter registration is legitimate: a certification statement at the bottom of the form, which is often checked off by someone other than the person completing the form. In so many cases, the only action the registrant takes on the form is to sign it-the biographic portions (address, birth date, etc.) are already completed electronically as part of the state ID application. For an immigrant who may not speak fluent English, or if they do, may not understand the nuance between the legal definition of Citizen and the layperson’s definition (more like a general “resident”), it is easy to make this mistake-especially when he or she is asked several questions at once and given multiple forms to sign. This action, however, constitutes “making false claims to U.S. citizenship” and is more than adequate reason for an Immigration Judge to order deportation.

Jerri Mead, an attorney based in Fort Wayne, Indiana, believes that a lot of the confusion has to do with a language barrier. “Our way of doing things really doesn’t take into effect the people who don’t know the language,” she argues. “The government, from what I’m seeing, is finally saying ‘if you’re going to be here, you need to learn the language, and if you don’t learn the language, then you’re just going to pay dearly for it.’”

Houston-based attorney, Brian Johnson, says nearly all of the cases his firm handles dealing with “false claims to citizenship” involve immigrants who speak little English. “They don’t know what they’re signing, they don’t know what they’re checking off,” he explains. In one particular case, at a community event, “the client thought it was just a lottery thing or a sweepstakes” and signed his name on the form, which had been completed for him by a cousin.

Well-meaning U.S. citizen family members are often, sadly, the source of such misinformation. “Most people who are confused are not the immigrants,” says Altagracia McDonald, an attorney in Pasadena, Texas. “A lot of people are under the misconception that because they are U.S. citizens, their spouses automatically are either residents or citizens and they can do all these things….  So a lot of times it was the spouses that would say ‘Honey, they sent you that [voter registration form] because you’re married to me and I’m sure it’s okay. They wouldn’t send you this if it wasn’t ok.’”

Innumerable immigrants have been presented with such an opportunity to break the law, and they are given no reason to believe that it might be the wrong thing to do. In these cases, where immigrants end up in deportation for claiming U.S. citizenship on a form that was presented to them with no explanation of the consequences, the most well-meaning of individuals have found themselves in harrowing circumstances.

Technically, a false claim to citizenship could be considered a form of fraud, and in order to be convicted of fraud-under each state’s criminal laws-any such crime requires intent. However, the relationship is sticky between federal immigration law, which outlines what sorts of offenses are deportable, and criminal law, which defines and criminalizes “fraud” at the state level. There is essentially a missing link between the two.

At the federal level, voting or claiming citizenship can get a non-citizen immigrant deported; at the state level, committing any sort of fraud requires intent. Unfortunately for immigrants, their applications for citizenship are evaluated at the federal level. “ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is getting people who haven’t committed fraud, they simply made a mistake!” says James Benzoni, attorney for the Diouf family. Benzoni is a seasoned immigration attorney, but he says their case was the first time he’d seen a situation like this-likely an unforeseen result of the reorganization of the Department of Homeland Security.

Technical improvements in the linking of government databases between all the various agencies that now fall under DHS (Social Security, the FBI, and so on) mean each individual now has a trackable long-term history in the system, and “mistakes” will no longer go undetected. Attorney Johnson says he’s seen the government agencies “tighten the screws on a lot of things… verifying the accuracy of information and double-checking sources, doing background checks.”

Mead and Benzoni both warned that by joining these various databases, the government is broaching on sensitive individual information. Benzoni points out that state election officials are verifying identity illegally by “going to the Social Security database first when they shouldn’t.” Mead echoed his sentiment, saying, “they’re slipping it in under everybody’s noses.”

—

Over the years, the passage of overlapping and conflicting legislation-from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1986, to the implementation of Motor Voter in the mid-90s, to the recent reorganization of INS under the DHS umbrella-has brought about this messy conundrum of accidental voter registration. Nowadays, unlike in years past, citizenship applicants who have lived in the country for decades are seeing old mistakes come back to haunt them, and it doesn’t seem fair. “The punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” says attorney McDonald.

The only hope a naturalization applicant may have at this point is an exercise of discretion by the particular officer who handles his or her case. As attorney McDonald explains, however, the extent of discretion varies widely. “If you file naturalization in California this may not be an issue, but if you file it in Houston you may get deported-out of the same action-because the adjudicator has discretion.”

“The best thing I think we could hope for is for them to allow a waiver for it,” says Johnson. A waiver would allow, for example, a man who is married to a U.S. citizen and has children who are U.S. citizens, to plead the case that his family would not be able to survive without him here. At present, there is no waiver option available to immigrants who are placed in deportation proceedings for false claims to citizenship.

McDonald, for her part, believes the general public needs to be more educated on what it means to be a citizen and the difference between various immigrant statuses. “Perhaps 20 years ago this wasn’t a big issue, but now our citizenry need to know.”

While education on immigrant status and the meaning of “citizen” is important for the general populace, perhaps more salient-particularly this year-would be a background on fraud surrounding our nation’s electoral process. There is a possibility that ineligible immigrants may be registered to vote unintentionally, and it is one of many good reasons to direct a close eye to the way our elections are managed. However, “The real problem,” according to attorney Benzoni, “is just getting [immigrants] to vote at all when they’re U.S. citizens.”

David Morris, vice president of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, writes in an opinion piece for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: “Raising the fear of individual voter fraud brings a short-term and a long-term advantage to those who would reduce the turnout of the disadvantaged and dispossessed. In the short term, it hobbles registration and turnout efforts. In the longer term, it helps to persuade state legislatures to pass laws that make it more difficult to vote.”

