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The contretemps between the Bush and Kerry camps over Ohio dominated the television results last night and this morning. But while the networks focused obsessively on the presidential race and a handful of Republican scalps in the House and Senate, some underlying voting patterns did not get the coverage they deserved.
Uberblogger Jeff Jarvis’ Post-Election Peace Pledge expresses what I’ve been hoping to see for some time now: A nonpartisan willingness to place the commonweal ahead of ideological purity.
The doorbell rang Sunday afternoon and it turned out to be a bleached-blond Gen X man from the MoveOn.org organization. He said he was there to get out the vote for the Democratic Party. He asked me if I had voted or decided for whom I would vote. Was I registered?
True story: Your humble scribe once got sucked into a conversation with a guy who thought his own taste in music should settle the argument for what is good and hip and cool. A few minutes in, I let slip that I enjoyed the songs of the late lamented crypto-Christian rock group Creed, which launched my friend on a whale of a rant.
Here’s a twist. Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin has hauled off and said that Sen. John Kerry’s slight rise in recent polls toward dead-heat status is clearly the work of the Holy Spirit. Well, OK, he didn’t put it that way. He said the president is down and Kerry is up and “That’s how God wants it to be.” There was no immediate response from press officials working for the Rev. Pat Robertson.
It is interesting to have to turn to Baptist Press for coverage of an event in the Roman Catholic community — for the most part — in Miami-Dade County. The Democratic League there has decided not to endorse Sen. John Kerry, primarily because of religious and cultural issues. The Baptists note that it has “more than 1,000 members and a reach that expands to 100,000 pro-life, pro-family Democrats in Miami” and that it is “primarily led by Hispanic-American Democrats.” It’s impossible to read the group’s 10 reasons for rejecting Kerry without hearing the voice of Pope John Paul II. I can’t find national coverage of this story, other than this weak nod in that direction.
Pre-Election Day reports about targeted campaigning are enough to make even a political junkie chant, “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!”
Jerome Weeks of the Dallas Morning News recalls the golden days when John Adams, a “more traditional Christian” than Thomas Jefferson (Adams was a Unitarian), declared that “the Government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.”
