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" (Optional soundtrack to the first of many blog posts today...)      POMPANO BEACH, Fla. \u2014 My friend, the boxing writer Ron Borges, is fond of telling the story about Joe Louis before one of his big fights. With good reason, Louis was terrified that he would lose any decision because he was a black champion in a white man&amp;#039;s game. He came nearly unstrung with concern. The judges would steal it from him, he thought. The referee would steal it from him. They \u2014 all of the They&amp;#039;s that had lined up against him his entire life \u2014 would take it away from him. There was nothing he could do. He could only fight the man in front of him. He couldn&amp;#039;t fight Them. He couldn&amp;#039;t fight All of Them. His handlers were at their wits&amp;#039; end. Finally, one of them sat him down. &amp;quot;Joe,&amp;quot; the trainer said, &amp;quot;let your right hand be your referee.&amp;quot; In the late days of the campaign, there has been a chorus arising in the elite political media about what a grubby, wretched campaign this has been. It has not been a battle of big ideas, they say. It has not been a clash of grand visions. (They&amp;#039;re wrong about that last part, as we will demonstrate shortly.) It has not transported them to lofty heights of democratic ecstasy. Yeah, and it hath harshed all their mellows unto the many generations. I&amp;#039;m not exactly sure what these people expected. American politics has degenerated into a grubby, wretched business. American elections have become a staggering money-drunk mess reeling from one catastrophe to another, culminating in the Panamanian clusterfuck that has been unspooling down here over the last four days, and which will come to a cacophonous crescendo on Election Day, when, I guarantee you, something you absolutely did not think ever was possible here in the World&amp;#039;s Greatest Democracy will come blundering out of the swamps and scrub pine to fascinate and horrify us all. It had been a long time since I was around a presidential campaign when I picked this one up in Iowa a little more than a year ago. The first story that hit me was the money. It still seems to me that the money is the only story in this whole campaign. It has deformed the process almost to unrecognizability. It has created a new normal that seems insulated on all sides from the people who are supposed to matter the most. If the president manages to hang on, it will be seen as a triumph of participatory democracy over legalized bribery, and we will all be encouraged to feel very good about ourselves because things turned out that way. But, seriously, were it not for the new political universe created by the Big Bang of the Citizens United decision, and were it not for the swiftly established metric that he who has the most money wins, the candidacy of Willard Romney would be an almost impossible burlesque. Four years after the titans of the financial-services industry nearly ate the entire world, the Republicans nominate a plutocratic maladroit who can barely wrestle a coherent sentence to a draw \u2014 &amp;quot;We start a new tomorrow tomorrow,&amp;quot; was yesterday&amp;#039;s gem \u2014 and who is entirely a creature of the very industry that had caused the misery in the first place. It is exactly the same as if the Republicans in 1932 had replaced Herbert Hoover at the top of their ticket with Andrew Mellon. But the election is still within an eyelash, one way or the other, because Romney&amp;#039;s money, and all the other money that lined up behind it, made him credible. Exactly forty years after anonymous corporate cash became the first loose thread that would lead to the unravelling of Richard Nixon&amp;#039;s presidency, anonymous corporate cash is the coin of the realm. It is the measure by which we determine the fitness to lead the nation, to command the armed forces, to who gets their hands on the nuclear codes. It used to be popular to complain that we had turned politics into an advertising design competition, that we sold our candidates &amp;quot;like soap.&amp;quot; Now, we&amp;#039;ve turned the elections into investment opportunities, and we sell our candidates like beachfront condos or cattle futures. I am not at all sure this is an improvement. But, recently, watching things on the ground here in Florida, I&amp;#039;ve come to think that there is an even bigger story than the money, that the money is merely the only story within the only story. I have watched at close range how very far politicians will go to use their institutional power as elected officials to deaden the instincts of self-government. It is the money that got them into place to do it, but what they&amp;#039;re doing is something far more insidious and dangerous. Actively keeping people from exercising the franchise is bad enough. But to continue, over and over and over again, to make the process harder and harder until a critical mass of people decides that self-government is not worth the bother, I think, is far, far worse. There are legal and institutional remedies to the former. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 swept Jim Crow aside with a single stroke. But there are far fewer remedies to the steady, deliberate infusion of the habits of lassitude and futility into the emotional and intellectual bloodstream of self-government. There&amp;#039;s no easy antidote to that, and that kind of thing is exactly what most of the big money has bought for itself in this election. So, if the gentlefolk of the elite political press think this election to have been a grubby and wretched business, let them look around themselves and see the steady and febrile decline that the money has brought about. But, while the process may have been grubby, and the tone of the debate wretched, there was a genuine debate to be had here, and it was worthy of all the best instincts of self-government that had been enervated, day by grinding day, by what our politics had become. It was a debate about the very nature of self-government itself, and about the value of the political commonwealth that is its only worthwhile creative endeavor. There is one side in this election that is far too timid, and far too closely allied with far too many people it ought not to be allied with at all, but which at least does admit the existence of a political commonwealth, and at least does recognize that self-government is an ongoing creative endeavor. And there is one side that simply does neither, and that has been quite clear about why it does not, and that has worked within the institutional structures of self-government to undermine the creative soul of the democratic project. And that has been a debate worth having, and that is the debate that will conclude today. For three days now, I have watched people wait for four and five hours just to get the right paperwork to fill out so they can wait another hour or two to cast their ballots. I admire them, but I admire them for themselves. I will not use their stubborn insistence on being heard to absolve the people who have turned the system into a blind and unreasonable obstacle course. No matter who wins today, this election has been a spiritual and a logistical embarrassment, and to borrow the courage and perseverance of these people as testimony to our collective greatness as a democratic people is an outright obscenity. We do not own those things, and we have no right to borrow them. We let all this happen to our country. Ultimately, though, there is no other answer to the asinine way we have come to elect a president in this country than to revive the creative spirit of self-government by sheer numbers, to build a political commonwealth the old-fashioned way, by having so many people pitch in on the job that the people trying to get us to give up on the process become broken and dispirited and abandon their own work in despair. Let Rick Scott do his worst. Let your right hand be your referee. ---ELECTION DAY ON THE POLITICS BLOG: LIVE FROM EVERY SWING STATE... \u2022 FLORIDA: Charles P. Pierce with the Voting-Rights Watchdogs \u2022 OHIO: Mark Warren Traveling with Governor John Kasich (and with Romney) \u2022 NEW HAMPSHIRE: Margaret Doris in 5-Vote Territory (and with Romney) \u2022 VIRGINIA: Elizabeth Sile in the Uncertain Suburbs \u2022 NEVADA: Jason Whithed in Sheldon Adelson Country \u2022 WISCONSIN: Joe Tarr with the Trained Poll-Watchers \u2022 NORTH CAROLINA: Aaron Gwyn on the Church Hereafter \u2022 IOWA: Kyle Minor on the Last-Minute Battleground Road Trip \u2022 COLORADO: Sam Levin at the Last Victory Party (and with Obama and Romney) \u2022 ...AND PENNSYLVANIA: Isaiah Thompson on the Blue State That Would Be Red PLUS: Tom Junod in Chicago with Obama, Margaret Doris in Boston with Romney... and John H. Richardson in Breezy Point with Sandy Victims Voting ELECTION NIGHT ON TWITTER: LIVE FROM EVERY ANGLE... \u2022 @ESQPolitics: Charles P. Pierce, Snarking the Results All Night Long \u2022 @StephenMarche: Watching Nothing but Twitter All Night Long \u2022 @Sullduggery: Matt Sullivan, Watching the Pundits on TV All Night Long \u2022 @TomJunod: Inside the Obama &amp;quot;Victory&amp;quot; Party in Chicago All Night Long "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16601/election-day-2012-14483643/>