The majority of immigrant applicants for naturalization lead honest, hard-working lives, trying to do the right thing in the hopes of someday being justly awarded their rightful citizenship. These individuals must face every application for benefits, every tax form, and every governmental process with painstaking attention to detail. Unfortunately for some, the application for voter registration is too often not fully explained and the outcome of immigrant voter fraud takes a much higher toll on the well-meaning immigrant than on the integrity of the electoral process.

FOOTNOTE: [1] Permanent residency is the initial immigration application process after becoming married to a U.S. citizen. This is usually granted on a two year “conditional” basis, after which the couple must apply to remove the conditions on the immigrant’s residence. This application requires couples to prove the legitimacy of their union with detailed documentation.

One of the difficult things to appreciate about California is just how vast it is. There are clear geographical barriers between its coastal blue communities and its predominantly red inland regions. Most who live in the coastal communities tend to forget that the rest of the state exists. This phenomenon comes to the fore every election season, when liberals are shocked that the bulk of the state shows up at polling places. This convenient ignorance is puzzling–as the California popular vote map from the 2004 election shows, you could handily fit three or four smaller red states into California’s sea of red.

In 2004, 5,509,826 Californians voted for Bush, according to Wikipedia. This was only 43% of the popular vote, to Kerry’s 53%, but in comparison to the voting rolls of smaller avowedly red states, 5,509,826 votes is an enormous number. By comparison, in Indiana in 2004, 1,479,438 voted for Bush, comprising 59% of the popular vote. In Texas–California’s rival by sheer size–4,526,917 people voted for Bush, comprising 61.09% of the popular vote. Nearly as many Californians voted for Bush in 2004 as Texans and Indianans combined. I realize that this is in no ways scientific from a pollster’s perspective–plenty of issues of population density in the regions arise–but it is illustrative of one main point: there’s a lot of fucking conservatives in California.

Driving around the country earlier this year, my Californian wife and I were struck by the disconnect between popular perception of regional politics, and reality. The political reality of this nation is far more nuanced and complex than a simple Electoral College map would suggest. Most striking, however, was after four months of sitting in traffic awash in Obama and Clinton stickers in the South, passing Obama placards outside rural farmhouses in the Midwest, just how regressive and conservative California felt upon returning. We saw far more pickup trucks adorned with Confederate Flag stickers and plastic testicles in rural California than anywhere we traveled in the deep South. It’s almost as if the conservative areas of the state feel the need to overcompensate, proudly showing off their willful ignorance.

To wit: I’m Californian born-and-raised. I’m also the only consistently Democratic voter in my immediate family, which includes far more Evangelicals and born-agains than College grads.

It’s convenient for liberal coastal Californians to glibly dismiss the country between California and NYC as “flyover states”, and entirely reasonable that the rest of this enormous country responds by dismissing California as a den of far-left elite with no appreciation for the concerns of the working class. Not only are both perceptions completely off-base, but they suggest that liberal and progressive Californians need to keep their house in order before they cast blame at the rest of the nation.

Look no further than this year’s Proposition 8, which aims to rescind California’s recognition of same-sex marriage. A recent Survey USA poll shows support for the measure by a troubling wide margin, 47% for it as opposed to 42% against.

Far-right Propositions are common in the state’s elections. The Evangelical base loves them–considered direct government by some, a drag on the State’s judicial system by many, they allow big-pocketed Republican operatives an opportunity to push back against the population-dense liberal strongholds of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.

For decades, Californians have called for two states, as the cultural gap between the Northern half of the state’s coast and the South is wide–denizens of Silicon Valley and Hollywood consider themselves to be in cultural opposition to one another. The gaudy excess of Hollywood versus the faux-ascetic Prius-driving of the Bay Area is a persistent contrast, but it’s a niggling difference between two areas that have fundamentally similar political beliefs. It’s also a major distraction from the real cultural and political divide in the state.

This is a mistake. The glib NorCal latte liberals, the undergrad anarchists who consider voting to be an endorsement of the evils of global Capitalism, and the wealthy Hollywood kingmakers should be well advised of the Conservative and Evangelical giant lurking in their own midst. As should the rest of the country, which incorrectly–and dangerously–considers California to be eternally blue.

In the Golden State, Prop 8 passed by 52 percent of the vote. Driven by some $20 million in donations by affiliates of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who a letter in June to each of its churches, asking members to “do all you can to support” the proposition by donating “your means and time,” to insure that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and the formation of families is central to the Creator’s plan for His children.”

I find this rather narrow interpretation of the holy bond of matrimony ironic given that the last time the Church faced a constitutional question on the issue, it packed up the store and moved from Nauvoo, Illinois to the Great Salt Lake.

Prop 8 is a stunning aberration in California’s legal history, the codification of bigotry and fear into one of our foundational documents and the wholesale disenfranchisement of a vital part of our community.

With exit polls showing up to 70% of black voters backing Prop. 8, it also shows that we’re far from the founding of a rainbow nation, even on a night when an African American managed to overcome a huge obstacle on the 400-year old path to freedom.

To deny legal status to same sex love here in California is antithetical to the arc of our history, which has embraced the outsider long before our founding in 1850. Just go Google Emperor Norton.

What’s even more disturbing about the victory of the marriage amendment is that it was predicated on the values of Christianity, and couched in the language of preserving the nuclear family.

Frankly speaking, the true threat vectors to familial love are not questions of plumbing, but temperament. I fear the angry and drunk father, or the abusive mother of any orientation much more than the love and affection of two daddies or mommies.

To sublimate the obvious love between many gay and lesbian couples, that differs not one iota from the one shared by my parents or myself is a denial of our humanity and an affront to the civil and human rights of our fellow citizens. As Gandhi so elegantly put it, “A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”

With the support of Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and several legal challenges to Prop 8, this debate is far from over, but the fact that it is still a debate is thoroughly depressing.

