{"id":307,"date":"2008-11-04T11:30:13","date_gmt":"2008-11-04T11:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/onecity\/2008\/11\/election-08-thread-the-best-writing-from-the-internet.html"},"modified":"2008-11-04T11:30:13","modified_gmt":"2008-11-04T11:30:13","slug":"election-08-thread-the-best-writing-from-the-internet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/onecity\/2008\/11\/election-08-thread-the-best-writing-from-the-internet.html","title":{"rendered":"Election 08′ Thread: The Best Writing from the Internet"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: I’ll be updating periodically throughout the day. Submit your stories, videos, and links in the comments section!<\/em>
\nI voted this morning at 8:15 after waiting on line for 45 minutes in the humid, bustling gymnasium at the elementary school near my house. Now it’s 11:00 AM and I have nothing to do except think about how our country (and, indeed, the world) will change over the next four years, wait on the returns, and hope I get to pop the cork on the bottle of Prosecco currently chilling in my fridge.
\nWork is slow and I’m antsy as hell (what’s left to do now but wait?) so I thought I’d post some of the most thoughtful and\/or inspiring writing from around the internet.\u00a0
\nAlso, please share your voting stories! Make One City your election ’08 headquarters! Even though we don’t have any actual election coverage at all!
\nGeorge Packer<\/a> speaks to my voting experience in Brooklyn:\u00a0
\n<\/p>\n

My wife and I went out to vote in Brooklyn early this morning. The whole process, including waiting in a line that stretched around the corner from the local elementary school and down the block, took an hour and a half\u2014at least an hour longer than it\u2019s ever taken me to vote in my adult life. Quiet excitement in the school gym; also a certain amount of controlled chaos. I heard no one complain\u2014politeness was breaking out all around, with that cheerfulness between strangers that is generally reserved for religious occasions and sports events.
\nEveryone seemed to be aware that this is a historic day, and even in a state where the results are a foregone conclusion the people in the gym wanted their vote counted, believed their iota of the overall tally matters, which is the absurd and sublime essence of democracy. Lots of children had been brought out to witness the occasion. Our one-year-old was uncharacteristically still.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Andrew Sullivan<\/a> will be posting View from Your Election all day. This one was unexpectedly stirring:<\/p>\n

A reader writes:
\nThose who are wondering if the youth will turn out ought to see what I saw this morning.
\nOne well-known government professor here told me that she has never seen so many students vote in the first hour of voting as she saw this morning. And I’ve never seen so many students up and alert at this hour. They’re normally stumbling out of bed to make it to their 10 a.m. courses. Today, the campus has been buzzing for hours this morning. It appears that many of them decided to go to the polls as groups of twos, threes, fours and more when the polls opened at 7 a.m. The number of students I saw by 8 a.m. walking around with “I voted” stickers on is astonishing.
\nAt breakfast, I sat next to a table of four black students, all of whom had voted. The three men were wearing ties. I asked them why. The answer: It was their first election, and they wanted to mark the occasion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marc Ambinder<\/a> makes a funny:<\/p>\n

\n

A Memo I’m Half-Expecting To See<\/span><\/h3>\n

03 Nov 2008 04:48 pm<\/p>\n

From the McCain campaign: “Final\u00a0 Vote Tally Will Overstate Obama’s Support.”<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
More from George Packer<\/a> on Obama’s mindstate these last few days (to those of you not plugged in: Obama’s grandmother passed away on Sunday night. Watch him talk about it here<\/a>.):<\/div>\n
\n
\nObama seems a bit grave to me these days. The death of his grandmother has edged his public mood with sadness, but this heaviness preceded it. Compare the closing-days portraits of the two candidates in the\u00a0Times<\/em>: I\u2019d rather spend the final stretch in the company of the Republican.\u00a0McCain<\/a>\u00a0is ironic, gregarious, plucky;\u00a0Obama<\/a>\u00a0is fully hidden away within himself. He is, we already knew, an aloof, perhaps unknowable man\u2014you feel it even after hearing his life story told in his own remarkable voice over the several hundred pages of \u201cDreams from My Father.\u201d But his manner before crowds and his face in photographs seem even farther out of reach than usual.
\nThe reason came to me when I was reading the galleys of H. W. Brands\u2019s new biography of F.D.R., \u201cTraitor to His Class.\u201d On the night of his landslide victory over Hoover, in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, Roosevelt had an intimate conversation with his son James:
\n\u201cYou know, Jimmy,\u201d Franklin said, \u201call my life I have been afraid of only one thing\u2014fire. Tonight I think I\u2019m afraid of something else.\u201d
\n\u201cAfraid of what, Pa?\u201d
\n\u201cI\u2019m just afraid that I may not have the strength to do this job.\u201d He paused reflectively. \u201cAfter you leave me tonight, Jimmy, I am going to pray. I am going to pray that God will help me, that he will give me the strength and the guidance to do this job and to do it right. I hope that you will pray for me, too, Jimmy.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The man is human and, unlike the current incumbent, understands human emotions like doubt, fear, and humility. This, to me, is cause for hope.
\nUpdate:\u00a0<\/strong>
\nHendrick Hertzberger takes communion<\/a> in New York and perfectly captures the pleasure of “ka-chunk”-ing our antiquated voting machines:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s especially satisfying in New York on account of our ancient voting machines. No punch cards or touchscreens or spindly little aluminum-and-plastic booths that look like they\u2019d tip over at the slightest push. Our machines weigh eight hundred pounds. They\u2019re tall, the size and shape of a confessional. You go behind a calf-length curtain and pull a big three-foot-long lever from left to right, like a gondolier\u2019s oar. It goes Chunk! The candidates are laid out before you in neat columns, with an inch-long black teardrop-shaped lever next to each name. You snap the levers down. Chunk chunk chunk! You survey your work. You pull the oar back from right to left. Chunk!
\nMost satisfying. I let my son pull the little black levers, as I did in 2000, when he was two, and 2004, when he was six. This time he was tall enough to reach the Obama lever on tiptoes, without a boost. Next time he\u2019ll be too big to come into the booth with me. But the time after that he\u2019ll be able to go in alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And I know this isn’t writing persay<\/em>, but most analysts say Democrats need at least 500,000 votes in Philadelphia to carry the state and make McCain’s eleventh hour push exactly what it is: the last gasp of a dinosaur. Turnout in Philly is expected to be as high as 750,000. Still, a line of 1000 students at Penn State at 7 AM (7 AM, people)\u00a0<\/em>is encouraging:
\n