Politics

I vividly remember my first exposure to the U.S. Presidential Election process. It was 1952, I was five years old, we had just bought our first television, and I was broken-hearted when an entire 30-minute episode of I Love Lucy was bumped so that Adlai E. Stevenson, the Democratic Party’s candidate, could present his platform to the American public. I wasn’t alone. Stevenson was barraged with hate mail from thousands of other disappointed fans. He had made history by being the first presidential candidate to use television as a way to promote his message, but he lost his bid for the presidency to Dwight D. Eisenhower who only interrupted the airwaves with a series of 20-second commercial spots.

Fast forward fifty-six years to one of the most historic elections our nation has yet witnessed. An African-American is leading the polls as the presidential candidate and the opposition is running a woman in the vice-presidential slot. In the nearly two years that this battle for the White House has been waged, thousands of television hours have been devoted to covering state-by-state caucuses, primary voting, stump speeches, and dozens of debates. Every network has its pundits who gleefully dissect every nuance and nod, and posit their predictions of what the eventual outcome might be. As the critical voting day draws near, battalions of volunteers canvass ‘swing’ districts in an effort to persuade the public to vote one way or another and ‘I have approved this message’ commercials pepper every program on every television channel.

What if the recession, which has become the American voters’ number one concern, is just retribution for all of us who continue to go along with the unjust wars which are waged in our names at a retail cost of 10 billion dollars a month?  The wars have slipped to fourth and sometimes fifth in voters’ concerns this election year, and yet…and yet, how many more innocent women and children and men in Iraq and Afghanistan will debit their deaths for three thousand innocent New Yorkers killed on September 11, 2001?  Today, Americans can credit some 20 of Them to 1 of Us; and every day that the wars of vengeance go on, you and I condone the rising costs.

Those of us who have not paid for the war directly with our children, boots to the ground, are now going to pay and pay and pay for the unjustifiable war in Iraq which was “going to pay for itself” with Iraqi oil revenues.  For those Americans who have paid with their children, or husbands, or wives, or mothers, or fathers, or brothers and sisters, we have already passed the one to one ratio:  4500 innocent American soldiers to 3000 innocent New Yorkers. 

Big TV nights…what’s a restaurant owner to do?  I’ll tell you the last thing you want to do.  Stand in your empty place sobbing with your head on the bar.  There are a couple of nights a year when you are pretty much guaranteed to be hosting a bowling alley rather than a bustling “eatery”.  Those would be, the night of The Academy Awards and THE UPCOMING ELECTION NIGHT. 

So I decided to close the Angeli Caffe on November 4th  for in-house dining, but take-out?  Hold onto that phone!  It’s sure to be a night of fingerbiting, sighing, barely held in panic attacks and a lot of swearing at the television.  It’s a night that caps off a couple months of the most intensely escalating high anxiety most of us have ever experienced not brought on by ourselves.  The solution to get us through the night?  LET’S EAT!

This isn’t the night to savor a slow meal of a perfectly balanced plate of meat/fish/veggie entrée accompanied by two veg and a starch.  No, I think this night calls for hours of guilt free grazing. Think crunchy, salty, (fatty?) bites.  Cheese boards with your favorite crackers you never let yourself have.  Full fat cheeses that seem like strangers to your home.  Little plates of deep fried goodies…

A friend who is making thousands of Get Out the Vote calls recently advised me that those of us working on campaigns should be eating plenty of oranges to ward off scurvy. At one time I would have laughed and made a joke about impressed seamen. Instead, I went out and bought a big bag of oranges between writing a press release and blogging about wind turbines.

Since July, I’ve been the Press Secretary for Bob Alexander, a Democrat running for Congress in Michigan’s 8th Congressional District. For three of those months, my job has been all about getting someone to pay attention to the fact that Bob exists. He’s trying to unseat a four-term incumbent, and “the Party line” (literally) was that Bob was a good guy, doing a dirty job that someone had to do.

This month, the tide has turned. Bob has morphed from sacrificial lamb to Feared Challenger. Two polls, one conducted by a crusty local politico with a history of phenomenally accurate predictions, give Bob a 50% chance of winning. Russ Feingold selected Bob as a “Progressive Patriot,” and one of the largest papers in the District endorsed him resoundingly. We can now pay our bills, we have a TV ad, albeit a teeny, tiny one that’s almost all made of still photos, but it’s a “buy.”