Reopening the closet is not an option and neither is denying the existence of love in all its wondrous forms. Repression and bigotry are not family values, they are not religious values and they just aren’t intelligent.

It’s my sincere hope that this year’s electoral aberration, when overthrown, will fade into the historical mists to join other ill-conceived legal actions like Dred Scott or the Briggs Initiative, which sought the power to fire gay school teachers and their supporters in an ill conceived attempt to protect children from sexual predators.

Prop 8 didn’t win by much, and is proof that despite this setback, the gay rights movement is never going away and it’s goals, which seemed so bold at Stonewall, will be accepted by our children as self-evident, just as my generation accepts women in the workplace and embraces a multiracial society.

I’m going to leave the last word to another of history’s confirmed bachelors, Jesuha of Nazareth. “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!” – Matthew 7:21-23

I understand where this sentiment comes from, but I cannot say that I agree. I find this slogan problematic: it fosters the idea that racism against the African American community is a thing of the past and it appropriates the narrative of a struggle that is still very much going on, our President-elect notwithstanding. When I first read the reports of voter statistics and saw the overwhelming percentage of African Americans who voted for California Proposition 8, I was immediately concerned about the effect this would have within the LGBT movement; a wounded community would start looking for scapegoats. Seventy percent is a huge number, but people (specifically white gay men) have been far too quick to say “well it’s because of Obama,” as though gay rights were sacrificed for a step forward against racism. There seem to be people who are intent on blaming African American homophobia for Tuesday’s results instead of recognizing the fact that LGBT movement has largely ignored people of color and made queer people of color nearly invisible. As a queer Cambodian woman, I empathize with black gays’ & lesbians’ sense of being ignored and uninvolved by mainstream LGBT activism.

The repercussions of this invisibility and lack of outreach are becoming apparent. A UCLA student wrote to Rod 2.0 that someone at the protest in front of the Mormon temple in Westwood shouted at him: “YOU NIGGER. . . If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger.” It is appalling that white people would target black people who are actually participating in a protest against Prop 8 and, worse, that they seem to think that experiencing an act of discrimination is license to discriminate against others. This is not acceptable and only shows that the LGBT community needs to deal with the issue of racism as much as people of color must deal with homophobia.

I did not witness any blatantly racist behavior at the march on Saturday, but I was very aware that there were few black people in crowd. That in itself is symptomatic of the invisibility of black gays and lesbians in both communities. It’s arguable that the black gay community faces some of the most difficult challenges with homophobia, racism, and the inevitable clash of both.

One man at the march held a sign with the 7 of 10 statistic and the words “We supported ur rights.” I couldn’t articulate to him at the time why his sign made me so uncomfortable, but I realize now that it was because of the language. When I read “we supported your rights,” I immediately questioned who constitutes that “We”? The sign implies that racism isn’t a problem in the LGBT community and to say “your rights” is to suggest that there is a distinction between the rights of Black people and the rights of LGBT people–it divides the overlapping communities and plays King Solomon with Black gays and lesbians. The point of civil rights activism is that there are rights which belong to everyone and language like this isn’t going to help the cause gain allies.

Yes, civil rights for gays is the movement of the moment, but let us please not forget that the movement to end racism is far from over, and let us not further victimize each other in this process.

Leland Cheuk

Tonight we are finally the city on the hill.

But tomorrow and come late January when Obama is sworn into the office, will we still be? Will Obama make the right decisions and get us out of Iraq? Will he make the tough decisions necessary to restore fiscal and executive responsibility back to the White House in this economic meltdown? Will he resist the urge to compromise, both personally and politically, as Clinton did? And will Obama lead and inspire as he has the potential to do? Yes he can. And yes he did, for one night. But will he continue to?

Leland Cheuk is a novelist living in San Francisco.

Paul M. Davis

I have never been so proud to be an American citizen as I was last night, as McCain took the stage to deliver a speech that may go down in history as one of the most dignified and eloquent concession speeches ever. Barack Obama — a Constitutional Law professor, a black man in what remains a bitterly divisive nation — became our President-elect. And it is good. For the first time in eight years, we can all hold our heads high as citizens of the world, as people celebrate in the streets — not only in Chicago, IL, not only in the United States, but around the world, from Canada to Kenya, France to Japan.

We have much work to do, and Obama can not possibly fix it all. There are many things that must be done that are not even on his docket. Once again, civil rights for homosexuals in this country have been shot down, with the passage of Proposition 8 in California. We have a Constitution bowing under the weight of precedents set by the George W. Bush administration. We are in two wars that no one has a idea how to resolve.

Let’s not make the mistake that Clinton supporters did in 1992, pinning unrealizable expectations on a single charismatic, yet inevitably flawed, figure. For many readers of and contributors to this site, Obama’s administration will take an at-times-frustratingly centrist approach to governing. There are many inequalities in this nation and this world which the Obama administration will fail to redress.

Still, this is a day for celebration. The good that Obama will do for this nation — and has already done, by sheer glint of winning the office — will reverberate for generations to come. He is truly this nation’s first President of the 21st Century, as opposed to our current lame-duck-in-chief, who seemed to govern as President of the 18th Century. But for all the caveats, with Obama in office, this country will finally move forward.

Paul M. Davis is the editor and publisher of Is Greater Than.

Peter Koht

Halfway through the Chicago speech last night (and three quarters of the way through the champagne bottle) I had the rogue thought that this election represents a new model of activism and a much better approach to building a coalition.

