The NYTimes and those dastardly lawyers

It is not altogether unusual to those who know me for my first blog to be a harangue largely focused on the New York Times and the pernicious influence of lawyers. In the interest of full disclosure, I am both a subscriber to the former and one of the latter. My bipolar relationship with both is worth, I am sure, a small fortune to some aspiring Freud. But that isn't what I came here to talk about.

The New York Times has, twice in two days, trumpeted Election Protection 2004 as a non-partisan effort (see Adam Cohen's article on Sunday, October 31, as well as the editorial from Monday, November 1). What is interesting about this is that no one has bothered to mention, whether out of journalistic laziness or pure disingenuous election-eve politicking we may never know, that Election Protection was launched and largely funded by People for the American Way. Indeed, EP will have its "nerve center" at PFAW's headquarters tomorrow (and on and on and on). Why is this interesting? Because PFAW is very specifically partisan; it has a continuously updated "right wing watch" on its website and considers its role in, well, borking Robert Bork as one of the highlights of its history. Reasonable people may disagree as to the usefulness of its politics, but no one can honestly deny that PFAW is partisan.

So what does this all mean? It means that PFAW is currently transporting thousands of lawyers and law students to polls all over the country (well, maybe not all over so much as to two or three states) to "protect voters". Those lawyers are fine, young, energetic and certainly democratic folk. But putting thousands of lawyers in hundreds polling places is like putting thousands of Emerils in hundreds of kitchens. No matter what, you know someone is going to come out with something and not all of it is going to go down well or smoothly (notwithstanding the special place that I hold in my heart for Emeril's restaurants and Fall River, MA). My election prediction is that there will be an explosion of unwarranted litigation, most of it coming from the Kerry camp, through such "non-partisan" organizations as Election Protection.

The reason I am so confident is because of where these lawyers and law students are coming from and where they are going to. It is hard to imagine a less, well, self-messianic mission than bringing voting to those poor, sorry, backward folk out in the great flyover country that makes up middle America. This is metro saving retro. If you listen closely, you can almost hear a young Northeastern woman from an Ivy league law school, or clean-cut and trendily dressed young man from one of the many great schools on the west coast, whispering or shouting out loud "but my god, they didn't even know they were being disenfranchised!" This is the disgusting thing, this is what haunts me, and this is what is going to fuel the endless litigation. Who wants to go back to New York City, or Boston, or San Francisco, and say that they didn't see anything? Who will go back to the friends that they have made through the PFAW affiliates and say that everything went smoothly? That the dark spectre of Republicans, inevitably trying to keep everyone but the Bush family from voting, didn't appear to them? Like so much else in our country, fighting so-called disenfranchisement will become so much currency to this group. Millions more will be misled into thinking there is illegitimacy in the outcome, that voter suppression occurred systematically, that there are dark forces afoot. This cannot help but undermine our democracy.

(As an aside, this was originally going to be a rant against the FT, which ran a horrendous article about an ex-pat who returns to America and promptly determines that he decided that he made the right decision to leave fifteen years ago and promptly returns to Europe. I happen to think that he was right to leave and that the only mistake he made was ever coming back, prompting him to write an obnoxious article that I would later find myself reading. But alas, the subject of the self-loathing American will have to wait for another day).