corrente

100,000 contractors voting with GOP help. WTF?

Interest Groups Mounting Costly Push to Get Out Vote
By Michael Moss and Ford Fessenden, The New York Times
Wednesday 20 October 2004

In a presidential race whose outcome is expected to hang on turnout at the polls, an army of interest groups is pumping at least $350 million into get-out-the-vote campaigns that are rewriting the tactics of elections.

….the fervor has even reached Baghdad, where a Republican lobbyist is trying to help an estimated 100,000 employees of American contractors in the Persian Gulf vote in time to be counted…

…The turnout campaigns are concerned not just with voters in the United States. Timothy B. Mills, a lobbyist working on Iraq reconstruction issues for the law firm of Patton Boggs and a former vice president of the Republican National Lawyers Association, has organized the effort in Baghdad to help the estimated 100,000 contractor employees in the region cast their votes. One plan is to send the ballots en masse to an office in Washington, where they would be separated and redirected to the appropriate local election site…

via Costly Push to Get Out Vote

I didn’t even know there were 100,000 of them over there. Ye gods! These people will stop at nothing!

Arrrgggh, me hearties! Raise the Jolly Roger! Point the ship toward the nearest group of slacker Dem voters and march them off to the early voting stations! Give them doughnuts. Give them free beer. Give them a guilt trip. But get them to the polls! Especially the young folks...

Will Bush cause a seismic youthquake? by Arianna Huffington

A taste from ol’ Huffington:

He has sparked a youthful uprising unseen since Robert Kennedy's tragically shortened run for president. Kennedy's 1968 campaign brought together a powerful coalition of progressive young white voters and disaffected young black voters, united in support of his twin platform of fighting poverty and ending the war in Vietnam. Bush's immoral war in Iraq and poverty-spreading domestic policies have brought those same groups together in an effort to topple him.

Bush is the photo negative of Kennedy. The anti-Bobby.

Of course, registration is just the first step -- it won't mean a thing if the new registrants fail to turn up at the polls or if, once they get there, they are turned away by a 2004 Katharine Harris wanna-be.

That's why the key to delivering the youth vote, and with it the keys to the White House, will be which side is most successful at getting out the vote. Studies have shown that the most effective way to do this is through peer-to-peer contact -- and with young people this means knocking on dorm doors and repeatedly following up with e-mails, cell phone calls and text messages.

Which is why the tipping point of 2004 may be reached not by the big, well-funded voter registration efforts, but by the under-the-radar efforts of the hundreds of small, independent, grassroots groups of young people that have joined in the effort to remove the president from office.

Let us hope.