Vic Socotra

26 October 2008

Absentee in Person

I couldn’t stand it any longer. The sun was shining brightly down on North Glebe Road, and the temperature was supposed to soar into the low eighties. I got up from the desk at lunchtime yesterday, took the elevator down to the lobby and walked out of the building. I walked past the now-shuttered Clinton Campaign headquarters, the heels of my dress business loafers clicking on the concrete.

I took the escalator down to the Metro station at Ballston, and waited eleven minutes for a train to show up. That is one of the things that makes you realize Washington is a Potempkin Village on the Potomac; the trains in Moscow and Paris and London run every couple minutes, round the clock. Here they run with a certain urgency around rush hour, and since there is no real reason for a city to be here at all, except to pass laws and badly regulate things. The rest of the time it is faster to walk.

Of course, once a train shows up, it is pretty cool. I stood as the train glided under Virginia Square and Clarendon and slid into Courthouse. I got off and took the steep escalator up toward the light. The tunnel is deep underground at this point, preparing for the passage under the Potomac and into Foggy Bottom from Rossyln.

I was thinking about Foggy Bottom and this particular commute. I rolled it around in my mind, since Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico appears destined for one of the big positions in the Obama Administration. His early support for the Senator really angered the Clintons, more so than his attempt to head the ticket up himself. They say that Hillary is OK with it, but the former President won’t forgive him.

That may not mean that much, since the Governor looked at the odds and made the right bet. The former President had to go down with the ship.

I have a tradition of making contributions to those people I actually know who are running for the highest office in the land, and I wondered if I should contact the Governor’s office out in Sante Fe and let him know I am just a few Metro stops away from the State Department, if that is where he winds up.

In the meantime, I wanted to get an important action item out of the way. The election is likely to be pretty crazy, and although our polling station is pretty well ordered, who needs the hassle on Election Day?

I got a call from one of the local parties telling me I could vote in advance of the event, and did not even have to request an absentee ballot. Being in the military all those years, I was accustomed to writing letters back to Michigan from all over the world well in advance of the event, so this seemed to be a great alternative to having to pretend to make up my mind at the last moment, after the debates and October Surprises were all done.

Instead, I marched into the County Office building at 2100 Clarendon Drive, and cast my vote. I had to produce picture ID with proof of residence- that seems to be a big deal out there in the battleground states. Some activists seem upset that voters should have to prove that they actually live where they are voting. I haven’t a clue why anyone would object to having to prove who they are in order to participate in the most significant election in years.

I did have to tell a little lie about where I was going to be on election day. I said I would be in Michigan, though I honestly don’t know where I will be. The white-haired lady who took20my affidavit didn’t seem to mind, and didn’t quite wink when I signed my name.

The volunteers asked me if I wanted to take a chance on hanging chads, and declined. The Machine Age is good enough for me. After I had proved my eligibility, I walked to the machine and punched in the right answer. I don’t know who the school board candidates are, and left them blank. There were several initiatives involving assuming more debt for County infrastructure, and I voted to increase my taxes.

Why should the County be any different than the rest of us?

I thanked the volunteers for their service and walked back out into the marvelous Fall day content that I had done what I could to participate in the democratic process, and still dodged the long lines on The Day.

The last debate is tonight. I saw some unsettling stuff on the internet after I got back to the office. There was another note about the birth certificate business. I sighed when I read it.

Remember back in the dim mists of time? Activists from both sides were taking shots at the frontrunners. Some claimed that Senator McCain had been born in Panama, and was thus ineligible to run, since there is a constitutional provision that candidates for the office be “natural born citizens.”

Big John promptly released his birth certificate, indicating that he was the natural born son of two American citizens on military assignment in what had been a US Possession at the time, the Canal Zone. He threw in his medical records as well, which documented his skin cancer and old wounds from the war long ago.

What with his unique family background, there was a reasonable expectation that the Obama campaign would do the same thing. It did not happen then, and hasn’t happened yet. The delay is actually a matter of litigation up in Philadelphia, where a former Democratic party official is suing for the matter to be resolved. I assume he is a die-hard Clinton partisan, though he claims to be an American.

The story is pretty wild, and hasn’t got any better with age, though it is not likely to be settled before the election. There is an allegation that the Senator was actually born in Kenya, where his Mom had gone to meet the family. All that has been offered is a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, and a document that looked like a Hawaii birth certi ficate that turned out to be a photo-shop document created last summer.

The matter might be a big deal, legally, though no one seems to care much about it. The other document raising comment is the one that was used to register “Barry Soetoro,” the adopted son of an Indonesian businessman to attend school in Djakarta.

That appears to be a valid document, regardless of the truth about the one from Honolulu. Certainly Senator Obama cannot be held responsible for the paperwork filled out when he was a kid, but you would think that a man with ambition might want to clear it up. George and Mitt Romney had to deal with the issue of Governor Romney’s birth to American parents in Mexico, after all.

Legal technicalities don’t appear to be what is important in this super-heated environment. I think the media would cry “foul” if that was the first question out of Senator McCain tonight, and maybe they would be right.

Still, when you talk about the sort of changes that are going to come in the Obama Administration, there will be some that are unprecedented. It would go without saying that being the first Indonesian president of the United States of America wou ld be right up there.

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