The Clintons and Kerry were representative of the old guard, anti-war 60s ideology tempered by the gradual accumulation of wealth, privilege and habit. But Obama’s volunteer army and his embrace of social media allowed many more people to actively participate in the election rather than criticize on the sideline.

I think the two David’s deserve a lot of credit for expanding the base, and their efforts to target rural “red” areas will continue to pay dividends down the road. I just sincerely hope that Obama realizes that his large electoral college win will be served by governing pragmatically and working with the fiscal conservatives to fix infrastructure and the finance system before tackling health care. In other words, don’t go out and make HR 1 about gays in the military.

Peter Koht is a freelance journalist based in the San Francsico Bay Area.

Levi Fuller

I would not be surprised to learn that there have already been more words written about the 2008 Presidential Election than about any election in history, and that total is only going to increase geometrically over the next days, weeks and years. I don’t feel the need to add too much to that total, but I do want to say that yesterday evening, as it started to become apparent that Barack Obama was indeed going to become our 44th President, I realized that my attitude toward the majority of my fellow Americans (and people in general) could be softened in one fell swoop. For the majority of voters to sit through that campaign – the lies and the slander and the fear and the exaggerations and the guilt-by-association attacks – and to see through it all, and to rise up and speak clearly and say “we choose That One,” instilled a faith in my fellow man that I didn’t think I could ever have. I just hope that the energy and positivity I saw last night – running through the streets of Seattle high-fiving strangers of all ages and colors – can be carried through the next 4 (8!) years and beyond and really bring this country the change and hope it needs.

Levi Fuller is a Seattle-based musician, and the man behind the Ball of Wax compilation quarterly.

Rob Miller

I want to drink from the Kool-Aid, I really do. And, yes, this is a tremendous victory for reasons symbolic and beyond; the rose-colored big media would not let me forget that, and the self-congratulatory mythologizing of America’s story was in its full throated glory. But let us not forget that there were still 50 million plus voters who chose to support the losing party, despite an eight year administration that has piled civil liberties, foreign relations, the environment, science, fiscal responsibility, human rights and reasoned discourse on to a flaming shit wagon and kicked it down a hill. There is, at this writing, only a 6% difference in the popular vote. Let us take the good, verging on euphoric feelings and energy of last night, the culmination of so much activism and political engagement, and keep them stoked. It is only through persistent personal action on a massive scale that the potential of last night will have a chance. The fact of Obama’s election is truly remarkable, to be sure. A victory, yes, but also just a first step.

Rob Miller is the founder and owner of Bloodshot Records.

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

My people, we have arrived. And no, I don’t mean my American people. I mean Black folks. You see, I grew up Black in a country started by and run by white folks. I grew up learning at school that the only great achievements of people who looked like me were not being slaves anymore and no longer getting beaten in the streets just for trying to sit at a lunch counter. I grew up being asked to celebrate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, slave holders — people who took advantage of their right to own people who looked like me. I grew up in a country where it was understood that Blacks don’t become President. So I grew up Black in America, but I never felt American.

So, Black folks, we have arrived. As I spoke to my 90 year old grandmother tonight, the lady who did the hard work of leaving her homeland (Barbados) to start over in the US, the lady who was at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, I cried tears of joy because my grandmother lived to see the day. Because I lived to see the day. The day when a Black man became President. The day when white folks thought the content of his character mattered more than the color of his skin. The day when young Black men and Black women saw, really saw, that we can and should tear down the barriers put before us and our communities.

So, today I am a different woman. I am a woman who knows that she has a problem with Obama’s Zionism. I am a woman who doesn’t want to bomb Pakistan. I am a queer woman who thinks she deserves equal rights. Who wants universal health care for everyone. Who wants to end sweatshop labor. Who wants and hopes for a lot of change that Barack Obama may not care to make.

But today I have faith that the young Black or Latina or Chinese woman who will commit to that kind of change, the kind that I believe in, now knows that her time is arriving. And I realize that, at 26, I am one of those women. Si se puede!

O, let America be America again — 

The land that never has been yet — 

And yet must be — the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME — 

Who made America,

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,

Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,

Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Langston Hughes

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an American living in Ontario, Canada, working on a PhD in theoretical physics.

Heather West

Why haven’t we heard from Bill Clinton on the election of Barack Obama? Were no journalists camped in front of his office in Harlem the night the first black man was elected president? This seems highly out of character for an attention addict like our former President. After a numerous google searches, I finally found this statement from Hillary, “Tonight, we are celebrating an historic victory for the American people. This was a long and hard fought campaign but the result was well worth the wait.” The full story can be found here. Pretty weak statement on the enthusiasm scale.

Clintonian reaction aside, I am proud to live in a country that elected a black man president. For Christ’s sake, it’s a recent development to let blacks play quarterback in the NFL! Though my fellow citizens are surfing on a wave of rainbows and unicorns, I can’t help but point out that it probably wouldn’t have happened if the economy hadn’t tanked, taking the retirement money of countless Americans down the drain. It’s a shame that it took such tragic circumstances to galvanize us into action, but the end result is the same, the long, ugly era of Republican rule is at an end. The real work is coming, and I’ll put my faith in Barack Obama because I believe he will surround himself with fine statesmen/women who’ll give him honest feedback and help find solutions to our country’s seemingly insurmountable problems.

Heather West is a publicist and freelance writer living in Chicago.

A. Zell Williams

There are three words that have never meant as much to me as they do now.

As I stood in a park smothered by love and fear, a new friend and I watch with an odd feeling between us. She is a foreign student from France fortunate enough to be in a country as they evaluated how they would enter the future. I was born in that country and had long before had become cynical, seeing that the rest of the people I was supposed to call fellow countryperson could naively be tricked, mislead, or feed lies about someone patriotism based on hands held over hearts or coat accessories.

