My dearest love, my absolute dearest love, I am sorry. I am sorry for abandoning you, sorry that these last weeks have been wrought with anger and focused on my selfishness. You are right of course; I am totally being selfish. But you were wrong about my feelings, Alex. You have always been my everything: my lover, my closest friend, the family who would never abandon me. And now I am abandoning you. I am so desperately sorry, darling.

The only thing I am afraid of now is that you will assume I didn’t love you with the depth and passion that I have always felt for you. I am terrified that my leaving now means just that. It hurts me. It literally hurts me, my stomach clenched, my mouth dry. It hurts more than the loss of my parents and brother when they cut me out of their lives. You have cared for me and loved me in ways I never imagined possible, and I have always loved you with every little bit of myself. I am afraid that every bit of me is simply not enough.

I am sure you are thinking that if I really felt this way I would be with you right now, that I wouldn’t have left you alone. I am sorry that I am so weak, my body so broken. I am sorry that I cannot take anymore. I am dying too slowly, poisoned so painfully by these drugs that could keep me alive indefinitely. It is humiliating, no matter your claims that cleaning me up with painstaking care is an honor, when I can’t even move my head to that goddamned bucket.

My darling Alex, I cannot, have never been able to express my frustration to you. I guess I feel too guilty, too selfish. Here you are taking such very good care of me, ignoring your own illness. You don’t even stop when you get sick yourself. But I am frustrated. I can hardly think anymore. I can’t really work anymore. It has taken me nearly three weeks just to write this letter. The other day, when I was thinking about my hateful fucking brother, I was horrified to realize that I couldn’t remember his goddamned name.

My body has betrayed me, my mind has betrayed me, and I am tired, ever so tired. I have tried to accept it, tried to accept your need to care for me no matter how bad it gets. I have tried and failed. It isn’t really the failure of my body. I could deal with the pain for you; I am almost certain I could. But I don’t want to forget any more. My memories are too precious to lose.

I keep thinking about the evening we first met. Poor dear Steven, he knew you two were over the moment he introduced us. He has always been such a wonderful friend, and it was never so evident than that moment, when with his characteristic good nature he smiled at us and told you it was wonderful while it lasted and then walked away. I keep thinking about talking with you until well into the next morning, when we were too exhausted to continue, and waking up in the afternoon to your kisses. That first week, pent up in my house, was so incredible. I almost decided to break a contract for the script I was supposed to be writing, because I never wanted it to end.

I hope that you know that you are the sort of man I used to wished I could be. You are so big and powerful, even as HIV and the HIV drugs ravage your body. I remember the first time you picked me up and carried me to bed, after I fell asleep in front of the television. I woke up to the feeling of being enveloped in your arms, pressed hard against your body as you carried me as though I was merely a child. I was aroused. I remember the tightness of my cock constricted by my pants. But what I remember most clearly was feeling that I was safe. For the first time since my parents and then my brother disowned me, I felt secure and cared for.

I love how you were so tender with me as I started to cry, afraid you had hurt me. You were unbelievably beautiful as I looked into your eyes through my tears. The love reflected in them when I whispered, “I love you” with awe was almost too much. I was overwhelmed by the increasing intensity of my feelings. I felt at first like I could never love more intensely than that, but I did, so much so that it was actually painful. It’s funny, but the pain I feel now is eased a little, as I think about lying there with you. I remember that we tried to make love, our bodies mistaking our emotions for arousal. But just holding you there, completely enveloped by your arms and your body was better than any sex could ever be.

As I sit here eleven years later, I am amazed as I have always been that I love you even more now than I did that night. I shudder to think what it might be like, were we to have another eleven years, or thirty or more. I couldn’t comprehend loving you any more deeply then, and I cannot imagine it now. I am desperately sorry that we will never find out. Yet for all we might have had, given more time, what we have had already was more than I ever imagined possible, more still than my most wondrous dreams.

You were so wonderful to me when my father died. I hated him for abandoning me, for hating me. I hadn’t even spoken to him in more than eighteen years. I was shocked to find myself grieving for this asshole who had promised, promised to love me no matter what and who then proved himself a liar–unable to love or accept a queer son. You were my strength then, as you have been for so much of our time together. You convinced me to see my mother again and were there to support me when we met with her. I think my mother understood then, as you held me while I read the letter my father had left for me, begging me for forgiveness. It wasn’t enough. Her understanding, his letter–they simply weren’t enough. It was too late for forgiveness. And you were there for me, as I finally and truly grieved for the loss of my family.

I thought that I was over it, that I had been over it for years. I didn’t realize until that moment, sitting there with you, my mother and my father’s letter, that eighteen years of rage had blocked my grief. I think that was when I was first able to grieve for my diagnosis, back when AIDS was still a death sentence, for the same reason. You carried me then, like you had carried me to bed that beautiful night, like you had so many times before and have so many times since. I love knowing you will carry me to the end.

I cannot take this, this losing myself. It is like my memories are mostly still there, but everything is jumbled. I could almost tolerate the indignity of losing control of my bodily functions, I could never suffer true humiliation with you. But my memories are getting all mixed up, and I am afraid of what is already being lost in the confusion. I am far more afraid of losing the life we have shared than I am of oblivion. It keeps getting worse. I keep trying to remember what we ate for dinner last night, and I cannot find even a hint. I am also trying to remember what color your tux was when we officiated our relationship, and I can’t fucking remember.

I do remember how I felt though. Knowing that our familial bond was recognized by the state, that our legal rights were protected by law. It wasn’t called marriage, but fuck marriage anyways. What we have is better than most marriages. What mattered most to me, was knowing that if I died before you, you wouldn’t have any problems with the family that abandoned me. You deserve everything I have on the merit of your love for me alone. You also deserve it all because you gave up your career and your other interests to care for me when it started getting bad. You kept claiming that you would eventually have to anyways, but you were infected late enough that the drugs prevented you getting as badly off as me. It isn’t perfect, but you could have continued working indefinitely.

Instead, you gave that all up for me. The least I could do was to make sure that what I have left will care for you for the rest of your life. And it was beautiful, wasn’t it? You and me, Steven and Garry, Kaylee and Mica–all of us standing together, done up like the Beautiful People, while the magistrate took us through the civil commitment. Fuck, why can’t I remember your tux? I remember Mica’s gorgeous dress. I remember Kaylee and Steven’s tuxes. But I can’t remember yours. I do so wish I could let you carry me further, but I cannot live with losing our life.

I remember middle school more clearly than I do portions of our life. How sick is that? I remember being the faggot who got beat up all the time better than I remember much of our time together. I can’t go on like that, knowing that I will forget us before I forget my childhood and those people who abandoned me.

I am sorry you’re so angry with me and I am more sorry that I have been so cruel to you. I keep saying I am not afraid to die. I even think I mean it sometimes. But the truth is that I am a coward, choosing the option that is less terrifying. I don’t want to die, knowing that this is it–that it is most likely that this life is all there is of me. I mean, I will live on in you and my work will probably last even longer. But for me, this is it; this is the end. I am angry that I was so fucking stupid, that you were so fucking stupid. I am angry that we get to have this and only this. I am angry that we won’t grow old together, to discover how much deeper, how much greater this love could grow.

And I am angry that I am losing so much. I will never finish what might have been my best screenplay. I have tried and tried and I just can’t keep it all straight–can’t even keep my goddamned notes straight. I forgot the name of Steven’s current partner. I spent the entire evening they were here last week absolutely mortified and trying to avoid letting on I had forgotten his fucking name. I am angry and terrified of the important things I might have already lost. I am also angry that I can hardly even tell if I need to pee anymore and can barely control it when I am able to notice. I am horrified that I can’t make love to you anymore.

I wish so desperately that I could feel your mouth engulfing me, as I take your cock deep in my throat. I wish that just one more time, I could feel myself enter you–your back pressed against my chest, your body arching as I grow harder just before I explode inside you. I wish ever so badly that we could lay blissfully there in our bed, bodies spent, naked and sweaty. Maybe we will try for one last time tonight, our last chance. I am not sure how my body will react or even if my body even can react. I have been very angry that this has been stolen from us and scared that you would start to resent me and the weakness that has made sex so difficult.

I have been so angry, so scared, and I have been taking it out on you. You, in turn, have been angry and scared and have been well within your rights to take it out on me, as my decision has been the entire cause of it. I am most sorry that I didn’t take you to the doctor for my first appointment. I am sorry that I hid it from you, until I asked you to come with me to see the psychologist. I tried, my darling Alex, I truly tried to tell you. I tried to tell you when I had decided it was time. I tried to tell you, to ask you to join me for the first appointments. I even tried to tell you when we were on the way to see the psychologist. I just couldn’t. I knew it would hurt you, and I was afraid of what it would do to us. I think I even knew that not telling you would make it worse, but I just couldn’t get the words to come out.

