Hawaii = 16 = marriage

Hawaii passed same-sex marriage today, making it the 16th of 50 states and DC. Gov. Neil Abercrombie has been eager to sign and should this evening.

We saw the same hackneyed, even bigoted, emotional and personal-religion based rants by legislators and 1000+ who testified to the Senate and 5000+ before the House (much overlap). Many were opposed to equal marriage rights. They used identical whines, non-intellectual arguments, and even threats of election retribution as we heard here in MA.

Same-sex marriage starts Monday, December 2nd.

The good guys prevailed. The law is pono — righteous.

Post-vote update: Listening to many hours of testimony and speechifying by voters and legislators, I was moderately surprised. The anti-equality arguments were replays of those a decade ago here in MA. So many of the anti-SSM voter made it plain that because people heard their emotional pleas, somehow that should mean agreement. Not so in MA nor in HI.

Update update: The Star Advertiser got around to a full recap.

Franken Carries Liz' Portfolio

Al Franken, no longer funny guy but still stand-up in the other sense of the term, stood in for Elizabeth Warren today in Cambridge. Yeah, he was still funny, even though he's seriously the U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

Truth be told, a friend and I intended to have a pint across the street from the Warren-for-Senate HQ on Mass Ave. out of Harvard Square before the sked announced she and he would appear there about the same time. We're both pinkos about her age, so we were delighted.

Cambridge Common is a fine place for reasonably priced brews, particularly IPAs. I doubt that is why Warren's campaign planted her office directly across the avenue. However after increasing our wisdom, we were ready for the scrum.

Turns out that Warren must have been at another locale. Franken appeared and charmingly carried the afternoon. I was fine with that, having met her numerous times as well as hosting her on the Left Ahead show. I'm decidedly one of her groupies and my wife has been canvassing and phone-banking for her. When we went to her West Roxbury office opening, she threw her arm around me and said, "I love this guy!" My wife allowed as she did too. It was all good.

Lackaday, my chum, who is also a Warren supporter, had not and still has not met her. We tried to get the tap puller to join us, but she pleaded work duties. Just as well...

Al Franken was in town and around for four or five events promoting his potential colleague. He did well.

The room was astoundingly deep for a Cambridge storefront. We packed it with several hundred very decided voters.

Oddly enough, the speakers who prepped the crowd for Franken's arrival were all women and concentrated heavily on LGBT issues. Obviously, this blog has long been gay-rights/marriage-equality oriented. Yet, it was strange that as far as Marjorie Decker (Cambridge City Councilor and candidate for state rep) and Denise Simmons (Cambridge Vice Mayor) and others were concerned, Warren's LGBT positions were start, middle and end. They didn't talk about equal pay, jobs, the economy or the other big issues in play. Meh.

Franken arrived jolly but coy. He stood by his claim that he did not criticize colleagues, as in Sen. Scott Brown. However, he did note the facts about interactions with Brown. Specifically, he cited a bill, the Student Non-Discrimination Act,  he introduced and collected 39 cosponsors for that would provide anti-discrimination for LGBT teens. This would protect kids like the ADA does for the disabled and Title IX does for girls and women. He said he asked Brown to join the cosponsors. Brown said he'd get back with him, which turned into his staff saying no.

Franken preferred to gush rationally about Warren. He noted that control of the Senate is at stake this year and that "is so important." He added that "Elizabeth Warren is so great."

Then he blended his two public personalities to urge those in the room "get off your butts" for the next two and one half weeks before the election. He said that they might have jobs and families, but that they should forget them for the next 18 days.

He joked that 8-year-olds were perfectly capable of using a microwave, while their parent(s) were canvassing or calling for Warren. He added that the 8-year-olds could also teach the 4-year-olds, and that kids really like being on their own for dinner.

He concluded more seriously that you don't want to wake up on November 7th thinking that you could have and should have done more to elect Warren.