But we shared the experience of it all. Children running from one another as their mother tried to get them to look at the high screen aglow with pundits and analyst. The flyers that littered the ground and hands reminding us that there would, indeed, be a tomorrow with much turmoil and injustice. The man who paced the same fifteen feet over and over for twenty minutes, fist clenched and tugged between his chest and the night in a manner that appeared out of his control.

I told myself I would watch from a friend’s house with the plan of sipping drinks, sheltered in my usual distain for crowds. However, a great teacher reminded me that there are few moments in which time becomes tangible. As much a part of you as your sex or skin and you can wear that moment throughout the course of your life. But time is also fluid. It can pass you by unless you are active in its capture so it can refresh you in days of drought and struggle.

I stood in a park wrapped with joy and hope. I stand at corner, not sure what awaits my turn. But now I can say — fear quenched and hunger fed — I was there.

A. Zell Williams is an award-winning playwright living in Chicago whose works include BLOOD/MONEY, The Woman I Live With, and A Motherless Child.

Kira Wisniewski

“10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1”

And the crowd goes wild!

I spent my election night in our nation’s capital watching the results party in an environmental non-profit office. (Side note: I was wearing an H2Obama shirt, which the enviro-kids loved, thinking it wasn’t legendary NY hardcore band.) The atmosphere was festive, the drinks were plentiful, the food was organic and the cups were made from corn. We watched with high anticipation the countdown until the polls closed in California and Obama surpassed the 270 votes necessary to become our president. Everyone in the room counted down the seconds New Years Eve style and then the room erupted in a moment of absolute happiness. I had chills for over 45 minutes. Then we took it to the streets. Right to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave where we joined by tons of other people jubilantly celebrating at the future home of Barack Obama. As the crowd started cheering “USA! USA!” I felt connected, proud and hopeful in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

Kira Wisniewski currently lives just outside of our nation’s capitol and continually tries to do her part in fighting the good fight, and is currently working with the Capitol Letters Writing Center.

* Well, if you’re stoked on having the young, articulate, not-white dude in the white house, in spite of his tired and centrist platform, you’ll likely be celebrating this evening. To paraphrase Chris Rock, this is a year for black people to wear suits. And since we’re talking politics, let’s make it a really boring navy blue suit, something très Beltway, eh? White folks can try to fake some cultural understanding by accessorizing their skirt suit with traditional African jewelry or replacing that white dress shirt with a Mos Def t-shirt (Def, BTW, says Obama is better looking that McCain, in case you hadn’t noticed).

* McCain winning is gonna feel kinda dirty. Their after party will suck and if you can’t afford the Neiman Marcus shopping spree, well, you know, I don’t know why I’m even talking about this. If McCain wins, go home, put on your sweat pants get drunk by yourself. The hang over will feel better than sobriety.

* And if you didn’t vote, or you voted for someone else, or you are generally appalled by the system, and you think it particularly matters who keeps us in Iraq and who doesn’t do shit about domestic capital flight, declining social services and the deplorable state of education in This Great Nation, then I suggest you recycle that outfit you wore to protest the DNC and/or RNC. You know, that black one that was kinda messy with the balaclava. It looked almost working-class and totally hopeless. You can really take this outfit from day to night with a classy vintage gas mask and a crow bar.

The polling place opened at 7am, I got there at 6:15. There were 50 or 60 people in front of me, people brought chairs. Within ten minutes, there were twenty people lined up behind me. Fifteen minutes after that, I couldn’t keep count. At 7am, the doors opened and we started filing in. A head count was made and I heard the tally: there were over 200 of us waiting to vote, and that didn’t include those who joined the line after the doors opened. I have never seen anything like it. This is November 3rd and this many people turn out at the crack of dawn?!

I can’t even imagine what today will be like, but I urge everyone to get to your polling place at least two hours early. Don’t mess this up. Get your vote in and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. No matter who you are voting for, this is an undeniably extraordinary election.

As I cast my vote onto the electronic voting booth, it printed the ballot onto ink and paper. For a moment, I realized that this was right, here I can see my vote; no one can claim it was “lost in the mail.” And when I saw my vote print out, my voice, I felt a surge of emotion that I still can’t quite explain. It was overwhelming and real.

U.S. PRESIDENT: BARACK OBAMA

My first presidential election was only eight years ago: an election that told me, in so many perversions, that my vote was a joke. I’m not counting chickens. I’m also not jumping on the old lefty bandwagon of leaving the country if it doesn’t go my way. No matter how f’ed we are, we aren’t stoning 13-year-old rape victims to death in front of a salivating audience. So, if this election ends in McCain/Palin…well then…get angry. Get furious — enough with the collective apathy.

But, please, let’s not let it come to that. Just get off your ass and vote.

“I don’t know who he is. I heard he has a grandmother in Africa he doesn’t care for. Just today, he said he doesn’t even know his aunt. What kind of person doesn’t take care of his family? They say he might be Muslim. They say he wants to turn this country into a communist state. We don’t know anything about him. We don’t know what kind of person he is. It’s like he came out of nowhere. ”

To which I answered, “He didn’t just come out of nowhere. He was a senator in Illinois, you know.”

My mother was silent.

“You did know that, didn’t you?”

“Really?” she said. “He was a senator?!”

And so today, my mother, an immigrant and resident of the United States for over 30 years, votes for a President. Her vote counts as much as mine. And today, both of us are taking the same standardized test that we take every four years as part of the “No America Left Behind” test. Whether you are white America, black America, red America, blue America, real America, un-real America, Joe the Plumber America or Joe Biden America, you can choose to take this test and this year’s test is, at least so the reporters keep telling us, a historic and monumental one.