I wish I could take back the cruel things I have said, every cruel thing I have said to you over the last eleven years. But I especially wish I could take back all of my anger of the last five weeks. It wasn’t you and shouldn’t have been thrown at you. I need you to know that I love you now, more than I have ever loved you. I can barely contain it and wish I could just die of it, if such a thing is even possible. As weak as I have become, I am not so sure it isn’t. I am sorry that I have hurt you so, when I know that my decision alone was cruel enough. Please my love, please don’t remember my anger and fear. Remember the evening we met. Remember the joy you brought into my life and the wonderful times we spent together.

I know that you are still angry and hurt and afraid. I have betrayed you here at the end. I cannot thank you enough for choosing to carry me again, just a few more steps, but what steps they are. I hate myself for putting you through this, but I can’t die alone, and no matter who might be here for me, without you I am alone. It is this need for you that makes me understand how cruel I really am. Yet I will be cruel to the end. I need to feel your arms around me. I need to feel your body as you hold me against you. I need to feel your tears on my cheek. Most of all, I need your face to be the last thing I see, before I slip away forever.

Thank you, my dear, darling Alex,
Nicholas

During Warren Harding’s 1920 presidential campaign, Boise Penrose, the Republican boss of Philadelphia, is reputed to have said, “Keep Warren at home. If he goes on tour, somebody’s sure to ask him questions, and Warren’s just the sort of damn fool that’ll try and answer them.” The risk in answering questions is, of course, giving an answer that loses more votes than it gains. Harding, the frontrunner in that contest due to public disapproval of outgoing Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, won the election, though how many questions he answered in the process is less than clear. It is usual for incumbents to keep a low policy profile, already possessing sizable advantages, and having nothing to gain by sharing their opinions. The wise strategy in an open-seat election is less obvious, but the Minnesota Third District was Republican territory, and the smart money had voters defaulting to established partisan tendencies.

There is another way to handle policy. A candidate could run by poll, attempting to position him- or herself in agreement with the public on as many issues as possible, but that’s hard to do in a congressional campaign. Public opinion on a wide spectrum of issues is difficult to gauge among voters within a congressional district. Both parties conduct polls to gauge voters’ preference of candidates, as do independent research firms, but getting a clear answer to district voters’ opinions on this or that issue is beyond what a survey could realistically accomplish. The news changes at an ever-increasing pace, and as voters do their best to keep abreast of the emerging details, their opinions can change equally rapidly. Candidates could make issue-by-issue decisions based on the most recent polls, and not, in the end, find themselves on the more popular sides of many issues.

Advice on how to handle policy issues in a campaign, when not contradictory, presents a tightrope that is nearly impossible to walk. Since knowing the respective positions of the district’s voters is impossible, and convincing voters to adopt the candidate’s position is just as unlikely, the only remaining approach seems to be to convince voters that they have been in agreement with the candidate all along. A campaign strategy paper once succinctly advised, “The goal is not to change people’s attitudes, but rather to define the choice so that a vote for the candidate is consistent with existing attitudes.” Given the constant fight for scarce media resources that a congressional campaign finds itself involved in, such a goal is quite unrealistic. Campaigns are often preoccupied with whether average voters will remember the candidate’s name.

There are issues, as well, that resist the taking of a clear stance. Everyone likes a fiery candidate who takes a clear stand, but a congressional representative has to deal with policy issues that are intricate, as everyone in Congress, and everyone who wanted to be, found out last fall. When Wall Street firms began to fall like dominoes last September, the White House and both congressional parties agreed that an emergency had occurred that would require congressional action. That’s about as far as the agreement went, even within the party caucuses. The parties bickered between and amongst themselves over the amount of the bailout, where the money would go, who would be responsible for its disbursement, the degree of oversight, and countless other details. It’s frustrating to observe–and exactly how the process is supposed to work.

An immensely complex piece of legislation concerning levels of finance few of us understand was produced, and Congress was asked to pass it with maximum haste. For a candidate to take a public position on the bailout that was responsible and clear was a little like explaining how to tie a shoe to someone who’s never seen a shoe. Still, the press and the public demanded to know, rightly so, where the candidates stood. At a debate on September 22, with the package still under discussion, Ashwin Madia saw the inevitability of the passage of some kind of bailout, and said, “Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a choice when it comes to the package, so I support it, but I’m not happy about it.” When the first bill failed to pass, Madia issued a statement pointing out the bill’s lack of bipartisan support, and stating that his criteria for passage would include protections for taxpayers, prohibitions on Wall Street bonuses, and greater scrutiny of investment banks. When the compromise bill was passed and signed, the candidate issued another statement, this time stating that he was, “Pleased that a significant bipartisan compromise has been achieved. However, I am disappointed that compromise required more than $100 billion in pork barrel spending.”

To read Madia’s remarks now, it sounds like he was hedging his bets on the issue, never quite getting around to mentioning how he would have voted, but that’s not entirely fair. The candidate made clear that he thought the legislation necessary, and what his expectations of the bill would be. The bill fell short of those expectations, as well as being laden with measures he deemed wasteful, but was still being taken up by the Congress as an emergency measure. So should the hypothetical representative vote yea or nay? All we can reasonably expect of a representative is to advocate for the issues he deems appropriate, and vote his best judgment. The standard for candidates, however, is stricter than that. The deliberation you would wish for in a congressional representative seems like dodging the issue when done by someone running for the office.

In the election season, the greater concern seemed to be convincing the public that there was a campaign at all. In the case of an unknown candidate like Ashwin Madia, there was little to be lost in demonstrating his issue positions to the public. Just getting noticed amongst the extensive buffet of political information in a presidential year is the major, ever-present issue of the day. The mainstream media ignored most of the campaign’s issue-related releases, and showed little interest in covering policy-based events. By Election Day, despite the campaign’s best efforts, most voters likely walked into the booth with little knowledge of either candidate’s specific positions. In the end, candidates are often judged on something more intangible, as one political scientist put it, “Less by what they say than how they say it, less by their achievements than by their personalities.”

The Madia for Congress campaign’s approach to policy–making the candidate’s positions as clear as possible–was a clear strategy to appeal to voters who might be sympathetic to that candidate’s positions. It probably made little difference, though, in the final outcome. Of course a candidate could always attempt to pander to voter preferences, going public with only the most popular of initiatives, as Dick Morris, former strategist to President Clinton has advised.

The key is to advertise your positions only if the public agrees with them. If the public won’t accept your basic premise, it doesn’t matter how much you spend or how well your ads are produced; they won’t work.

That is an ugly sentiment, one that places winning the election as an absolute goal, and gives cause to wonder what the point is in running for office in the first place. At any rate, there seems to be little evidence indicating that this cynical approach leads to electoral success, at least at the level of a congressional election.

The Madia for Congress campaign went out of its way to make its policy positions as clear as possible. To the degree it succeeded in portraying the candidate’s governing philosophy, it was the right approach, if for no other reason than because it was the right thing to do. Policy position may not, in the end, change the minds of very many voters, but voters who take an interest ought to have access to their potential representative’s opinion, and know who they’ll be voting for. Running for Congress is a massive undertaking, and when all is said and done, you might lose. You may as well lose being what you really are.

The day before the election, I was leaving the Madia for Congress office to prepare for the candidate’s visit to a community college that I had arranged, and on my way out, overheard a colleague from the campaign’s finance office down the hall, saying, “You know, I feel like this whole campaign has been a loud argument on about ten blogs between a bunch of people who already had their minds made up.” He might have been right.

After an exhausting campaign that, between the endorsement and the general election, lasted over a year, Ashwin Madia lost the 2008 congressional election in Minnesota’s Third District to Erik Paulsen by over 7.5%. The most frustrating aspect of losing an election is never quite knowing the full reason for the loss. The campaign might have been a failure, or, perhaps, it was a waste of time from the outset, never having the ghost of a chance of picking up a Democratic seat in a traditionally Republican district. There is no clear answer, and for all I know, the results might have had nothing at all to do with effectiveness of the either campaign.

Some time ago, I attended my soon-to-be ninth grade daughter’s registration program at our neighborhood high school, at which teachers from various departments presented what the school had to offer. A couple of dozen parents were in the small auditorium, and the teacher from the Social Studies department decided to liven up the proceedings by asking questions about the recent election, rewarding correct answers by throwing candy. “Who is the new President of the United States?” he asked, and a woman in the sixth row answered, “Barack Obama!” The teacher asked the name of the current winner of the hairpin-close Minnesota U.S. Senate race, and an eighth-grade boy in front got his candy for answering “Al Franken.” “Here’s a tough one,” the teacher said, “Who is the newly elected U.S. Representative from Minnesota Congressional District Three?”

