[BwayDems] Read all the way to the end!

[Paula Diamond Roman]

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/03/opinion/collins-the-last-election-list.html?ref=gailcollins&pagewanted=print

November 2, 2012

The Last Election List

By 

GAIL COLLINS

 


 

    
O.K., people, we’ve got an election coming. Tuesday’s the day! So little
 time, so much to do before we go to the polls. Perhaps we should make a
 list:        


1) Complain about the Electoral College.        

If you live in places like New York or California or Texas, feel free to
 spend some time in a dark corner, contemplating the way you’re taken 
for granted. So what if you’ve got a strong political majority for one 
party. You’re still Americans! But your state has already been colored 
red or blue on all the Election Central maps. Nobody wants to take your 
political temperature. Nobody cares what your waitress moms are 
thinking.        


For months now, we’ve been listening to people from Ohio moan about how 
many political ads they’re seeing on TV. Ohio, some of us have never 
gotten a single ad! How many celebrities do you think have parachuted 
into Rhode Island to do fund-raising for Barack Obama? How many network 
camera crews are on their way to take the pulse of Alabama? You’re 
beginning to sound like people who complain about how tough it is to 
manage three vacation homes.        


2) Consider the bright side of the Electoral College.        

If your state has no swing-like characteristics, there’s no danger that 
you’ll be humiliated before the global media when it screws up the vote 
count. New Yorkers, every time you get sullen about the fact that your 
state doesn’t matter, try to imagine what would happen if the entire 
future of the presidency depended on getting absolutely precise numbers 
out of Brooklyn.        


3) Worst tweet of the election season:        

“Because of the hurricane, I am extending my 5 million dollar offer for 
President Obama’s favorite charity until 12PM on Thursday.”        

— Donald Trump        


4) Stop obsessively checking the polls.        

This has been going on way too long. Stop torturing yourself! Whatever 
Colorado is going to do, it’ll do it on Tuesday. Clean the basement. 
Read a novel. Consider purchasing a new pet. If it’s an Irish setter, 
you can name it Seamus.        


5) Forget about the fact that Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.        

If he loses, nobody will care. If he wins, we’ll have so many other things to worry about.        


6) Find a Senate race to follow.        

You are probably going to spend Tuesday night glued to a computer or 
television that is repeatedly announcing it’s too soon to tell who got 
elected president. The time will go much faster if you’re diverted by 
the Senate returns. Since there are only about a dozen races in which 
there is any conceivable contest, it’s really not all that hard to 
become an expert. (“I believe Heidi Heitkamp has an excellent chance of 
beating expectations in North Dakota, which by the way is the only state
 with no voter registration.”)        

My personal favorite is Connecticut, in which we finally get to find out
 whether a person whose only prior experience is that she helped to 
build a professional wrestling empire can get elected to the U.S. Senate
 if she spends $100 million of her own money. But pick for yourself.    
    


 7) Learn the identity of your state legislators.        

The chances are 50 to 1 that they’re going to be re-elected without 
breaking a sweat. But the fact that you know their names will impress 
your friends even more than that thing about the North Dakota Senate 
race.        


 8) Just go ahead and vote.        

If we lived in a democracy full of heroic candidates in evenly matched 
battles, there’d be no challenge to being an energized voter. Everybody 
would do it! As it is, one of our greatest civic virtues is the 
willingness to soldier on and participate in elections even when the 
contests are foregone conclusions or vaguely ridiculous. 



Every day on my way to work for the last few months I’ve walked past the
 Victory for Obama Campaign Center on Broadway and 103rd Street in 
Manhattan. This is a neighborhood in which every single race on the 
ballot is hopelessly lopsided. Actually, most of them are uncontested. 
The state has already been painted blue. The congressman who has been in
 office for 20 years is being challenged by a person with no campaign 
funds and whose slogan is “Michael is familiar with politics ... but he 
is not political.” 



Yet the place has been full of enthusiastic people selling buttons, 
handing out literature and staffing the phones. This is what makes 
America great. True, the people on the phones were calling voters in 
Ohio. But still. You do what you can.        




	






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