A sign of brilliance is counting brilliant people among your friends

This is a brilliant eye witness account of one internet friend's voting experience in OH.

I have permission to share!

credit scottish_like.

1.
I have to leave town this week for poetry gigs out of state, so today seemed like a good time to try out the Board of Elections early voting option. I’ve never voted outside of designated voting days before, so I’m looking forward to putting on my “I voted!” sticker three days before everyone else. I drive downtown, put 45 minutes on the meter, and head over to the BOE to vote. It’s history any way this election goes – even on the Republican side, as far as I’m concerned – so it’s an exciting time. The sun is out and the cold is biting, but playfully so.

Then I see the voting line.

The voting line-that-is-a-mosh-pit is, literally, the longest line I’ve ever stood in for anything: coveted concert tickets, new roller coaster rides, the DMV…all pale in comparison to this line. When I see this line at 9:30 on a cold Saturday morning I immediately begin to hope, not for change in Washington, but that the meter maids will be lenient. This is the kind of line that kills cellphones and makes lifetime friends out of complete strangers. I am reasonably sure I saw a man propose to a woman in line at one spot, and after about fifty yards of shuffling feet and cracking knees, they’d had a wedding ceremony. By the time they reach the registration table they’ll be able to turn in divorce paperwork with their ballots.

In my search for the end of the line I run into a family that I help at my day job at the public library. They stand at a coveted midpoint in the line, well into the building and warm. We shake hands, exchange greetings. As I step away to continue looking for the end of the line, the mother of the clan waves her hand at me to join them in line where they are. I beg off politely and keep moving. You don’t ditch history.

The line snakes through every crevice of the building, then back outside, then back in. I got into line twenty feet from the registration table, but ended up being shuffled back out the doors and around the back of the building, into an alley. Election workers walk the line, imploring people not to leave, to stick with the cause, assuring everyone they would get to vote. Thirty minutes in line and the cold is setting in firm. The line is moving at a good clip, but it isn’t shrinking. People keep getting in line despite the fact that it puts them in an alley behind the building standing on ice patches in some spots. The line has become a magical thing, what the Cheetos-adled denizens who play Dungeons & Dragons would call a +10 Pitcher of Unending Democracy.

The building across the street has three aerial antennas on its roof, like Calgary crosses at noon. I’ve driven by that building my whole life and never before noticed them. I try not to read too much into the vision.

2.
There are the typical characters you’d expect to find in a line like this: the joker with the most obvious punch line ever (“Can we stand in line? Yes we can!”); the hyperactive five year old who is cute for twenty minutes but becomes grating at twenty minutes and one second.

Two bodies behind me is the catch of the day: The Entitled. He is the one that, when faced with a line of committed voters stretching around a municipal building on a Saturday morning in a historic election cries “This is bullshit!” The Entitled is used to walking in and out of his own polls on his own steam, conveniently, without issue. The Entitled is arguing with a woman in front of him about his right to loudly give political commentary framed mostly with curses about standing in line. The Entitled has no class. You don’t curse history.

An unmarked car with a horn on its roof blasts the soundtrack of the Obama-infused video that overtook the internet, “Yes We Can”. It plays it over and over. And over. And over. After a while it switches to the theme from “Rocky”, then “Eye of the Tiger”. Apparently YouTube and Rocky Balboa are to be the coffee and donuts that election workers have been suggesting we’d receive, like lollipops handed out after a doctor’s visit. The snacks would never materialize. Sly must be a Republican.

I can’t believe I came anywhere near this building without my PSP.

3.
All of the buttons, signs and banners in sight are either local politicos or Obama’s. Not a Clinton sign in sight. Did she write off Columbus? Not have the money to spread until Tuesday? Was there a democratic gang fight before I showed up and the loser’s side had to take their signs home? I look for bruises and cuts, but none are to be found.

4.
If Obama’s black support in Columbus mirrors what it has in most of the country, Clinton’s lost this town hands-down. The line is predominantly black, like we’re Detroit or something, and it’s something to see. A plaque on the wall notes that the building has seen over 6.3 million visitors on its steps in the one hundred years it’s been there. I think we broke the record today just in black folks.

Barack Obama has done something that no politician at his level has done for a great many years: they have made the black vote feel important again. Please understand that I am not saying voting is unimportant to black people or that a candidate has never benefited from our vote. I am saying that, at the presidential level, the black vote is typically courted briefly, then bypassed, and quickly so. In most cases it is written off completely, with little or no attempt to address our existence, let alone our issues.

Contrast that tradition with the educational results of this election. Ask a hundred black people on the street what percentage of black voters Obama and Clinton have received in this election and you’ll find well over half of them know a rough idea (a ratio of approximately 80/10 respectively). Ask this same group of people what percentage of black voters John McCain has, or any Republican for that matter, and you’d be hard-pressed to get your number of respondents in double digits. It certainly isn’t because black people don’t vote Republican. It is because they do so in numbers so small they’re hardly worth talking about. Republicans and talking news heads know this, and the lessons to be derived from the pie charts that are afforded the Obama/Clinton contest are never drawn for McCain and his ilk.