Silence filled the room. The two major party candidates had spent a combined five million dollars running for congress, not counting the campaign of the third-party candidate and the millions of dollars in resources the two major party congressional committees had poured into the race. Untold volunteer hours had been donated. Doors were knocked on, phone calls made, TV ads run. This was a room full of active participants in the community, parents who most likely voted, many of whom probably voted for their new congressman whose name they did not know, much less the name of his defeated opponent.

Finally I could take no more. “Erik Paulsen,” I called out, and was dully rewarded with a strawberry Starburst. It was like some kind of bitter joke. If a congressional candidate falls in a district where nobody much is paying attention, does it make a sound? Apparently not. The time, effort, and resources poured into convincing voters in the district to have an opinion on who represents them in Congress had no effect at all, at least not among the parents of eighth graders in East Bloomington. They may have simply been among the nearly 12,000 voters in the district who cast a vote for President, and didn’t bother with the election for the U.S. House.

The contest for the congressional seat in Minnesota’s Third District had the attention of two major political parties, the national press, and political watchers all over the country, which is to say the contest was watched by everyone except the people who mattered most, the residents of the district who would cast a vote for the seat. Those are the people the campaign competed for, and those people have other things on their mind. The campaigns are left with one comprehensive communications strategy to capture the attention of voters: Try everything.

It’s a new age of politics, and you have to campaign using every new piece of technology that comes along, but that doesn’t exempt anyone from using the tried and true methods of campaigning that candidates have always engaged in. Your supporters might be posting on blogs, but they’d better not neglect to send letters to the editor of their local free weekly paper. You might have a slick website, but don’t forget to knock on doors. Email your supporters, and anyone who might possibly become a supporter, but you best send a bulk mailing, lest your name become lost in the spam filter.

While you’re in the middle of a congressional campaign, that campaign seems drastically important, and truly it is. This is a representative democracy, and elections decide who makes the nation’s important decisions on all of our behalf. Most people don’t think about that every day, though. They don’t wake up every day and check their email to see where their candidate’s name has been mentioned. They don’t care how many people showed up at the West Minnetonka Rotary Club last Wednesday morning to hear his speech. They don’t have a bumper sticker. So the campaign does what it can to bring it to them, and so does every other candidate campaigning for every other office.

It’s all background noise after a while. The commercial break during every local TV news broadcast is filled with one political ad after another–the Presidential election, Senate contest, House races not just in your district but all the others that are in the same broadcast market. Mailers arrive from candidates, parties, interest groups. You get phone calls, people at the door, fliers on the stoop if they miss you. The state house candidate shakes your hand at the local farmers market. Your friends send you emails. Pundits on the radio handicap the races. The parties send you sample ballots. After a while, no one can distinguish one candidate from another. Ashwin Madia, right. Remind me what he was running for again?

It’s a couple of months after the election, now. My candidate lost, and life seems to be going on, my family currently escaping the clutches of the looming economic crisis. The Presidential candidate I supported won, and I have enough distance from the disappointing election to see that President of the United States is probably more significant than a freshman representative in the U.S. House, even if that’s not the campaign I poured my energy into. I won’t be voting for anyone for anything for a couple of years, so my attention can drift back to the concerns that make up life for normal people–who’s making dinner, whether the kids got their homework done, how to handle the latest car trouble, how stable the Twins third base situation is. It’s enough to fill up the days, and then some. If someone wants to tell me they’re running for Congress, well, they’ll have some work ahead of them to get me to notice.

Perspective gained, politics can resume a more reasonable role in life, as it does for most people. No more Google Alerts in my inbox. Well, that’s almost true. My state senator is up for reelection in 2010, and I do have an alert for his name, as well as the three prominent Republicans in the district that might consider challenging him. This morning, I saw that one of them is giving a talk at a meeting next week. I wonder if anyone should be taping that.

It seems like a simple and obvious application for the web’s most successful brand-named search engine, but its implications are dramatic. The Madia campaign had a subscription to the local daily newspaper, but really, it was a wasteful and anachronistic expenditure. Every day I would pick the Star Tribune up off the sidewalk in front of the office door and pitch it into the paper recycling bin beside the office copier. It was already well after 7 a.m., and to anyone who had checked their email since dinner the evening before, whatever was in the morning daily was old news.

The technology available to the campaigns constantly improves with new applications that make communications faster and cheaper. Tracker footage gets posted to YouTube within minutes of an event, and campaigns have begun to produce viral video ads specifically for the site. It’s much less expensive than TV, simpler get the content to the target audience, and of course, faster. Blogs with relevant stories feature updated postings, minute-to-minute, that you can check from your Blackberry. All of it happens at digital speed, and campaigns do what they can to keep up.

And you have to keep up, and use the available technology at least as well as your opponent, or give away an advantage. The idea is to make use of these resources for the campaign, but you start to wonder if, in some perverse way, it’s become the other way around, and the resource is using the campaign. Are candidates truly building a campaign online, or are they just not giving ground, worried that the opponent will come to dominate the medium, as Republicans have taken over the talk-radio airwaves and the Obama campaign claimed ownership of text-message communication? If daily newspapers don’t get stories to us fast enough anymore, how far does this go? Will the 2010 midterm election feature frazzled campaign staffs obsessively checking for new scandal updates on Twitter? Will campaigns turn the cameras on themselves to defend against trackers taking remarks out of context? There is not a clear answer, but you have to wonder how much video footage of candidates is floating around YouTube, every tracker looking for the next macaca moment.22 How many political blogs would have given up on posting into the unread void of cyberspace without candidate supporters attending to their day-to-day postings? We don’t know, and won’t, because no campaign can afford an experiment in conceding the electronic battlefield. Doing so would render the November election a referendum on whatever issues your opponent selects, on terms defined by the other campaign.

A key moment in the campaign?

On September 30, the Erik Paulsen campaign called a press conference in which Senator Geoff Michel, a Republican member of the Minnesota Senate, was the only speaker. Press conferences exist to get attention for the candidate, and are, as a rule, heavily promoted by campaigns. Attention from mainstream news sources is desired, and TV news coverage is the Holy Grail. It was odd, then, that Erik Paulsen, himself, did not appear at all on that day. For a press conference, the atmosphere was markedly low-key.

Senator Michel, as it turned out, was there to point out the differences between Erik Paulsen and Ashwin Madia. “Raising a family in the district, sending your kids to the public school, owning a home, working in the Third District, paying property taxes in the Third District. Erik Paulsen has done all these things,” the Senator told us, “and Ashwin Madia has not.” “I don’t want to use the word ‘carpetbagger,’” Michel went on to say, though of course he just had. Madia is a 30-year-old bachelor who rents an apartment. Representative Ramstad, who had served the district as a Republican congressman for nine terms and had endorsed Paulsen, also had no children, but that was hardly the point.

The Paulsen campaign, taking care to speak through their surrogate, made the point on that day that Minnesota’s Third Congressional District is made up of, and should be represented by, a certain type of person. The district is suburban and its residents are, for the most part, white. Ashwin Madia, the dark-skinned son of Indian immigrants who had left the district to be educated in New York City, was not these things. Erik Paulsen, by contrast, very much was, as Minnesota GOP Chairman Ron Carey later, explained, noting that, “Erik Paulsen … really fits the 3rd District so well, as one of them.”

It was an old school campaign play, updated. The Paulsen campaign did not invent the tactic of pointing out the otherness of a political opponent as a negative. Dividing the electorate between us and them has been one of the defining tactics of American politics since World War II. The acknowledged master of the tactic was Richard Nixon, whose campaign slogan for his first successful congressional run was, “One of Us.” Paulsen, like Nixon before him, was attempting to tap into the way suburban homeowners in his district see themselves.

William Schneider examined the suburban ethic in a 1992 Atlantic Monthly article, noting, “The prevailing life-style in all these places remains distinctively suburban, meaning home-owning, homogeneous, and largely white.” Schneider interviewed Dan Walters, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, who further explained, “The theory…is I bought this house. It’s mine. This is my little preserve.” In the suburban preserve, as Senator Michel seemed to suggest, people are like you. They are from the neighborhood, and they stay there. Their family looks like yours, their job is similar, and they do not look like their parents came from another part of the world. The Paulsen campaign was tapping into the same impulse then-Vice President Nixon had in 1952 when he gave his infamous “Checkers” speech, as Rick Perlstein notes in his book on Nixon’s lasting political legacy.

To a new suburban middle class that was tempting itself into Republicanism, admiring Richard Nixon was becoming part and parcel of a political identity based on seeing through the pretensions of the cosmopolitan liberals…The America over whose direction they struggled for the next fifty years, whose meaning they continue to contest.