Immutable Voters

I've lamented here that voters can be illogically fixed. I think of 2012 elections for example, including the POTUS and our Warren/Brown Senate contests. I fully expect at least 40% to vote for what I consider definitely the wrong candidate; how can these races be at all close, I wonder?

No reasoning is revealed, but a solid piece in yesterday's Boston Globe, Wait, campaigns don't work?, does concur with my exasperated question. Citing proven political prognosticators, it reads that at least 80% of voters have fixed minds and hearts. All the campaigning possible in the time available won't alter their preset preferences. Ads, debates, conventions and such only reinforce their starting positions.

Instead, a very few factors, such as second quarter GDP and incumbent popularity in June, make the difference. The pros allegedly can use their formulae to pick the vote early and within 2%.

It's a little amusing to find such a clear, believable piece in the Globe. After all, more typical of its research articles is the weekly Uncommon Knowledge feature. It features short recaps of trendy, even sensationalist, findings largely by academicians. These are pop brights about your love life or how beer glass shape may affect your drinking rate or how coffee or red wine is good for you, no bad. Ho hum. These ephemera are often trivial and frequently destined to be refuted by future lightweight studies...and soon.

Lackaday. We can listen to the ghost of H.L. Mencken, who wrote, "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." As much as we'd like to have faith that our electorate will generally get it right, we likely are deluding ourselves with such optimism.

Let us wonder now in the first major election after the Citizens United decision whether the sliver of perhaps 10% of the persuadable voters will fall and be fooled. This is the first go with SuperPACs weaving their distorted, dishonest and secretly financed lies in ad and advocacy forms.

It's quite possible that the hundreds of millions or several billion dollars spent won't determine the outcome of the POTUS race or control of either house of Congress. If nearly all voters were decided long before the campaigns really started, can those filthy bucks make the difference?

It's just as possible that the success in the disgraceful, un-American, anti-democracy efforts at voter disenfranchisement will make that difference. That is, in the many states where Republicans are actively trying to keep left-leaning voters from being able to cast ballots, if they fail, the democratic process perks along, quite likely favoring Democrats. If they succeed, historians will immediately start documenting the shame of it all.

Think too if the SuperPAC and winger billionaire money fails to tip the election, even with the shield of Citizens United. We're years away from overturning that though a Constitutional amendment. We can be positive that in the meanwhile the Dark Side would not slink away, admitting failure and discarding this weapon. Instead, they'd strategize how to make it work. Being called as anti-liberty and anti-democratic process won't deter them.

It's long been plain that we have many low-information voters. If the Globe piece is right, they have no intention of getting smart or risking having to think.

Take the Woe Out of Warren

If asked publicly, most of like would say yes we'd like a candidate to be sincere. I doubt that...honest yes, but sincere can be a turnoff.

Oddly, Elizabeth Warren is at once intense and extremely likable. She has never lost her Southern, small city/big town charm. She's often witty and delightfully honest. Yet her intensity has led folk to tell her to lighten up and personalize her ads.

I've heard her speak many times and chatted directly with her quite a few. In addition, she was on the Left Ahead show last October right after she announced her candidacy.

Superficially, I note we share the same birth state (a rarity this far removed) and are the same age. From hearing and speaking with her, I like Elizabeth Warren. More important, I respect her worldview, her personal accomplishments, and her evolved clarity of political vision.

All of that aside, I understand pols and others noting she must do more than be right and righteous. I've long said that anyone spending two minutes with her would vote for her over Scott Brown. Yet most voters won't get that close that long. Moreover, she's up against a theatrical sort who plays an everyman he never was nor will be.

Brown has been successful playing your neighbor. He used this to great advantage against the icy AG Martha Coakley in the special election that sent him to D.C.

