KyiMayKaung

U.S. Midterms -- Nov 9, 2006.
When my niece, of mixed parentage, was seven, she drew herself as ET, with the caption, “Yumi, where the hell are you from?” After 20+ years in the United States, I still feel an outsider. American politics as gleaned from sound bites is not easy to understand. Until about a week ago, when I saw a documentary on how midterm elections are run, I had no idea that they are run at the local level, mostly by volunteers, who are mostly aging baby boomers. On Monday, I was sick from my annual flu shot. On Tuesday I went for my morning walk with my senior friends, in our neighborhood in Maryland, which is the most educated in the United States, has the highest percentage of postgraduate degree-holders. As we walked among the immaculate, at least 3 m. dollar homes, two of my friends carefully gave me a rundown on the candidates based on their research. I had been too busy to do my own. One woman, in her mid-70s, spoke of how “Now I understand how Hitler came to power in Germany.” She said with G.W. Bush it was all “oil and papa.”
Buoyed up by the conversation, assured by my friends that I did not need any form of identification, I rushed to the Village Center, which was the polling center for the day. Two people who were on the Democratic ballot, including a woman named Susan C. Lee, running for House of Delegates, greeted us smiling at the entrance. “Please vote for the Democratic Party,” she said. “I intend to,” I said purposefully. I was so happy I was going to vote in a few minutes for the first time in my life.
It was not to be. Despite spelling my name for them twice, they could not find me on the list. It turned out I had not registered to vote 21 days earlier as I was supposed to. “Don’t worry,” someone said, “we’ll get you set up so you can vote in 2 years.”
Dejected, I walked out of the center. At the door, a reporter came up to me and asked me if I had voted. He said, “Even if you didn’t get to vote, would you like to talk to us? Do you like the direction in which the Republicans are taking us?”
Would I like to talk! “The war in Iraq,” I started out, “they should have been better prepared. It isn’t so easy to go in there ‘to set up democracy’ without knowing the culture or anything. The Democrats have been traditionally for the underclass. I think they will see to raising the minimum wage. We’ll get to a solution of the war situation, talk about things we need to, like the environment.”
Two days later, with Republican Sen. George Allen conceding defeat to Jim Webb in Virginia, just a little southwest, across the Potomac from us in Maryland, the Democrats are now in control of both houses of Congress by a 51-49 majority. Yesterday Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned, Democrat Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House. All my friends are beaming, passing around chocolates, saying they don’t need to move to Canada or Australia after all.
Oddly, The Independent and the BBC have given us the best analyses of the changes. That’s nothing new. A lot of us gave up on the American media some time ago.
I like Nancy Pelosi. Saw her once in the Rayburn Building in D.C. when she came to give a speech on Burmese democracy leader Suu Kyi’s birthday. Pelosi is brainy, tough and beautiful. She doesn’t mince words, has called President Bush an emperor without clothes. She gets right to the point, never stops smiling, but is firm. During Chinese New Year in San Francisco, she knew to wear red. Hopefully, as Bush and Pelosi both talk of bi-partisan solutions (to Iraq) I look forward to a time when I won’t need to turn my TV off when Jim Lehrer on the McNeil Lehrer News Hour says every evening – in reference to the daily war dead – “And here in silence are the names of – more.”
We all know more Iraquis have died and are barely counted, let alone named. According to journalist Judith Coburn, the number in 2005 as counted by IBC (Iraq Body Count) was between nearly 23,000 and 26,000.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0718-21.htm
That’s an enormous number. Now (Jan 2007) it is reported at 34,000, more than ten times the number of the more than 3000 reported American dead.
The Democratic Party should not let down its guard. President Bush apparently still has some tricks up his sleeve. On Thursday he submitted the nomination of the unpopular and controversial John Bolton as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.; he’s pushing legislation to pass the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Donald Rumsfeld might have been just a convenient fall guy.
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