Senator Michel, on that day, made the case that it should be obvious who we are and just as obvious that Ashwin Madia is something else altogether. Covert racism is no small part of this tactic. Dan Carter, in his book on the 1968 George Wallace campaign tips his hat to Nixon’s (and later Ronald Reagan’s) mastery of subtle race-baiting.

Nixon had taped a television commercial attacking the decline of “law and order” in American cities…Nixon did not have to make the racial connection any more than would Ronald Reagan when he began one of his famous discourses on welfare queens using food stamps to buy porterhouse steaks.

There are votes to be had by distinguishing yourself from your opponent in this way, but it needs to be done with great care. A risk is run that you will offend the public, losing more votes than you gain. Erik Paulsen wanted his suburban pedigree on his candidate resume, but only to be read by the people who would appreciate it. The strategy was to call attention to it, but not too much attention. Have it said, but not by the candidate. Get some news coverage, but not too much. If the press conference stays off the TV, but shows up in the online publications and the blogs, the right people will see it and internalize it. Those people are already voting for you, but now they have a clearer picture of why, an identity that they might pass along to their social groups. Anyone who finds it and takes offense wasn’t going to vote for you anyway.

Ashwin Madia called a press conference the following day, essentially asking his opponent to campaign by discussing the issues. Senator Michel and Minnesota Republican Party Chair Ron Carey were present, though again, not Representative Paulsen. Each of them, in turn, took the microphone after Madia left the room, and tried to clarify, or perhaps distance, the remarks of the previous day, ensuring that Paulsen was not portrayed as an overt racist. Carey began, pointing out that, “From a demographic standpoint, Erik Paulsen fits the district very well.” Senator Michel spoke further about Mr. Madia’s fit for the district, using the phrase, “When you look at the candidate…” Then, when asked by reporters about the racism implied in the words they chose, both Republicans representing the Paulsen campaign denied using them.

As the questions from reporters became somewhat hostile, Carey and Michel became visibly agitated, apparently not having expected a backlash from reporters concerning what appeared to be underhanded tactics. Michel began to phrase more carefully, now explaining, “If you look at the candidate’s resume…,” and Carey became almost incoherent, rambling something about what a good soccer coach Ashwin Madia would, indeed, make, as he was clearly in good physical condition.

It was a strange moment. The Paulsen camp seemed genuine, simply expressing what, to them, was their candidate’s fitness for public service and not possessing the self-awareness for it to occur to them that their comments might be offensive, until they had already made them. They were just stating the obvious–a certain kind of person lives here, and Ashwin Madia is not our kind. It was, again, more than a little Nixonian, as Perlstein, examining Nixon’s definition of the “silent majority,” recalls.

Nixon made political capital of a certain experience of humiliation: the humiliation of having to defend values that seemed to you self-evident, then finding you had no words to defend them, precisely because they seemed so self-evident.

Given the energy the campaign put into the two days of press conferences, Erik Paulsen’s absence continued to confound, though in retrospect it seems like a shrewd decision.

The controversy was, in the end, largely ignored by the mainstream press, as was, it would seem, its intent. Minnesota Public Radio’s politics blog covered both days of conferences, and the Minnesota Independent posted the videos. Minnesota Democrats Exposed was present and did the obligatory blog postings. The Paulsen campaign likely made their case successfully, to exactly the audience with whom it would resonate.

The internet takes the communication between a candidate and a voter inquisitive enough to seek information about a candidate to a more intimate level, one in which television crews and newspaper editors are absent. The public seems to be responding. A 2008 survey reported that 39% of internet users (29% of all adults) have gone online to read or watch “unfiltered” campaign material, which includes candidate debates, speeches/announcements, and position papers.

My own tasks at the Madia for Congress headquarters were ample evidence of this. Each day, the Communications Director would send me e-mails from web users who had clicked the link on our website to ask policy questions, and I would respond. The issues in question were all over the board: same-sex marriage, energy policy, the Iraq War, gun control, the financial services bailout, and so on. Questioners would give their email address, and I would reply with the candidate’s position. Usually the questioner would then reply to my response. While I would get the occasional angry reply from voters who disagreed with Mr. Madia’s position, or from voters with whom the campaign’s position was aligned but not strongly enough to satisfy them, the vast majority of emailers were grateful for our attention, and for being taken seriously, even if the candidate’s position was at odds with their own.

Giving voters this kind of attention was, in itself, the point of the exercise, and a luxury for the campaign and voters alike. The campaign received some extra assurance that policy positions were being accurately articulated to voters who were truly interested in a specific issue. Voters got answers to their questions, quickly and with little effort. A worker who came home from the second shift and wanted to know Ashwin Madia’s position on the Employee Free Choice Act could Google the candidate’s name, bring up the website, and send us as nuanced a question as she wished, right then, at 4 a.m., while it was still fresh in her mind. That’s easier and less intimidating than taking to the microphone at a candidate forum, to which she likely couldn’t make it anyway because she needed to get supper on the table and run her kid to basketball practice. This way, she knew she’d get an answer, quickly and easily.

Online interaction between campaigns and voters has increased consistently over time, every election producing a larger, more impressive statistic of internet use among voters. In the 2008 election, 46% of Americans (up from 31% in 2004) used the internet, email, or cell phone text messaging to get news about the campaign, share their views, and mobilize others. That is a big number, almost half the American public and probably closer to 80% of those who vote. There is every indication that there will be a new statistic after the 2012 election that will make this one seem relatively unimpressive.

Accessing candidate websites is far from the only manner in which voters search for information on the web. There are uncounted numbers of online news sources and political blogs on the internet, open to anyone with a connection and the inclination. Just as users of candidate websites interact with them directly, users of online news sources have a much more immediate relationship with their preferred websites than consumers of traditional media can expect. Gary Selnow calls this “up-lining,” the ability of web users to respond to the initial information source in a manner that renders their response as a part of the content. “Up-lining topples the traditional hierarchy of sender and receiver,” argues Selnow, “and in the years ahead, it is destined to have a profound effect on political communication.”

Indeed, it seems it already has, especially when the phenomenon of blogging is added to the on-line mix. A blog was initially a sort of online diary posted by a single host, but has become something quite different. Blogs, today, especially those that concern themselves with politics, are daily postings of whatever news items the host deems relevant, followed by (usually, but not necessarily) brief responses from readers that can number into the thousands per day, depending upon how well-trafficked the blog, and perhaps to some degree, how inflammatory the initial posting. Andrew Sullivan, a writer who stumbled into the form partly by accident, and in the process helped to invent it, appreciates the style of immediate feedback as a sort of hyper fact-check.

Unlike newspapers, which would eventually publish corrections in a box of printed spinach far from the original error, bloggers had to walk the walk of self-correction in the same space and in the same format as the original screwup. The form was more accountable, not less, because there is nothing more conducive to professionalism than being publicly humiliated for sloppiness. Of course, a blogger could ignore an error or simply refuse to acknowledge mistakes. But if he persisted, he would be razzed by competitors and assailed by commenters and abandoned by readers.

Due to its emphasis on immediate feedback, a blog, though in print, is not a printed medium in quite the same static way as a newspaper or a book. Sullivan continues, “The key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks.”

There is no arguing that online blogs have a loyal, even a fanatical, audience. There are not many indications, however, that those dedicated online reader/responders add up to very many people. Only an estimated 4% of online users read blogs. The few vigilant blog readers are then divided up among the multitude of competing blogs, and traditional news sources, having brand names and websites of their own, retain most of the market share.

Due to the type of user that blogs draw, there seems to be little likelihood that readers are open to persuasion by either candidate. On the web, as in other walks of life, people like to have conversations, political and otherwise, with people like themselves who will validate their opinions. Web users looking for political content find blogs with a supportive audience that will confirm already held beliefs. At the end of the day, blog readers very likely hold the same political positions they did at the start, now with a greater degree of certitude.

Blogs are an irresistible venue for campaigns. If they don’t directly change the mind of voters, they affect the campaign in a more subtle way. Campaigns have a narrative, and any public policy issue has a vocabulary. It is difficult for an elected representative to vote against something called the Patriot Act because of a concern for civil liberties—one does not want to be bogged down in nitpicky issues of constitutional law at the expense of a perception of being lacking in genuine patriotism.

Much as right-wing talk radio shows do little to convince anyone who does not already subscribe to their point of view, blogs give supporters a productive way to stay engaged, lend a general atmosphere to the campaign, and most importantly, define the terms of the debate. If a campaign is a public conversation about who should govern a society, the framing of that conversation is a way to influence its outcome. Campaigns fight hard to determine the political vocabulary, and blogs are good places for supporters to make the campaign’s case, on the campaign’s terms.

