A Long Day Turns to Night

I know a lot of folks are feeling optimistic about an Obama victory tonight in the presidential election, but I can't shake this sense of foreboding.

Shortly after polling places opened there were reports of long lines, inept election officials, the Black Panthers patrolling one precinct in Philadelphia, wet ballots in Virginia and myriad other problems in swing states that either Barack Obama or John McCain must win to win the White House.

Here in Chicago the day dawned sunny and there was a giddiness in the air. The stage seemed set for an election night party, with warm temperatures, no rain and an entire lakefront park waiting to be filled with folks eager to be as near as possible to history—an Obama win. Or at least, that was the Hope. The reality could still turn out to be quite different.

If these reports of lines and faulty electronic voting machines and wiggy ballot handling persist, and some of these swing states that have looked for weeks as though they were leaning toward Obama start showing McCain tendencies instead, I think we'll see protests in Chicago and plenty of people hollering "disenfranchisement" and "fraud" and maybe even "revolution."

We should know not long after, say, 8 p.m. in Chicago whether voting irregularities in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and Virginia are serious enough to merit legal challenges. If so, this election may well be decided in the courts. If by, say, 10:30 p.m. in Chicago the electoral vote dominos haven't begun falling pretty clearly one way or the other, the night will likely end in an anticlimactic sense of frustration. What to do, then, with 200,000 or 500,000 or a million people with enough political conviction on one side of the ledger to wait for hours outside in November in downtown Chicago for a sense of resolution that never came? That's a scene that could get ugly in a hurry. Imagine July 3rd in Grant Park if 9:30 came and went with no fireworks, and no explanation. By 10:15 it'd be time to high-tail it out of the line of fire, bubba.

There is a chance that this election will be a landslide win for Obama. Personally, I hope so. A win by Obama would be a victory for intellectualism, for diplomacy and for racial advancement. It would be a repudiation of class warfare, demagoguery and this weird celebration of ignorance in which we've been engaged since the mid-1990s. If Obama ends up being half as good as I think he could be he'll still be twice as good as McCain at his best.

But there's a long night ahead before all that. My fear is that it will be a long night followed by many more long nights and days.

The Indignant Citizen