I would agree that this election has been one of the most interesting of my relatively brief lifetime. If you just took the top of the tickets on its own, this election would already be a fine Rob Reiner film. America’s first viable African-American candidate (and first oratorically gifted candidate since Kennedy) versus a war-hero maverick senator who never flew straight or walked straight but always talked straight. And then Sarah Palin happened and suddenly, the campaign seemed to have enough storylines for several reality show seasons. And now, as we come to this test, it seems that the campaign has run as long as Survivor has.

Take away the tassels, the lace, the fringe, the breathless daily storylines and the thrice-a-day poll of polls, and the campaign, judged on substance, has not amounted to anything historic or monumental. Policy-wise, both candidates are proposing tax cuts, all kinds of spending, a way out of Iraq, and ways to increase health care coverage and save social security. Take away the helping-the-middle-class rhetoric from the Obama camp and they might as well be running a Republican platform from the 1980s with a few nostalgic nods to progressives for early childhood medical care or getting out of Iraq. Obama’s platform is coherent, modern, and frankly, relatively moderate. He’s winning in the polls because he’s a gifted communicator, not because he’s had a single original idea.

As for McCain, he must wonder what might have been. What would have happened if he was the coherent Republican, and not Obama. What if he didn’t choose Sarah Palin when she was so obviously ill-prepared? What if he chose to run on the issues instead of choosing to pin his campaign hopes to reminding America who the hell Bill Ayers was? And therein lies the biggest miscalculation of the McCain campaign if he loses today: Steve Schmidt’s failure to recognize that there’s a statute of limitations on the guilty acts of people. If Bill Clinton ran for president again in four years, do you think Karl Rove’s people would be able to energize their base enough to win an election by slinging mud on the Monica Lewinsky scandal? Probably not. No one cares; it was that long ago. That would be roughly twenty years after the fact in 2012. Bill Ayers committed his terrorist act 40 years ago. The only people who care are 1) those old enough to remember the Weather Underground clearly, and 2) crotchety enough to still be outraged by it. That’s not the demographic that’s going to win an election, especially with so many fewer Republicans after eight years of W.

But that said, McCain hasn’t lost yet. Stranger things have happened. I’d put a McCain upset win somewhere between the Giants beating the Patriots in the last Super Bowl and Texas Tech toppling Texas last weekend. In the ”No America Left Behind” four year program, on any given November Tuesday, anything can happen.

So will we pass this test? Will America be left behind by the likes of Germany, Mozambique, Argentina, Liberia, the Phillippines, Ireland, Chile, India, Peru, Fiji, and Bolivia, all countries that have elected a woman or a representative of an ethnic minority head-of-state in the past two decades? The citizens of some of those countries have discovered that while the ethnicity or gender of their heads-of-state may have been groundbreaking, the novelty wears off quite quickly. At the end of the day, it’s still about choosing the best candidate on the question of substance. And on that count, Obama has certainly run a campaign that more than made up for its lack of originality by staying on that little message about CHANGE from the very beginning way back when (oh, I can hardly remember New Hampshire it was so long ago…back when Jeff Probst’s Patagonia shirts were still fresh and crisp).

Now if only I could remember whether Obama is Muslim or not…

After almost a full hour of rehearsed lines and poorly veiled condescension, Obama explained why Joe-The-You-Know-What may have to pay more taxes if he operated a business which earned enough revenue to compensate him with $250,000. Seeing a moment where the socially awkward septuagenarian could fain a bond with a public who was steadily becoming more uncomfortable even contemplating what might constitute a McCain Presidential Doctrine, he looked into the camera, grinned, and said, “Congratulations, Joe. You’re rich.”

For a brief moment, it seemed as though McCain was talking to me. It was like a one-man show when the audience realizes they are the ex-lover, the mother, or whoever else is in the room with the performer. I understood that I was in John McCain’s production of Mister Smith Goes to Washington, except Mister Smith was an anti-hero and Washington was studio apartment in Roger’s Park.

But then he laughed. The scene was over and like a high school drama student, he laughed at the idea that $250,000 a year was somehow not a great deal of money. But what I found more disappointing was that in the middle of an economic crisis that everyone from Nobel Laureates to Barber Shop Lincoln-Douglas debaters have labeled as the worst financial event sense the Great Depression, no one in print, radio, or televised media has mention the fact that if JTP does bring home $250,000 annually, he is indeed financially rich.

The issue is a battle on many cultural and economic fronts. As a writer, I feel the battle over “Richness” is best waged on the field of language. Webster.com defines ‘rich’ as, “Having abundant possessions and especially material wealth.” It goes on to give additional definitions for quality and color, but the first definition is at the heart of the problem with American’s views on economy.

Our culture is built on consumption, most notably proven after 9/11 when the person currently occupying our highest elected office told us to go and shop as though a new washer/dryer combo or plasma TV would bring back the thousands of dead or dying. My generation, which was born when the seeds of the current economic fallout were freshly planted, had grown up with the idea that being an American meant constantly consuming. Our cheap Playmates’ Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles…well, are cheap, so Mom goes an gets another and another and the matching bomb-dropping blimp, and the pizza shooting tank, and the NES to play the game on, and etcetera and etcetera. To paraphrase a common saying, our only tool is a dollar, so every problem looks like a sale.