Also, blogs are cheap. Blogs already exist that are friendly to the issues that make up a candidate’s platform. All that needs to be done is to develop the relationship and send supporters to the site to post comments, which doesn’t cost a nickel. The Paulsen campaign went a step farther than that, putting an established blogger on payroll. Michael Brodkorb owns and operates a blog called “Minnesota Democrats Exposed,” its obvious raison d’etre to attack Democratic officials and candidates. The Paulsen campaign wrote several thousand dollars in checks to MDE, with the expense identified in Paulsen campaign expense reports as “Public Relations Services,” The actual service rendered was to turn the blog’s attention to attacking Ashwin Madia on an almost daily basis. A few thousand dollars is not chump change, but it is a small fraction of the cost of producing and airing a television ad buy. Of course, the blog only reaches a fraction of the number of voters televisions ads do, but that’s beside the point. The Paulsen campaign was paying for the attention of an already assembled audience, an audience that would be willing and able to take direction, internalize the campaign’s talking points, and work on the campaign’s behalf to define the terms of the debate. While energizing supporters, a blog like MDE casts a wider net, as political reporters follow the daily postings as a potential source of leads for what might be legitimate mainstream news stories.

… continued …

There was an election in November of 2008, but you probably knew that already. You cast a vote for a presidential candidate, and if you were especially interested, put a bumper sticker on your car and a sign in your yard. If you’re a typical Minnesotan, somewhat more engaged in the process than is usual with Americans, statistically speaking, you also voted for a U.S. Senate candidate, and you remember who it was, even if your candidate didn’t win. That’s already quite a bit going on for one election cycle, but of course there was also an election for the U.S. House of Representatives in your district, and at least two candidates who wanted your attention, badly. Those candidates had plenty of help from staff, interns, and volunteers who wanted your interest and your vote. The technologies used by the campaigns to get your attention are changing rapidly, and so too are the effects of those technologies on a rational, responsible political discourse, or as 2008 often proved, a lack thereof.

A congressional campaign is a curious thing. Stakes are high, and resources pour in. Typical citizens might notice, but among the day-to-day of making a living and building a life, the race for President is plenty of politics for most of us to follow. Campaigns do everything they can think of to get noticed, and get people to care about who represents them in the U.S. House. The congressional election in Minnesota’s Third District was especially heated. Jim Ramstad, the Republican who had represented the district for the preceding nine terms, was retiring, leaving his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives open and worth a serious campaign by the Democratic Party (locally known as the DFL). The national press was watching the contest, regarding it as one of the closest in the country. Donors from all over the country gave large sums to candidates. The two major parties and their congressional committees poured resources into advertising. Political activists in the district donated thousands of hours of their time.

Minnesota’s Third Congressional District lies immediately west of Minneapolis and includes the Twin Cities’ western suburbs, hooking eastward at its north and south borders, giving it the resemblance of a giant “C” on a map. The combination of wealthy communities near Lake Minnetonka and conservative small towns to the northwest has rendered the district a solidly Republican area. The district has not elected a Democrat to Congress since the Eisenhower administration.

Jim Ramstad had served the district in Congress since 1991, and was generally considered to be unbeatable as a candidate. Besides possessing the advantages of name recognition and fund raising abilities typical of long-term incumbents, Representative Ramstad’s moderate views on social policy made him an acceptable candidate even among many Democratic voters. Representative Ramstad had not won an election with less than sixty-five percent of the popular vote in the past decade.

On September 17, 2007, Jim Ramstad announced that he would not seek another term in Congress, bringing what had been an unwinable seat for the DFL within the realm of electoral possibility. DFL Chair Brian Melendez noted that U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar had won 56% of the Third District vote in 2006 and that DFLers had picked up nine state legislative seats in the District over the previous two election cycles.

Clearly, the district was in play.

Ashwin Madia took notice. Madia was the son of Indian immigrants who had grown up with an inclination toward public service. Mr. Madia joined the U.S. Marine Corps after receiving his law degree, and served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006. Following his service, he returned to Minnesota and took a job with a prominent law firm. When Representative Ramstad announced his retirement, Ashwin Madia turned his gaze to politics full time, leaving his attorney job to declare his candidacy in the fall of 2007 and earning the DFL endorsement on April 13, 2008. He would run in the November election against Republican Erik Paulsen, a former Ramstad staffer and Minnesota House Majority Leader. I was a supporter of Madia’s almost from the inception of his campaign. From Labor Day to Election Day my role was more defined as a Communications Assistant for Madia for Congress, a campaign that was scrutinized by political watchers nationwide but had to constantly strain to gain notice in the district where it took place.

While most of us go about our lives, barely taking notice of the flurry of campaign activity happening in our midst, people working on a congressional campaign have little time to think of much else. Campaign workers’ days are narrowly focused on convincing the people around them to not just vote, but to move their pen down the ballot to the race for Congress and to have enough of an opinion about it to choose the right candidate. How to do that is the operative question, and if there was ever a clear answer, it no longer exists. Candidates, today, communicate with the public using every means at their disposal. At the most basic level, office-seekers and their surrogates shake hands, knock on doors, walk in parades, send mailings, and do all the work politicians always have. That work expands with the available technology. Voters have telephones, so campaign workers call. They have radios and televisions, which campaigns employ by running paid advertisements and seeking news coverage. Now most American voters have a computer on their desk, or even in the palm of their hand, rendering the question of how to reach voters vastly more complicated and the answer even more temporary.

The 2008 political season was unlike any before it or any that will come after it, and not only because its substance was unique. Communicating with the public is what a campaign does, by definition, and how that task is best accomplished changes constantly, election cycle to election cycle and almost day to day. Campaigns reinvent themselves and their method of presentation as technology changes, and technology is changing at such a pace, today, that in every election, voters will get a new version of what a campaign is, as the campaigns desperately compete for those voters’ eyes and ears.

By 2006 the practice of “tracking” ran into the practice of filming everything, and the presidential aspirations of one candidate were destroyed by the time he finished uttering one fateful, regretful sentence. If there was a defining moment in the age of high-speed campaigning, it might have occurred on August 11, 2006 when Senator George Allen (R-VA) referred to S.R. Sidarth, an Indian-American man filming one of his campaign events as “Mr. Macaca.” Senator Allen denied that it was his intent to use a racial epithet, though the fact that he added “Welcome to America” after the initial remark made his excuses seem weak. The Senator’s career had been thriving before that day, and he was presumed to be running for the Republican presidential nomination, having made several trips to Iowa and New Hampshire. The incident gained national news coverage immediately, and Senator Allen lost an election in which he had been leading in the polls. His prospects for a future presidential run appear dim.

Mr. Sidarth, the target of the Senator’s remark, was employed by Jim Webb, Allen’s opponent, as a “tracker.” The tracker’s job is to follow a candidate to public appearances, and capture everything he does, every word spoken to a crowd, and every conversation with every individual. The constant presence of the tracker evidently irritated Senator Allen to the point of provoking his uglier side, which was then captured on film, lest the Senator try to deny the incident.

The 2006 Virginia U.S. Senate contest was not the only campaign featuring trackers at the time, but since what has entered the political lexicon as the “macaca moment,” few campaigns of substantial size are without them. Trackers were employed by both the Minnesota State Democratic and Republican parties in the 2008 election cycle. The Republican tracker appeared very early in the election cycle at debate forums featuring Ashwin Madia and his opponent for the Democratic endorsement in the race, Terri Bonoff. No party had yet endorsed a candidate for the open House seat, but both were getting an early glimpse that this was going to be a new kind of campaign, one heavily influenced by the cheapness and availability of technology, in this case a hand-held video camera. All candidates were on notice that every word spoken, indeed every facial gesture, every breath taken, would be recorded. The margin of error for misstatement was reduced to zero. The following October, a week before Election Day, footage from a Madia-Bonoff forum was featured in an Erik Paulsen attack ad. The footage consisted of Madia saying the words “increase taxes,” which the ad repeated several times. The actual recorded footage lasted less than two seconds, but the two words spoken by Ashwin Madia more than half a year before votes were cast may have played a decisive role in the election’s outcome.

Video cameras aside, the obvious new frontier for campaign communication is in cyberspace. There is little question, at this point, that the internet has and will continue to affect nearly every aspect of how the public receives news and information, and as its presence increases, the web has more and more influence on the substance of the campaign. As far back as 1994, Vice President Al Gore was predicting (notwithstanding whomever might deserve the credit for the internet’s invention) the sea change that was coming to politics, foreseeing the web as a tool that would “promote the functioning of democracy by greatly enhancing the participation of citizens in decision making.”

