Point Austin: One for the Books

As I write, the general election is six days away, and judging from this morning's news reports, Republican George W. Bush once again faces Democrat John Kerry for re-election. It's a mark of both GOP desperation and political savvy that Kerry's throwaway line to students about education – if you don't take full advantage of it, you could wind up stuck in Iraq – is being lavishly employed by Bush and others as a bludgeon to attack the Democrats. In the first place, they have nothing else – are they going to point to their foreign-policy successes? But more importantly, they understand better than their opponents that elections are highly symbolic affairs, and if you can get people voting reflexively on symbols – say, a decorated war hero vs. a political string-pulling draft-dodger – you've nicely bypassed rational judgment and thereby won three-fourths of the battle.

So, just in case you've forgotten, neither Kerry nor Bush is on the ballot. The GOP desperation (they're screaming hysterically about Nancy Pelosi, for God's sake) derives from the fact that despite Karl Rove's assurances, the elephants appear to be going down in flames. All the public polls predict at least a Democratic U.S. House come January, and a few are strong enough to suggest a Democratic landslide. While the Dems are fully experienced at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, this time they look foolproof. Despite the disgraced Tom DeLay's unprecedented stacking of the races (not to mention a structural constitutional imbalance against popular power in the Senate), the national wave of revulsion against the war in Iraq is simply too strong to bully down this time.

If all else fails, remember that – that's the main question before all of us this Tuesday: rejecting outright an immoral, catastrophic, and villainous war. As Michael Kinsley puts it this week in Slate: "Voting 'no' to a record of failure is more important to the functioning of democracy than voting 'yes' to any number of promises about the future."

Do I expect miracles from a more Democratic Congress? Hardly. Social Security will not be up for automatic bid, public education will not be quite so reviled, and perhaps the rush to privatize health-care profits while socializing the costs will be perceptibly slowed. Beyond that, I don't expect much. But both parties will be on notice that this brutal and illegal war must end. That's quite enough for one election cycle.

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Choose Your Executioner

In Texas, the prospects are considerably less dramatic. Despite widespread rejection of Gov. Rick Perry's leadership and the state Republican agenda, especially on education, the incumbent seems likely to drag ass to victory with a voting percentage somewhere in the low 40s. (I'm guessing it will break that way on Election Day, as disgruntled partisans face an actual ballot.) Asked by the Houston Chronicle if it concerned him that he'll be a minority governor, Perry snapped, "I don't think that matters one twit [sic]. We'll still have 100% of the authority." In other words, we can expect the next Perry administration to be both as maladroit and malaprop as its predecessors, with that same nasty personal edge that makes Capitol reporters nostalgic for those good ol' "bipartisan" days of Gov. Bush. (For the record, that's not how I remember them, but in Texas when the legend becomes fact, they print the legend.)

Chris Bell has mounted a hard fight, with rising momentum to the end. But it's impossible to feel sorry for the state Democratic Party big shots, who last round nominated a billionaire Hispanic for those reasons only and this year largely panicked early to support a lifelong wind-shifter and self-promoter, whose primary virtue is that she's not Rick Perry. "Run a Republican against a Republican," runs the Harry Truman truism, "and the Republican will win every time." These guys will get what they deserve.

But even more discouraging was the parallel bolt of the teachers' unions, so desperate to stop the state's bleeding of the public schools that they eagerly swallowed Carole Keeton Strayhorn's latest high-speed snake oil instead of waiting to see the race develop. Her current TV commercial of union officials, local TFTers among them, grimly reciting Strayhorn's putative virtues looks like nothing so much as an educated tumbril rolling to the gallows.

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Sharing the Load

Way downballot, on the not-so-mean streets of Austin, reside the items where you and I are likely to make the most difference in what happens to our public life for the next decade. We're all heated up about the national and state votes, but in actual fact the municipal bonds represent the most important cumulative choices of our community, about how we want our city to work and thrive through the next few years. The current Austin political era is one of consensus – bad, frankly, for journalists, but good for the town – and the bonds represent a community-based consensus of a couple of years of mostly volunteer work, so it's no surprise that they've attracted little opposition (until the last week of reflexive partisan sniping).

Most of the bonds look likely to pass easily, and adding my voice to the approving chorus is not likely to mean much at this stage. But I want to say a few words about Proposition 6, the new central library, which has been badly needed for at least 10 years, has been whittled down to a very basic budget, and yet still faces ignorant sniping, on the left and right, from people who should know better (and they would, if they simply had taken the time to follow the bond process). I invite them to visit the Faulk Library, preferably on a Sunday afternoon or evening when hundreds of Austin school students are trying to find and use the overtaxed resources, and to call on the help of beleaguered librarians to complete school assignments. Then tell me we don't need a new library. As for the sainted "branches" (which can't function or even exist without a healthy "trunk"), they got the lion's share of the last bond package, precisely under the already strained argument that a new central library could wait – until next time.

Next time is now here. Austin's central library and its collections are completely inadequate to our needs, and frankly a disgrace to a city this size that so loudly proclaims its "creative community." Both conservatives, who claim to maintain traditions, and liberals, who say they are devoted to education, owe a profound and timeless debt to libraries and the cultural traditions they physically and irreplaceably sustain.

Austinites, let's pay down that debt, just a little bit. When you vote Tuesday, make certain you vote for Prop. 6.