As art and life are known to flatter each other, we have taken to celebrate being rich in popular culture not as the end of a journey of struggle and work, but simply as a state of being. Then we do our best to imitate this imitation. I have never understood the lore or either Sex in the City or Entourage. In fact, I have found it mildly terrifying that I am part of a generation that would actively observe others doing nothing but constantly consuming or finding other ways to consume. But my peers are not only entertained by this pointless obsession with materialism, they lift these figures up as relatable oracles, asking themselves in everyday situations, “What would Carrie do?”

My hope for the future lies in the fear of what is assured to come. This is only the beginning. There is no “Magic Bullet” bailout package that is ever going to fix overnight what the generations of consumption has done; at least, not a moral one. Our relatively early success in the brief existence of this nation was bought on the backs of terrorized natives, kidnapped slaves, and exploited immigrants. Even our economic dominance in the twentieth century is tied directly to wars and the creation of the military industrial complex and my generation (and at least the following two generations) is going to have to drastically change our concept of “rich.”

To put it bluntly, what our parents and grandparents considered the “American Dream” is about to become significantly less attainable for more Americans. Fewer of us will travel the world, or at least less regularly. Home ownership is not going to be base of our retirement plan (which probably should have happened in the late 1990’s.) Yet, when I tried to express this to a friend and peer recently, they sneered and asked, “So do you expect us to live in mud huts, or something?”

There it is, my fellow Millennials. The issue at hand: Will we be able to stop equating our dominance with ownership?

Unlike our grandparents who experienced the effects of the Great Depression, or our parents who faced and absorbed the effects of the draft, the Civil Rights/Black Power Movement, the Feminist Movement, and at least one major energy crisis, we lack a varied picture of wealth and access. Wealth and access were the terms John McCain was striving to describe, and Joe has a great deal of both. But the fact that few have addressed the great difference between cutting consumption, and Scrooge-McDuck-wealthy, tells me that we are astonishingly unprepared for what we are about to go through.

This is, of course, with the belief that my fellow citizens are also unprepared to turn back the clock of social justice we have strived to uphold. Right? Might we be willing to give less food aid and protection to countries that truly know poverty — another term that is rarely discussed but heavily experienced here and abroad. Are we going to maintain our habit of defining ourselves by the size of our IPhones and the bags under our shoulders? Or are we going to do what those who came before us could not; learn to say that enough – or more accurately, the abundance (the wealth and the access) that I already have – is enough?

Even as sweat beads visibly form on his forehead, McCain slaps on that famously awkward grin and tells the cop (who’s now reaching for his handcuffs) that his reckless decision to drive drunk was actually the best move of his career. But even as he says it, McCain appears woozy. He doesn’t seem to believe the claim himself.

John McCain is not stupid. He knew exactly what he was doing when he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate back in August. His campaign was about as exciting as watching paint dry before Palin stepped onto the scene clad in $150,000 GOP-sponsored clothing. But after the Republican National Convention, the McCain-mobile was zooming through the news cycle with renewed speed and a brand new hot-pink paint job. Some pundits were claiming it was the shrewdest political move the Republican nominee could have made — given his propensity for being boring and old.

But the American people are not so easily fooled, as it turns out. Sure, they fell for the hockey mom act for a short time (who isn’t susceptible to emotional blackmail in the form of a special-needs child being held at the RNC by his 4 year old sister?) but most of America is wising up to the real Palin: a 633-day (312 of which she spent in her hometown Wasilla – population 9,780) governor of a state comprised of 670,000 people with zero foreign policy experience and frighteningly little knowledge of the American constitution. This is a woman who, in an interview with CBS anchor Katie Couric, could not name one single Supreme Court Case with which she disagreed (say Dred Scott for crying out loud!) or one newspaper she reads with any regularity (just say the New York Times for god’s sake!) and has now failed to adequately describe what exactly the Vice President does on four separate occasions. It’s almost too much for even Saturday Night Live to handle.

In the face of these embarrassing revelations about his VP pick (and plummeting poll numbers), McCain still asks the electorate to believe that Palin was, in fact, the perfect choice. More than that, McCain wants the public to believe that HE still thinks she was the perfect choice, and will be ready to lead our divided country through wartime and economic crisis if his 72-year old body was to suddenly give way. It’s like some bizarre reversal of Stand-by-Your-Man – but this time it’s Stand-By-Your-Obviously-Incompetent-Running-Mate. Not quite as catchy, but definitely more dangerous.

In an interview with radio talk show host Don Imus on Wednesday, McCain went a step further and actually asked the American people to buy that Palin was “the most qualified VP nominee in recent memory.” The American public can be impressionable, but we are not flat-out stupid. It takes one Google click to figure out that Dick Cheney was the Secretary of Defense, Al Gore was a member of Congress for 16 years and George H.W. Bush was Director of the CIA before they all became Vice Presidential nominees. Sarah Palin is more qualified than these nominees, Senator?

Yet with a straight face, McCain shamelessly asks American voters to believe pure fiction — or should I say, fairy tale?

You are really pushing your luck here, Senator. Some Americans might sincerely like Palin for being a small-town mayor with conservative values, but few would call her the most qualified VP pick in recent memory unless they are experiencing an staggering bout of amnesia.

But writing fiction (particularly biographical fiction) seems to be the name of the game this election season. The McCain camp has really done a phenomenal job of crafting Sarah Palin’s lofty narrative — the supposed reformer, the purported Washington outsider, the no-frills hockey mom. If only it were remotely true – for starters, none of the hockey moms I knew growing up had tanning beds in their homes, and $27 million of pork barrel spending for tiny Wasilla, Alaska seems like an awful lot for a mayor ignorant to the Washington game. Not to mention that $223 million intended for Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that Palin kept and used for state pet projects. Palin’s extravagant requests actually landed on McCain’s list of “objectionable pork” a few years ago, before the two became soulmates.