Political organizers took notice of the internet as an organizing tool in Minnesota’s 1998 Governor’s race, as Jesse Ventura’s successful third-party campaign for the post gave much credit to online organizing. The New York Times saw the Ventura victory as a sign of things to come, noting, “The Ventura race is also being hailed by observers outside Minnesota as the first major election in which the Internet made a difference.” Phil Madsen, the director of then-candidate Ventura’s website said, “The Internet for us served as the nervous system for the campaign. The Web site was not the difference; it was the mobilization.”

Ralph Nader’s Green Party presidential campaign of 2000 seems to have been the first to harness the internet as a grassroots organizing tool. His webmaster, Jonah Baker, declared that the internet “was our ultimate means of communication with people.” Four years later, Howard Dean used the internet for fundraising and for arranging physical meetings of his supporters, and since then the use of internet technology has spread down the ticket to practically every campaign. The 2008 Minnesota Third District contest was typical. Both candidates hosted websites that featured biographical information, enabled potential volunteers to provide contact information, allowed donations using a credit card, and provided event schedules. Madia’s page also provided issue papers on various policy positions and included a link to a form that users could fill out in order to ask policy questions of the campaign.

While the medium used to communicate is novel, the substance of what it carries is not. Candidate websites are effective clearinghouses for the same information candidates have always made available, but that information is now more effectively managed. Computers, much as they do in so many other realms, simplify the organization of the data, and make it simpler to use. Even as the new medium adds no particular new thing, its availability changes the character of a campaign by giving the campaigns the power over the information. A website is created and maintained by the campaign itself. The campaign chooses what content to include and, just as importantly, what not to include. No consideration need be given to boiling policy positions down to TV-friendly sound bites. If the candidate wants to write a ten-page policy memo on health care policy, the link can be posted on the homepage, a click away. The campaign is in fully in charge.

This newfound control over information works both ways, enabling web users to access exactly the content they want from the campaigns without the need for media to choose for them. Matt Drudge took notice early in the game and has made a living linking from his “Drudge Report” website to other information sources. In 1998, he told a National Press Club audience that, “Now, with a modem, anyone can follow the world and report on the world—no middle man, no big brother.” That was a decade ago, and of course the world can now be followed on a Blackberry, no modem necessary. As the campaigns choose the content to put forward, the public gets to choose what it deems relevant.

What about the public, the voters? What new role might they play on this altered political landscape?

… to be continued …

I had the honor of being invited to a family’s memorial service a while ago.  While not a member of this family, I am very close to one member and through him knew the deceased.  To the others, Sylvia was sister, sister-in-law, aunt, great-aunt, and relationships extending outward from there.  Her own family had scattered after her divorce, and she moved up to Minnesota to be close to her brother’s family.

She was one of those people whom other folks sometimes refer to as a character.  Loving and spirited, never shy about sharing an opinion, she had filled her 70-plus years in ways both ordinary and not so ordinary, including honorable service as a U. S. Marine back when women were told their place was in the kitchen.  Had grief not clouded their thinking, the family could have gotten her an honor guard with a 21-gun salute, “Taps,” and a flag, but they thought about it too late.  To me it was a shame, not just because it was an honor she richly deserved, but because I would dearly have loved to see the reaction to the 21-gun salute from the other residents of the apartment building whose party room hosted this event.  I have a feeling that if it had stirred them up, Sylvia would have loved it.  Partly it would have been her wonderful sense of humor, and partly the simple acknowledgment that her years of service were worthy of it.

Why a party room and not a funeral parlor?  Money, of course.  None have gotten wealthy or held fancy titles in this family.  For some there is the constant struggle of raising small children, putting food on the table, coping with another layoff, sharing transportation among those who have cars.  One is working hard to finish college without incurring excessive debt and was, in fact, supposed to be studying for midterms this evening instead of being here.  Frequent smiles and laughter reveal teeth which have not been replaced. But to judge them by economic standards would be a serious mistake.  This family is rich in love, loyalty, generosity.  Every member is involved in the others’ lives.  Any child present, whether infant or teenager, is lovingly minded by each adult in the room, and each child knows it. Tears are dealt with by the nearest adult.  Family is who they are.  For this event, everyone took a hand, brought food, shared cooking on the grill outside, set up and cleared off tables, shared memories, shared tears.

They also shared laughter.  This, after all, was to be a celebration of the life of Sylvia.  Tables were spread with pictures of her, from being held as an infant by her mother to recent ones where two broken hips confined her to a wheelchair.  Her treasured keepsakes were also there, and throughout the event, all present were encouraged to select the ones that held personal meaning and memories of Sylvia to take home themselves.  One member of the family played piano well enough to provide music, choosing old standards and songs that she’d loved, but not to the exclusion of his participation as a family member.

In the spirit of this sharing, even a restraining order was temporarily forgiven so that all could gather.  All but one, that is.  One member was behind bars.  He was caught in the swing of the political pendulum.  Fifteen years ago his offense would have been considered punishable, yes, but minor enough that a few years of jail time would have been all society demanded of him. But too many complained that this society wasn’t harsh enough on its criminal offenders, particularly its young ones, so more recently jail terms have gotten longer and keys thrown away.  Thus he sits, no one knowing when or whether he’ll be freed.  No one can afford the really expensive attorney that might make the difference.

He could not be released for this, but in the infinite compassion of our prison system, the restrictions on his allotted phone time were lifted for the evening.  Once the connection was made, a tiny cell phone was passed from one person to the next so that all present could talk to him.  Each could share a favorite memory of Sylvia and let him know how much he was missed.  One young woman related how she got the “stamp of approval”  just after she started dating one of Sylvia’s nephews.  After a private conversation with the woman, Sylvia had turned to her nephew and declared to him that, “This one’s a keeper!”  On the phone I recalled a bit of advice she’d given for selecting a dog: The secret was to let the dog select you.  Since I was in the process of showing off my new dog to Sylvia at the time, I found the timing of the advice questionable but felt relieved that in fact I’d picked out the dog that picked me first.

The battery on one phone was used up, another phone located, the call reconnected, and the conversations with him went on.  Meanwhile food was served, eaten, and cleared away.  Other conversations went on as well. Plans were discussed for upcoming holidays: whose house was big enough, when to hold the event, who’d bring what.  Summer travel plans had now been amended to include at stop near Aspen to scatter Sylvia’s ashes in a spot she’d found restful and whose beauty had spiritually refreshed her periodically throughout her life.

After all had talked with him, the phone was handed back to his mother.  Removing herself from the centers of noise and activity, she sat and and carried on her own personal conversation with her son.  As she spoke to him, she started rocking back and forth, back and forth, through the whole rest of her conversation. I doubt she was even aware of it.  This, then, was the thing that struck me, the thing I found both remarkable and ordinary.  Anyone walking into the room at that moment, knowing nothing of funerals or prisons or any of the other dramas playing out in that room that night, upon seeing her would instantly know one thing:  The person on the other end of that phone conversation was this woman’s baby.

Heather is or has been daughter, sister, woman, wife, ex-wife, mother, grandmother, lover, friend, waitress, store clerk, family day care provider, store manager and manager trainer, group facilitator, board president, mayor, council member, poetographer, auction clerk, courier. Someday she’s likely to decide what she wants to do when she grows up if she doesn’t grow old too soon first. She blogs at Just Passing Through.

Meta was his middle name
He told them how to help
Earned a wee bit of fame
He could too loudly yelp

A blog takes time to grow and mature
The first few months are always slow
Will knew his success was not assure
But Will, impatient would not let go

Will needed heft, a clique, a loudish crowd
So he made for his blog three secret clones
When hints were dropped: his location found
He made himself a new false midwestern home

When challenged: what do you know anyway?
Will produced a few more fake throw-aways
One he made into a girl, so he could say:
Cred? Yes, you see, I have got diversitay

He tilted most at bloggers three
Or maybe four, five, six or more
Laden, Benson and of course PZ-M
Became Will’s daily bloggy fare!

But Will made an error in our face
His posts were timely and frequent
Even when he could not make a case
Off to WordPress his post was sent

Quote mined, willfully misunderstood
The bloggers noticed William’s deeds
Who wants to be someone’s blog food?
It easy to be annoyed at YNH’s creed

So six to twelve readers they did share notes
And William possessed only a modicum of smart
And lo! Guesses on data eventually will float
And so facts laid out tore Will’s story apart

The meltdown of his was verily something to see.
He accused Greg Laden of being the devil himself
But it was truly a committee of those he offend’
Who put the truth of his blog on honesty’s shelf

Sycophantic sock puppets hastily darned
Cheering onward the crowd that was Will
But his echo chamber became too crowded
Their stumbling round the blog did kill

Some religious people look at this supposedly “fine-tuned” universe and claim it is proof that a god exists who did the fine-tuning. Let us examine this claim.

