One Week to Go 

One Week to Go

If any events are truly of global significance, I guess U.S. presidential elections count--maybe this one in particular. In some ways Kerry is a centrist Democrat and Bush is a centrist Republican, yet the cultural differences of the true believers are also close the surface.

Will there be more shooting wars, or fewer?

I've just gone back to [link=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1568491433/blogeasy-20]The Making of the President, 1960[/link].

One strange note. Emphasizing the uniqueness of it all, White says "Only one other major nation in modern history has ever tried to elect its leader directly by mass, free, popular vote. This was the Weimar Republic....Out of its experiment with the system it got Hitler." He says nothing like this is true of France; but they have direct election of the President. Maybe he means to emphasize that the U.S. vote is "once and for all," whereas the French have run-offs if necessary until someone wins a majority of the vote. (It is, er, a majority of the actual vote, not of an electoral college, that counts in France).


Anyway:

It was then, at 10:30, that ... the trouble began....then came Wisconsin, which Kennedy had stumped so furiously in March and now expected with certainty to carry--and Wisconsin was lost....Now from somewhere must come the last thirty electoral votes to make the victory a reality.,,,Only once had he shown emotion. It was Ohio that had caused him bitterness. He had moved through Ohio six times in the course of the campaign. On his last trip on October 17th, campaigning from Middletown through Dayton through Springfield through Columbus, it has been such a day of marvel and splendor as is reserved only for heroes and gods. The Ohioans had lined 113 miles of highway almost solidly, holding their children up to watch him, clutching at him, tearing at him, waving at him, shrieking at him, until his staff had feared for his safety. Yet now along this route, precisely in these cities, from Franklin County through Hamilton County, the Ohioans of the southern tier were showing that their hearts still belonged to Robert A. Taft and Richard M. Nixon. The candiidate had listened as the profile of Ohio's preference traced the biggest disappointment of his campaign, and slowly he rolled back his sleeve. His right hand, by the end of the campaign, had swollen with the handshaking of the months to grossly disproportionate size and he displayed it now--calloused, red, the scratches reaching as far as his elbow. He held up the inflamed hand, bare to the elbow, and said "Ohio did this to me--they did it there." Then he had rolled down the sleeve, had shaken his head, not understanding, and had become cool again, as ever.