But the gig, it seems, is up. Polls suggest that most Americans are no longer buying the Palin myth that is being so unabashedly pitched to them- not even the suburban white woman she was meant to target. The latest MSNBC poll actually shows the “Palin effect” has been more detrimental than the “Bush effect” to McCain’s campaign. Sure, some Americans are still caught up in her catty humor, small-town shout-outs, and folksy rallies, but fewer and fewer are buying the act every day. I even have a suspicion that McCain himself isn’t buying it anymore – just watch his latest interview with Brian Williams. He sounds, well, like a guy who just blew a .32 trying to tell a cop he’s not wasted. But at this point he and Palin are inextricably strapped in, and have no choice but to careen toward the finish line with the entire GOP in tow. This is one crash I don’t want to miss.

This isn’t a letter in support of the superficiality of the Hipster culture. Chicago is home to more hipsters than anywhere in the Midwest; they have overrun Milwaukee avenue with the trendy thrift stores, their clubs dot Wicker Park and Lincoln Park (and are making inroads into Humbolt Park, the South Loop and Pilsen) and their chic, yet totally confusing, band stickers are on every light pole and every abandoned store front up and down Division, Grand, North and Milwaukee for blocks in Wicker Park. Most hipsters in Chicago are refugees from the choking consumer culture of the suburbs, home to more people in Illinois than the rest of the state, who are mostly working and middle class white folks. Contrary to Adbusters’ demographers, Hipster culture is definitely not an exclusively white, upper class phenomenon. Many Hipsters are refugees from oppressive working class cultures. You’ll find that most born and raised Chicago hipsters are people of color trying to build their own identity from the stifling expectations of their parents and importantly, the church (And if you forgot, white people are a minority in Chicago). Chicago Hipster culture has taken from “radical” punk, emo, metal, hip-hop, Puerto Rican, Mexican and many more cultures.

From reading your essay it seems that the reason you judge Hipster culture as the “dead-end of Western Civilization” is because it lacks an ambiguous and undefined notion of “authenticity” and that it lacks an explicit challenge to authority. Hipster consumer culture does not challenge capitalism, but singling out people who wear skinny jeans, bug sunglasses, or shop at thrift stores over those who wear Cubs jerseys and fight after nights of drinking at Wrigelyfield bars seems unfair. Clothing, music taste, etc. seems pretty value neutral. My opinion is that your singling out of Hipsters is a Freudian projection our movement’s secret, collective shame at creating Hipster culture and our subsequent failure to mobilize it politically.

One could say that my own organization, Students for a Democratic Society, is largely an expression of those that helped define the current Hipster culture. Unlike the old SDS, which took flight in college towns in the 60’s, the new SDS has largely exploded in urban centers, from students who live in Hipster neighborhoods. You’ll find more SDSers at an art institute than at a state school; you’ll find more skinny jeans and bug sun glasses at our conventions than blue jeans or Adidas sportswear. SDS however, like the rest of America’s political left (including Adbusters), has largely failed to expand past our own cultural ghetto, and now we have adopted our own past time of jeering our cultural progeny, the Hipsters. But we haven’t asked why most of these people have chosen to opt out of “politics”.

First, we have to drop the double standard. Expecting more from one community over all the other communities we could have singled out is patently unfair. We should ask with the same conviction why sports fans, or why metal fans, or why most women have stayed away from politics. Blaming a lack of political commitment on an entire group’s superficiality is a sorry and dangerous rationalization, especially when Hipsters are becoming the dominant demographic of global youth. We need to break with our traditional excuses that have reinforced our own “radical” elitism. Political organization is a process of building relationships with people and then progressively leaning on those relationships to build a similar commitment towards liberation from those being organized.

Your article is part of our collective, though irrational, set of higher expectations made on Hipsters. Why should Hipsters be more disposed to join the merry-go-round of stale and pointless meetings, protests and police stompings? Building relationships starts with meeting new people, something that has been de-prioritized by our movement behind online debates on the meaning of “violence” and criticizing irrelevant Marxist wing-nuts. If the same energy was put towards throwing parties when most schools start on September 2^nd, where we could meet a hundred new contacts at each SDS chapter, as will be put towards driving all our people to the DNC/RNC and subsequently paying their legal costs, SDS could expand ten-fold. People haven’t come to our protests in front of empty recruitment stations because they know it won’t make a difference. We need to be out in the neighborhoods where those going into recruitment centers live, organizing them to engage in power structures that affect them.

As a movement we need to reevaluate our targets. Sure multi-national corporations need to be toppled, but so do our corrupt local aldermen, who win Chicago elections in student wards (voting districts in the city) with a meager 3,500 votes. Our movement talks a big talk about direct democracy; why can’t we start holding neighborhood assemblies to talk about how to challenge the crooks in local office and local boardrooms? Empty lots in student wards can be used to grow food that can be stored and cooked at community meals at the lofts that Hipsters throw parties at. Hell, why don’t we get in with the best DJ’s in town and make a few jones off those Hipster parties we so despise? All politics are local, and local politics means encouraging people to vote early and often.

Adbusters, you are free to take me up on my suggestions and to call me on my own bullshit if I don’t live up to my own talk. But right now you are in the hot seat and I’m calling out your condescending bullshit. Hipsters are people too, and criticizing them without suggesting a strategy to transform and mobilize them makes you come off as pompous and arrogant as the Hipster connoisseurs of cheap plastic jewelry, thrift store fur jackets in July and obscure emo-core bands we all lament.

This article is crossposted from Next Left Chicago. Photos by Flickr users brainsik and dyobmit, used under Creative Commons Attribution license.