God of the Gaps

At heart, this is a god-of-the-gaps argument. It says that since we can’t think of a natural way that the odds would have resulted in life in the universe, that “god did it.” However, we have no knowledge of what this god is, nor what mechanism it uses to accomplish anything. Therefore, “god” is not an answer to anything.

Religious people claim that we aren’t entitled to a “free lunch” when it comes to assuming a natural explanation for life in the universe, but “god” is the ultimate free lunch–no explanations are ever provided.

The Universe

The vast, vast majority of the universe is decidedly inhospitable to life. Outer space is deadly to anything other than, perhaps, microbes–and the majority of planets, moons, and asteroids aren’t much better.

Judging by what we observe now, the universe will continue expanding forever, creating a “big chill” effect. Heat energy will be so dissipated that no life will be possible. A person alive just before this happens won’t view things as so “miraculously fine-tuned” as some religious people do today.

Our Sun

While natural conditions are favorable for life on Earth now, this won’t be true in about five billion years. At that point the sun’s supply of hydrogen will run out and it will begin to fuse helium into heavier elements. The sun will expand and engulf the Earth, wiping out all life. Even a billion years from now, all water will have boiled off the Earth, making life improbable, if not impossible. Again, a person alive just before either of these events occurs won’t view things as so “miraculously fine-tuned” as some religious people do today.

The Earth

Apart from the physics constants of the universe, some religious people claim that the Earth itself is so fine-tuned for life (proper distance from the sun, the right kind of elements, etc.) that only a god could have established it. This, of course, is the same god-of-the-gaps type argument we encountered with the “fine-tuned” universe.

An obvious natural explanation is that, given the likelihood of trillions of planets existing in the universe, it would only take a tiny fraction of them to have the right kind of conditions to produce some type of life. If only one planet per galaxy had life on it, that would still amount to 100 billion planets and at least 100 billion different species.

Limited Knowledge

The fined-tuned universe argument for a god assumes that what we think we know about the universe today is accurate. But this is cutting edge physics, and what we believe to be true today is far from certain. Even now there is much dispute among physicists as to how much these constants of the universe can vary and still produce a universe capable of leading to life.

Multiple Universes

Extraordinary odds against life in one universe become a near certainty if there are many universes. If many universes exist (sometimes called a “multiverse”), or many “bubble universes” exist within a single universe, and each universe or bubble universe has its own set of random constants, then life will almost certainly arise in at least one of these universes or bubble universes. (For example, roll a set of dice long enough and you will eventually get two sixes.)

While there is, as yet, no evidence for other universes, their existence is more plausible than the existence of a god. After all, we know it’s possible for universes to exist–we live in one. We have no evidence that it is possible for gods to exist.

A Fine-Tuned God?

Those who believe a “fine-tuned” universe proves the existence of a god admit there is some slight margin for variance in these physics constants of the universe. But what about the god they believe exists? Could that god be anything other than exactly what it is? If not, then there is zero margin for variance for that god. So, as improbable as the existence of life in the universe may seem, the existence of a god would be even more improbable.

Conclusion

The track record of naturalistic science for answering questions about the natural world far exceeds the track record of supernatural “revelation.” The existence of a god seems more improbable than life arising in the universe. “God” has not provided us with any answers and has instead raised more questions.

August Berkshire is president of Minnesota Atheists.

I’ve tried writing it down as a recipe, so my own daughter can take over the tradition, but she tells me it never comes out right for her.  While I consider that it might be just an excuse so that she doesn’t have to make it, since she is an excellent and adventurous cook, it’s possible that it’s simple truth. Later today I’m going to be in my kitchen, showing my son and his teenage daughter all the steps and explaining the do’s and don’ts, in hopes that some day they can take over, and I can relax.  Heck, I might even consider Stove Top.

The biggest problem with writing down my stuffing recipe is that the answer to every question about ingredients is “It depends.”  So rather than writing a recipe, I’m going to attempt to guide you through all the different ways it depends and how to make your own choices.

Start with the bread.  How much?  What kind?  How dry?  What size?  It all depends.  How big a turkey?  Will you cook the stuffing inside the bird or separately?  How many do you want to feed, and do you want leftovers?  I’ve found about 1-1/2 pounds of bread is fine for a 12–13 pound turkey, whether inside or out.  Add more for bigger, more mouths to feed, leftovers.  What kind varies, but always the more whole grain and less white, the better the stuffing.  You can buy it right off the shelf, or save up for months with the heel ends and other bread scraps nobody in the family wants.   In our family, one son loves raisin bread but hates the heels, so saves them up for his contribution to stuffing.  It’s delicious! We also notice that the number of buns in a bag never matches the number of brats in the package, and the leftovers are stale before the next brat roast. For whatever tag ends, dry for a day, then re-bag and freeze.  When you pull the bag out to thaw, open it briefly and knock out the frost that has accumulated inside the bag.  Otherwise you have a nasty soggy mess. Even our dog won’t touch it.

All this bread has to be torn into bits.  Not cut, torn.  Anything between the size of the store croutons for prepared stuffing and the salad croutons served in a restaurant will do, but the smaller they are, the more flavors mix and spread evenly.  A very large mixing bowl or 10-quart roasting pan usually holds the smaller batches, but you’ll find out as you go.  I often spill over into two mixing containers, and then it’s a challenge making the ingredients distribute evenly.  While moist bread makes a better start and is easier to handle, if dry is what you have, just remember to add more moisture later. This will wind up being a moist dressing.

Speaking of moisture, that’s the second item that requires advanced prep.  Of course you could just open a can of chicken broth, or more if needed.  But I like to take a couple of roasted chicken carcasses, including skin, bones, and remaining meat, and boil them in a pot full of water for about an hour.  The broth will be dark and you’ll need a colander to separate the broth from the bits.  The broth can stand in the ‘fridge overnight to separate fat and gel, since that’s what your broth will be once cold.  It can also be poured in leftover containers and frozen well ahead of time.  You might just skip that whole bit if you’re doing the stuffing in the bird, since that will provide plenty of moisture.  Nowadays, however, worries about salmonella, or the desire to use pan drippings to make gravy, generally lead to the decision to cook the stuffing outside the bird.  The moisture doesn’t actually get added until just before the stuffing goes into the oven, and after all other ingredients are added.  How much to add then depends on what it still takes for a dressing that’s moist and sticky, almost like a bread pudding, before cooking.

The third thing taking advanced prep are the cranberries.  I have fallen in love with Craisins, the orange flavored variety.  Orange peel has long been one of my secret ingredients, and this accents it.  A few hours ahead of time, even overnight, the Craisins need to be rehydrated.  I use the smaller 6-oz. pack for a 12-pound turkey. You can use orange juice, chicken broth, or, in a pinch, just water.  If you haven’t used raisin bread, add some raisins to the same bowl to soak.  If you have dried orange peel, sprinkle that on top.  It all goes into the stuffing later.  The fruit adds a special holiday touch to the turkey.  If you like, you can also add blueberries, cherries, and apple pieces.  My mother-in-law informed me that she always adds apples to stuffing for ducks and geese, as it helps abate the strong gamy flavor that many people don’t care for.

I usually add one large onion, chopped and sautéed in a stick of butter.  Again, amounts are approximate for stuffing a 12-lb. bird. Sometimes the onion is cooked just until it goes translucent, sometimes browned in the frying pan.  While that’s cooking, I throw sage, celery seed, dill weed, and a bit of garlic in to flavor the butter.  (Don’t burn the garlic!)  How much again depends.  After I mix everything together, I rely on a sample taste to tell me what’s enough.  It starts with about 2 T sage, 1 tsp. each of the others, and sage should wind up being the strongest flavor.  That’s the only flavoring I will add at the tail end of everything.  Otherwise I find that adding seasonings to the butter spreads the flavor evenly throughout the stuffing, eliminating pockets of overwhelming flavor and large segments of “blah”. When the onions are done, this gets poured out of the pan over the bread, and I use still-dry bread crumbs to mop the pan and soak up the last of the butter and spices.

Half a stalk of celery gets washed, chopped, and added straight to the bread crumbs while onions are cooking.  You can use the heart if you prefer it, but it really doesn’t matter.  I have learned to, in order to save the rest for celery sticks that don’t get nasty in a few days, towel-dry the cut sticks and wrap (seal) in aluminum foil, not plastic.

