Month: November 2004

Why am I blogging so often in the last day? I want to make it to the polls early this morning, but I just can’t go to sleep. As potents such as baseball and football games, and eclipses and other means of prognostication have made their appearance in this year’s campaign, it is truly fitting that Election Day falls on All Souls’ Day, a.k.a. El Día de los Muertos. The day in Mexico and other Latin cultures is celebrated with parades, special desserts, and prayers and remembrances. The traditional prayer ritual to help spring a soul out of purgatory is six Our Father’s, six Hail Mary’s, and six Glory Be’s.

The11th-hour campaign ads, especially the chain letter ones, are really annoying me.

Quoting from the ad:

Capital Punishment killed 98 Americans
War in Iraq killed 100,000 people
Abortionists murdered 1,750,656 American infants

P-Diddy’s “Vote or Die” slogan actually accurately describes the balancing act among various varieties of life or death issues: 1. War, 2. Abortion and 3. Capital Punishment. You would think that you would have to be all for or all against all three to be intellectually consistent. But the candidates are not. Bush is arguably reluctantly for 1, against 2, and enthuastically for 3; Kerry is arguably reluctantly against 1, backs 2, and against 3.

What is the rationalization? Taking both candidates’ positions, either all three should be justifiable for specific reasons, or all forms of death infliction are always wrong, no matter what the form or reason. Yet, we have this relative picking and choosing, or even worse, the Machiavellian calculus in the ad of pitting a lot of deaths against a lot of lives. No wonder we can’t collectively make up our minds. Not at least until we can put everyone through a college level ethics course.

On a more somber note, a friend’s wife had a miscarriage yesterday. I was in their wedding party a year and a half ago. My mother had a miscarriage before having me; I always wondered how things might have been different. Pray for their souls, and pray for ours. The Latin word for hope, prayer, or wish has carried into English as the act we will do today: vote.

Hmm. Is there tension in the air, or is it just me?

Relating to the profession that some of us bloggers/blog readers are in, let’s just recognize that this election is important for being yet another reason why people hate the legal profession so darn much. Terry Carter of the ABA Journal (or its electronic version, the E-Journal) notes that lawyers are in the crossfire with the campaign season’s rather sickening (in my opinion anyway) lawyer bashing. I have thought that all this lawyer-bashing is really pathetic – I mean, last I checked, being a lawyer wasn’t against the law. But, the question is:

But [the anti-lawyer bashing has] an impact on what? The jury will be out on that one for a while. But some say the prominence of anti-lawyer ads in the presidential campaign is having an amplifying or synergistic effect on the ever-increasing lawyer-bashing in election races for other offices at the federal, state and even local levels.

“The pervasiveness of attacks on lawyers for political advantage has an inevitable effect on the image of the bar,” says Stephen Gillers, who teaches ethics at the New York Univeristy School of Law. “Trial lawyers, and therefore all lawyers, have been portrayed as the devils in the machine. That’s unfortunate, but it’s politically useful.”

[….]

And while it is debatable that ads with a focus on lawyers will swing the election either way, there is some concern that the messages critical of lawyers might leave a lasting gut feeling in a lot of people.

That might be because the anti-lawyer messages in the various election campaigns are kept very simple and repeated often. And they build on more than 20 years of the same.

[….]

Many remain unswayed by the ads. A recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 69 percent of voters say the fact that Edwards is a lawyer will not affect their vote. But that hasn’t stopped Bush and Vice President Cheney from hammering the point. And while it may or may not have much influence on the election, many say it will have one on the legal profession—especially in swing states that are being inundated with political ads.

And, furthermore, the e-Journal includes a humorous yet poignant article: Legal humorist Sean Carter is so concerned about the impact the campaign has on lawyers, he suggests that to spare lawyers from more harm, let’s have the candidates fight it out by the tried and true method of… rock, scissors, paper; not only do we save ourselves from frightening rounds of litigation,

Even more importantly, lawyers won’t take the blame for subverting the democratic process. Some of us may even be able to come ‘out of the closet’ to our friends and family members about what we do for a living, provided we’re not personal injury lawyers.

I look forward to the day when I can stand up in a crowded room and say, “My name is Sean Carter and I’m a … a … used car salesman. Anyone need a ’67 Pontiac?”

Yes, let me stand up and say, I’m SSW and I’m a lawyer. Gasp.

No, I will not be making any prediction. Election Day ain’t like figuring out who’s going to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

Anyway, go vote tomorrow. You’ll be glad that you did.

The battle is finally drawn. Literally legions of lawyers have gathered to descend on polling places at sunrise for the final showdown. I know I will be there. Bring a copy of your state’s Voting Bill of Rights with you in case. If there could be only one wish, please make it that someone, anyone, wins big!