Tuesday and the Perils of an Election

It rained hard and relentlessly today where I live. The rainstorm seemed to deepen the solemnity of the approaching day of decision for America, made it look grim.

Well, maybe that’s what it is.

The day before we drove down from Minneapolis to Rochester, Minnesota, the city of the Mayo Clinic, the citadel of health care and of medical miracles. For thousands of people around the world, it has become a wellspring for the renewal of life.

The campaign of John Kerry chose Rochester for one of his final major appearances before the election, notwithstanding the city’s recent tradition as one of the rural fortresses of conservative Republicanism. The idea was to demonstrate that Kerry and some of the battered but still-lofty ideals of the Democratic Party can rally other voices in the midst of rural America.

They came by the thousands, from southern Minnesota, northern Iowa, Minneapolis and St. Paul. They filled the 7,500-seat Mayo Civic Auditorium and spilled over into the adjacent grounds. Not all of them came spontaneously. Presidential political rallies of the 21st Century aren’t conducted with crossed legs and worried looks at the horizon for symptoms of sunlight. Newly-naturalized Somali women were shuttled to the rally from the Twin Cities. Hundreds of young people who sat near them didn’t pop up impulsively out of the cornfields. But none of them came reluctantly. And if you were one of those approaching the dignified status of an old crock of American politics it was impossible not to be lit up by the concentrated exuberance of the crowd. It could have been one of Hubert Humphrey’s dusk-to-dawn bean feeds in the old Minneapolis Auditorium. It had almost the identical blow-out atmospherics and cheek to cheek camaraderie. All that was missing was somebody’s Better Than Dirt amateur band playing Happy Days Are Here Again.

The atmospherics were almost identical, but not quite.

This was not a political rally of the mid 1900s when, whatever the decision of election day, the country was going return to an acceptable political peace and to an America as usual.

This is an America today that truly believes in the dominant mantra rising from the clamor and the gut-kicking of the campaign of 2004, and in some ways from a lurking dread: That this is the most important election of our lifetimes.

It probably is. It certainly is the most perilous.

Perilous because the country has been tearing itself apart politically in a clash of competing values, so virulent that it has by now persuaded most Americans that the bedrock of their democracy—the idea of an honest election—may be corrupted.

They have a right to be scared or suspicious. From the burlesque in Florida in 2000 to the chaotic stampede to harvest or block new voter registration this year there’s enough evidence that election fraud can be creatively engineered. So we have the spectacle today of armies of lawyers and poll watchers from both sides about to storm the polling places. Some of them we’ll want to thank for protecting legally certified voters. We’ll suspect others of shielding the imposters. Election day disruption is predictable. The hostage in all of this is the country’s trust in the one irreplaceable doctrine of American democracy.

That is a shadow hanging over Tuesday. Another is the real possibility that the oligarchy that now runs America will, by winning this election, declare a mandate to continue its recklessness into the unlimited future. This is a government that works in virtual blood-oath secrecy, has needlessly killed thousands of innocents thousands of miles away, has run a war with arrogant incompetence and presided over the theft of billions of dollars from its own citizens to enrich billionaires. In the process it has cost its citizens millions of jobs, reduced their health care and earning power and virtually crippled American public education.

So I went to hear John Kerry in Rochester, and I sat in a section behind the stage wearing a small badge reading “Veteran for Kerry-Edwards,” bearing a tiny sub-title, “for a stronger America.”

I think I would have said for a better America. America is strong enough. It is rich enough. It is not as good as it should be, or as it once was. People who may have traveled less tell me “everybody around the world hates us.” Well, they don’t. Americans are generally held as fondly as they were ten and fifteen years ago. Americans individually remain generous and open. It isn’t Americans that are detested around the world. It is the behavior of the American government today that people find appalling. It is a government that has alienated most of the civilized world with its belligerence in avenging 9/11, its posturing as the conscience and the warden of the world, and its hypocrisy as the knight of democracy and world order while it creates turmoil with its refusal to be conciliator where it could produce legitimate and life-saving peace.

In Rochester, John Kerry said the usual Kerry things, and they were punchy and credible. This was a decent and thoughtful man finally finding his traction in the heavy lifting of this clangorous campaign. The crowd was alive and responsive. It was a comfort to sit there with good folks who looked so ready for a new breath in Washington. But under their layer of happy times ahead I know there was some festering worry about whether this can really happen. Kerry was confident and looked presidential. But so was George Bush a few hours later on my television set, deriding Kerry’s hip-shooting with the facts and the rest of the usual indictments.

Four more years of the obsessions of the Bush government, pandering to corporate power and greasing it, slickering an America public still wanting to believe in an American dream--I found that almost too loathsome to look at seriously in Rochester. So I sat at the Mayo center while the Democrats got everybody through security and Carole King warmed up the crowd and Garrison Keillor got us through the introductions. I found myself drifting back into the politics of the 1960s. Did Kerry have the stuff to be another John Kennedy? Another Bill Clinton? Well, yes. Why not? I recycled John Kennedy. We had a connection, I remembered. It was not exactly historic but it pulled me back into what I thought was a better time for America. I remembered 44 years ago, the day after the 1960 election. I was sitting at a typewriter in the Associated Press bureau in Minneapolis. It was 9 a.m. and the world was clamoring for an American president. John Kennedy was six votes short of clinching the presidency. Illinois, California and Minnesota were still out. In those years the county auditors actually counted the votes and phoned them into the two major wire services. George Moses, the bureau chief, and Adolph Johnson, the political writer, came over to my typewriter. I was writing the election leads for Minnesota and the Dakotas. Richard Nixon and Kennedy were running almost dead even in Minnesota. But the bulk of the Iron Range and Duluth votes—3 to 1 Democratic in those years—had not been tabulated.

The three of us talked. Nixon couldn’t possibly match Kennedy on the Range and in Duluth. Moses called the general desk in New York. “We’re going to elect Kennedy,” he said. “I’ve got two words of advice,” the chief of the general desk said: “Be right.”

He hung up a number for us on the AP’s trunk wire and I started writing. Moses pulled the copy out of my machine a paragraph at a time. We didn’t have time to slip carbons into the hard copy. After four paragraphs I yelled to the teletype operator, Bob Mexner: “How did that last paragraph end?” Mexner tried to be helpful. “With a period,” he said.

The world had a president. I was dawdling with that memory when Garrison Keillor cued the music in Rochester and led the 7,500 in the national anthem. When it was over the woman next to me was crying. Susan Wilkes, my wife. “You know," she said. “it isn’t only the people who noisily proclaim their patriotism who love this country. It’s been so good for me, and for so many others.”

It has that. It was an altogether marvelous country for my immigrant grandparents, who made a grail out of an education for their children and those who came after. I think most of those who were at Rochester know this country well enough to know when it’s made a wrong turn. We will find out Tuesday whether there are enough Americans who have made the same judgment.

---Jim Klobuchar

Copyright (c) 2004 Jim Klobuchar