I have through the years learned what I don’t like to add.  Wild rice sounds good, but it upsets the flavor balance for me, and I haven’t figured a way around it, don’t care to try.  Giblets can be okay in stuffing, but personally, I love to munch on heart and gizzard myself, having no competition for them in the family.  And liver is only fit for the dog, who has learned to love when I prepare stuffing.  Slivered almonds are another thing that sounds better than the end result, and I haven’t checked on pecans to see if they fare better.  Walnuts gave my ex canker sores, so I didn’t ever try those either.  Some years I have added blueberries and cherries, but their flavor tends to get lost in the mix, so I seldom bother anymore.

Now that all the “dry” ingredients are prepared, they get thoroughly mixed together.  It always takes a much bigger pan/roaster/bowl than I planned on, but I figure what spills on the counter is fair game for nibbling, and if questioned about it, can be justified as taste testing.  This is when you check sage levels, since so far you’re not risking your health over uncooked proteins. Uh, you have been scrupulously cleaning counters and cutting boards to avoid contamination, right?

This is now time for those final decisions:  If cooked in the bird, your stuffing is pretty much done, ready for, well, stuffing.  My mother-in-law would disagree, because she insisted the last part was unskippable: adding eggs.  Whip up 2-3 eggs and mix them into the stuffing, and your end product holds its shape rather than falling all over your plate after serving.  If for any reason you can’t commit to cooking your stuffing immediately after adding the eggs, leave them out of it.  For example, if you prepare ahead, transport to another site for cooking, leave them out completely or wait until you arrive to whip and add them.  And if you chronically undercook your bird, leaving the stuffing at best luke warm, no eggs.  Better yet, no turkey!  Cook that bird!

After adding the eggs, or deciding not to, check for over-all moisture.  If it cooks in the bird, there will be plenty of liquid soaked into the stuffing by the time the bird cooks.  The butter and moisture in the fruits and veggies will be plenty.  If you cook it separately, then add enough broth to make your uncooked stuffing moist and sticky.  You will know this because by this time you have likely given up on managing the concoction with even the sturdiest spoon and have dug in with your (clean) hands to mix evenly and distribute.  As a bonus for this practice, once the mixing pan/roaster/bowl is emptied out and before you cover your stuffing for cooking, you get to lick those hands clean.  Well, unless you’re paranoid about salmonella in the eggs you used, of course.  But, hey, nummy!

Cooking temperature is 325F, with or without bird.  Slow but dependable.  Turkey gets tender; stuffing doesn’t dry out and burn if properly covered.  Stuffing alone takes around an hour.  In the bird, add time to the total for the extra weight.  Better, use a good thermometer.  If stuffing goes in a pan, cover with aluminum foil to keep in the moisture.  If you cook it in a small bird, I recommend the paper bag method: use a standard 9×13 cake pan, set stuffed turkey inside, carefully insert all inside a paper grocery bag (clean, of course), roll the opening closed, poke your thermometer through bag into the bird, and go.  The skin browns nicely this way, without letting too much moisture escape.  After cooking, the bag gets ripped off and discarded, preferably not where the dog can get into it.

Since I always make more stuffing than fits in the bird, I bunch the rest around the bird in the same pan to soak up the drippings.  This is the absolute best tasting stuffing in the world!  And no, I don’t do gravy.  Ever.

This year we took making stuffing to a new level, and I’m not just talking about teaching the next generations.  We made a super-sized batch, increased the egg proportions further yet, and cooked the stuffing in muffin pans, two different sizes.  Smaller muffins got paper liners, but there weren’t any I could find for the large muffin pan, so we made do with nonstick spray.  The smaller ones got about 25 minutes, larger 30 to cook.  The point was to avoid not just the hassle of cooking on the day, but the mess of extra dishes and leftovers to bring home, since Thanksgiving is always hosted by my daughter.  We’ll just take a bunch of each size out of the freezer, thaw on the trip down, and have them heated in the microwave before serving.  If you are wondering, we started with over 4 lbs. of bread, 3 large onions, etc., etc., and topped it off with 8 eggs.  I’ve already sampled one–okay, I ate the whole thing–and it worked like a charm.

Among a certain class of people, the term “Rumsfeldian” is used to describe a style of leadership that prizes bureaucratic turf-protecting, dissent-quashing through barely concealed intimidation, an inflated sense of self-importance, and the inability to incorporate possible long-term consequences into the decision making process.  This class consists primarily of policy wonks, especially the left-leaning ones I interact with daily at the Humphrey Institute, and we are referring to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.  There is, however, another context where you will hear “Rumsfeldian” being bandied about, and that is in conjunction with his famous quote during a press conference on Feb. 12th, 2002:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know.

Justly ridiculed at the time as masking ignorance in seeming profundity, the quote has since entered popular culture, in particular the part about “unknown unknowns,” as a way of acknowledging uncertainty and the limits of human understanding.  This perspective can be very useful when thinking about the topic for today: Unidentified Flying Objects, more commonly referred to as UFOs.

In the Rumsfeldian system of classification, UFOs fall pretty squarely into the category of the “known unknowns,” but despite the admission that we don’t know what a UFO is (if we did, then by definition it would no longer be a UFO) it is often the case that whenever that acronym enters the conversation the subject almost inevitably turns to the subject of alien spacecraft and the question of whether or not the Earth has ever been visited by beings from another world.  By a curious bit of serendipity, right before I sat down to write this, I was checking Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog, and he had recently put up a link to a YouTube video of Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson answering a question about UFOs from an audience member at a panel discussion he was a part of.  In my book, Dr. Tyson occupies a position similar to the late, great Carl Sagan as the foremost public intellectual in the fields of astronomy and planetary science, and his answer to the question is both witty and insightful.

As human beings, we are usually very uncomfortable with uncertainty, and the case of UFOs puts this on display like few other subjects.  The leap from “we don’t know what this is” to “this must be an alien spacecraft” is pretty darn huge, and is a textbook example of what logicians call the argument from ignorance: If I don’t know what something is and you can’t explain it, then I am free to put it in any category I want, even though the available evidence is nowhere near the point where we can even make educated guesses.

Furthermore, most UFO reports are based on what Dr. Tyson rightly says is the least credible form of evidence we know of: eyewitness testimony.  Our senses are notoriously unreliable, and extremely easy to fool (think about optical illusions).  When we add that to the general ignorance in our culture about astronomical phenomena, along with countless TV shows, movies, conspiracy theories and the like that address the subject of alien visitation, often in the context of a vast government cover-up, it is not hard to see why the UFO=alien spacecraft is a leap that is so often made.  However, the fact that, conspiracy theorists notwithstanding, we have almost nothing other than eyewitness testimony to go on (photos, which can be easily doctored, no longer count) means that scientists really have nothing tangible to work with in order to determine what any particular UFO report might actually be.

Of course many things that were once thought to be UFOs actually do end up being explained in some fashion.  Many turn out to be meteorites, weather balloons, top secret aircraft, the planet Venus seen under a myriad of odd atmospheric conditions, or hoaxes of varying complexity and ingenuity.  For those that are still UFOs, the honest thing to do is to simply admit that we really just don’t know.  This does not close the book on UFOs by any means, but it also means not jumping to unwarranted conclusions on the basis of very flimsy evidence.

I will, however, grant that some UFO claims do have a little more to them than most and come from somewhat more credible sources than your average person on the street.  A few years ago, a good friend of mine loaned me a book called Disclosure : Military and Government Witnesses Reveal the Greatest Secrets in Modern History.  Many of the accounts contained in this book come from military pilots, who from their training are a lot more familiar with the many kinds of aircraft they might encounter in flight and can make more informed judgments about the size and speed of things in the air.  It is true that most of the accounts are primarily eyewitness testimony, but in quite a few of the cases there is evidence from radar readings that can confirm that they at least saw something.  While there was not enough in the book to turn me into a real-life version of Fox Mulder, it makes a good case as to why some of the claims presented deserve more thorough investigation.

So when you contemplate those things that still remain in the “known unknown” category, please remember that just because you don’t know and I don’t know, your imagination running wild does not then automatically become the truth.  A few years before Rumsfeld uttered his infamous quote, I came up with a saying that sort of gets at the same idea, but with a little less arrogance: “The more that I know, the more I realize how much more there is that I don’t know.”  Maybe it is not all that eloquent, but the message that true knowledge inspires humility is one that needs to be heard in an age where claims of absolute certainty are routinely made without any evidence to stand on, and where ignorance is too often celebrated and encouraged.

Links:
Donald Rumsfeld
Neil de Grasse Tyson on UFOs
Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist blog
The Disclosure project and book

Question: Where else in our culture do you see the argument from ignorance being frequently used?

Norman Barrett Wiik as a current graduate student in public policy, a board member for Camp Quest of Minnesota and Camp Quest Inc., and a lifelong enthusiast of space exploration.