New Year's Day Reading

The New York Review of Books' "How Bush Really Won", by professor Mark Danner, has a distintly Florida focus.

Driving north from Tampa on Florida's Route 75 on November 1, as the battle over who would hold political power in America was reaching a climax but the struggle over what that battle meant had yet to begin, I put down the top of my rented green convertible, turned the talk radio voices up to blaring, and commenced reading the roadside. Beside me billboards flew past, one hard upon another, as if some errant giant had cut a great deck of cards and fanned them out along each shoulder. Hour by hour, as the booming salesman's voice of proud Floridian Rush Limbaugh rumbled from the radio, warning gravely of the dangers of "voting for bin Laden" ("Haven't you noticed that bin Laden is using Democratic talking points?"), and other ominous voices reminded listeners of the "hundreds of votes" Senator Kerry cast "against our national defense" ("In a time of terror, when our enemies are gathering...can we afford to take that risk?"), I watched rush by, interspersed with the blaring offers of "Florida Citrus! One Bag $1!" and "Need Help With Sinkholes?," a series of perhaps fifty garish signs announcing an approaching "Adult Toy Café!" and "Adult Toy Extravaganza!" and then "We Bare All!" and finally, the capper, "All Nude—Good Food— Truckers Welcome!"

and this is straight out of 1984:

If your babies were left all alone in the dead of night, who would you rather have setting there on the porch—John Kerry and his snowboard or George W. with his shotgun?

—Sean Michaels, professional wrestler, warming up the crowd, Tinker Field, October 30, 2004

On a beautiful October evening three days before the election, Orlando's Tinker Field had become an enormous bowl filled with 17,000 screaming, chanting Bush partisans floating in a sea of red, white, and blue. On the stadium wall hung a great fifty-foot high sign proclaiming that George W. Bush was "MOVING AMERICA FORWARD!" Inside, flanking the stage in letters that dwarfed it, and echoed by smaller signs bobbing up and down everywhere in the crowd, was the terse slogan "AMERICA: SAFER STRONGER BETTER!" And then, precisely placed around the stadium in enormous letters, were the words on which the campaign was built: "STRENGTH! LEADERSHIP! CHARACTER! INTEGRITY!" Disciplined, organized, relentless, the Bush campaign would never be accused of subtlety.

Much more here.