By contrast, Obama has not only garnered the black vote; he has created a substantially larger black voting block than has ever existed. And while there are a number of reasons why that has occurred, the more important thing to note is the behavior of politicians and leaders now that this group exists. The black vote has become increasingly powerful this election in size and direction, more powerful than ever before most say…and Obama is, almost without fail, netting it in numbers never before seen even by strong black runners of the past.

In no other quarter than black leadership are the implications of this phenomenon more interesting. To look back on the interviews, quotes and platforms of many black so-called leaders a year ago is, in some cases, jarring. My personal favorite is a Minister Louis Farrakhan CNN clip done in early 2007, in which he’s asked about Obama (then not the powerful symbol that he is now).

Farrakhan: I like him very much. I’m not saying that I’m going to vote for him, but I like him. Because he’s fresh.

CNN: Do you think that Barack Obama is the answer to George Bush?

Farrakhan: No. I think he’s capable of being an answer, but who will provide him with the money so he can contend with Mrs. Clinton and her big bank? Or Giuliani and McCain and their growing bank? So the people that bankroll you, they’re the ones that ultimately call the tune.

CNN: So what are you saying?

Farrakhan: I’m saying no matter who sits in the White House, if you don’t uproot the structure that corrupts them you still don’t have a president. You have a figurehead.

CNN: Do you think Barack Obama can do that?

Farrakhan: No. Absolutely not. He knows some of the ugliness of politics ‘cause he’s been in it long enough. But the real wickedness of the face of politics…you’re looking right into the very face of Satan himself. And Satan doesn’t intend to be uprooted by an upstart from Chicago. Or Mrs. Clinton from New York.

This isn’t the worst rail to be found. Far worse things were said by other black leaders, even just a few months ago, when Hillary still had a shot. But I find Farrakhan’s statement one of the most compelling as a snapshot of black leadership at the time because it is shot straight, devoid of typical political mongering and reasonable. It contains hope, yet remains pragmatic. It is critical, yet fair for its time. It is a great barometer to measure the sentiment of its time.

And yet it almost seems unfair to pick on all of the fence-riding black leaders of a year ago (or less, if you ask Representative Lewis). No one could have predicted the groundswell of support that Obama would receive from all corners of our society. No one could foresee that Obama would become the political “Teflon Don”, or that he would generate record levels of funding from everyday people, or pick up 80 percent and more of the black vote with or without direct black leadership’s support. If anything, black leadership’s overall distance from him early in the campaign while the support from voters was building is telling, and should be looked at as a Socratic moment for the black community. We should now ask the question, “What makes you our leader?” We should take away from that dynamic – and its cousin, the mutating platform of political convention fast-approaching from the future – that maybe black leadership status should require more than a suit and tie, more than titles and television appearances. Maybe it should require check-ups of their knowledge of the issues of the day or written tests about what they did for black people last summer or a report card of their voting records. We should take away from this “fairy tale”, to use Bill Clinton’s words, that leadership that does not know what its supporters know or believe or desire is a poor leader. That, and that every great fairy tale has some seed of truth.

I had to add the words “Barack Obama” to the spell check dictionary in my software to get rid of the swarm of red snakes throughout this recollection. Change is on the horizon indeed.

5.
You’d think a polling place with a line like this only has a couple of booths, but that’s not the case. There are about twenty machines in the voting room proper, and staff at all corners logging people in to vote. No one is being turned away from voting, and even ID is not required. People have simply been moved to participate in the political process at never-before-seen levels, and no matter the outcome of the race, that’s something we should all be proud of.

6.
I get to my car at 11:30, almost two hours to the minute after parking it on Sixth Street. I can see the orange slip of a parking ticket flapping in the breeze, tucked firmly under my driver’s side windshield wiper. I pull it out and check the time on the ticket. 11:03. If I’d gotten to my car twenty minutes sooner I’d have gotten away scot-free, with my democracy and my wallet intact. I sigh and get in the car, then chuckle. I think about all of the people who died without ever having experienced the right to vote for centuries, and people who still live today in places with laws that disallow voting for some communities. I think about the people who were beaten or kicked or spat upon in marches, some that were threatened by police if they didn’t turn around and march away, all to build a case for voting rights. A parking ticket is a small price to pay for the right to vote. I take the voting sticker off of my shirt and I place it on the parking ticket. I figure it’ll be something for the people at the DMV to talk about for ten seconds when I mail it in.

Besides: if I ever meet Barack Obama, whether he becomes president or not, he can afford to give me my twenty bucks back.