Ironies and contradictions abound. He grew up citified/suburban with a lot more money and resources than she. He went to one of the nation's most expensive private universities, while she worked her way through state schools. He did next to nothing as a state senator, while she pioneered and won in creating a major middle-class protecting federal agency. He fairly coasted his way to lawyerly wealth while she proved her way up through academia to earn a tenured Harvard Law faculty position. Both ended up wealthy, but only she has the accomplishments to show for it.

So, why, you might ask does former MA Gov. Michael Dukakis tell the commonwealth's delegation to the DNC convention, "Yeah, I know Elizabeth’s media hasn’t been as good as it should be, and she knows that, and I think you’re going to see some significant changes."? Well, he's brutal and right.

I'm not sure about her woman's issue. I personally have heard middle-aged women I know say she comes on too strong, even that she's bitchy. However, I have to agree with the Duke. Her ads can be dour and impersonal.

Brown has nothing much to say and he no compunction about lying. He seems to love himself and portrays his role as the most important, tie-breaking one in all Congress. But he still comes across as a swell guy in his aw-shucks ads.

She on the other hand may be too intense for her own good. That dogged enthusiasm was key to her running over obstructionist, financial-industry lapdogs in Congress to create the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Her combination of knowing she was in the right and keeping up the fight to victory made that happen. Certainly of the two of them, I'd trust only her to do what's right for us here.

In a state that has never sent a woman to the U.S. Senate, many voters of both genders don't seem to know what to do with her. Yet in Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, West Roxbury and Hyde Park among places I've heard her speak, she owns the crowds, men and women, the range of ages. There again, if you spend time with her, you are for her.

The photo above is typical of her posture. It was at Boston Mayor Tom Menino's annual block party celebrating his assumption of office. She listens to the people she's with and when she responds, she leans forward, answers fully and knowledgeably and with great intensity. She may be too much for anyone who wants politicians LITE.

Thus, in today's Globe, Frank Phillips analysis the problem and reports proposed solutions. These include that she seems stiff and unmoving in ads, that she doesn't use stereotypical local places, people and other props, and that she doesn't use supporters to speak for her. I'd also note that unlike Brown's her ads have real and meaning content to the exclusion of fluff and PR.

She shouldn't bring herself all the way down to Brown's big-smile/little-brain level. Yet I know this woman and know that she has a gracious personality as powerful as her intellect. She needs to put both on display posthaste.

National Fantasy

Ladies and Gentlemen, come November Sixth, the bifurcation to end all forks in all roads confronts all voters. Surely at least 40% of them will head toward a fantasy land. Here's hoping with all my being that they don't take us with them.

I'm old enough, well read enough, and observant enough to draw some lessons an inferences from past elections. This looming one is huge, at least as big as the last Presidential. In 2008, Obama promised a clean break with the failed winger economic legacy of Reagan and the Bushes, as well as with their suicidal, economy-destroying wars. He only kind of delivered, hampered mostly by GOP total disregard for the nation and his own temerity.

Despite Republican efforts to keep millions jobless and our taxes going for military over-spending and benefits to the wealthiest only, we have slowly mirrored the rest of the world in recovering from the Great Recession caused by the parody of capitalism so beloved by wingers. Yet, this election may hinge in large part on the impatience and irrationality of the voters. Even with the GOP House and filibuster wielding Senate preventing big recovery efforts, the electorate tends to look to the President for magic.

Setting aside the reason, the Obama administration has been on duty while we only slowly recover. Many will look to the any replacement as the fantasy miracle he did not deliver.

You'd think that voters would go for the rational response — dump every Republican House member up for election and increase the Dem majority in the Senate. Let's pass the necessary legislation to get the nation moving!

Alas, that would require awareness of reality. Isn't the fantasy more seductive?

We'll be kicking this around tomorrow on Left Ahead. Our version of Ryan, as in Ryan Adams, my co-host, will discuss the election with the Paul Ryan pick. If you can catch us live at 2:30 PM Eastern Tuesday 8/14, do that here. Afterward, it will be available for a listen or download there, on Left Ahead or at our iTunes page.