Despite Botched Primary, NYC Board of Elections Thinks It's Doing a Great Job

Mayor Bloomberg isn't buying it.

Following New York's June 26 Congressional primary, it took the city's Board of Elections multiple days to deliver accurate results, leading to fears that the race between Rep. Charlie Rangel and State Senator Adriano Espaillat would devolve into a mini Bush v. Gore. Mayor Bloomberg and the New York Times have called the incident just the latest example of the board's "incompetence," thus, City Council members were surprised to hear Dawn Sandow, the board's deputy executive director, describe "how well the board performed for the voters of New York City," at a Wednesday hearing.

The hearing was called to discuss what led to the problems on primary night, but Sandow said she needed to "set the record straight" because the debacle was actually the media's fault. “Sadly, some members of the media no longer rely on facts or seek to expose the truth, but rather seize on false and sensational allegations promoted by certain candidates for the sole purpose of increasing their name identification,” Sandow said, according to the New York Times.

City Council members were unsympathetic, and stuck with their original plan for the hearing:  berating the board. Christine Quinn was particularly irate, as she and her then-fiancée had their vote disqualified after a poll worker gave them the wrong ballot (eventually their votes were counted). "I am concerned that you entered the analysis of the June federal primary with the mindset that you had done well," said Quinn.

There was other evidence on Wednesday that the Board of Elections did a less than stellar job. The Associated Press reports that a judge ruled in a lawsuit filed by advocates for the disabled in 2010, finding that the city violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by allowing "pervasive and recurring barriers to accessibility" at polling places operated by the board.

The Board of Elections has already made changes to how it conveys preliminary results. Rather than having poll workers tally votes by hand and pass the numbers off to police officers, the NYPD will get memory sticks from ballot scanners and turn over the data to the Associated Press. City Council members said that even though this will eliminate a potential miscount, they're still concerned about the board's ability to carry out the elections on the horizon, including legislative primaries in September and the presidential election in November. "This is the foundation of our democracy and I don't want excuses," said Councilwoman Jessica Lappin. "I want you to do your jobs well."

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Despite Mixed Heritage, President Obama Is Hardly Post-Racial

Barack and Michelle Obama walk across the White House lawn.

The discovery that Barack Obama is descended on his mother's side from America’s first slave is a teaching moment, right? We learn that blacks triumph over adversity. That since our very beginnings whites and blacks have been mating, creating mixed folks who are — or should be — seen as just American individuals. From first slave John Punch’s apparently marrying a white woman, we learn that long before Loving vs. Virginia, mixed matings had not even always been coercive. In sum, the line from Punch to president is to remind us that after all of the nastiness of America’s racial past, we are a land of mutts and race is ultimately a meaningless concept.

That’d be sweet, but in reality, if Obama’s is the “story of America,” it’s not in the "Kumbayah" way we might like to think.

Phenotypically, Obama is certainly a blend. We even now know that Obama has actual black American blood in him as well as the African kind. However, his persona is anything but post-racial. The boy those white Midwestern grandparents loved is a black American man culturally.

This is clear in the speech cadence he adopts with black audiences and also dusts his mainstream addresses with (“responsibili-tih”). It is clear in his gait, which black voters warmly identified with as showing that he was “one of us.” Many black men of Obama’s age and education level marry white women, and David Maraniss’s biography indicates that Obama was no stranger to dating white women earlier in his life. He settled down, however, with a black American woman, and a dark-skinned, tall one at that — and black people love that, too.

Thus Obama is no Tiger Woods, whose conception of himself as “Cablinasian” is equal parts ahead of the curve and tone-deaf. Obama, comfortable for years with a pastor like Jeremiah Wright, spontaneously saying that he’s black in the eyes of cab drivers, and signaling, "If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon," is a Black Man indeed. A constructed one, also, however: His checkered ancestry is so mesmerizingly multifarious that we tend to forget that no one learns to talk, walk, date, or go to church like the Obama we now know in Indonesia or Hawaii.

And therein lies his true lesson to America, regardless of the antiquarian fascinations exerted by Mr. Punch. In America, the one-drop rule lives on, enforced partly by white perceptions, of course, but also by black people’s quest for cultural fellowship. Today it is common — although by no means universal — for bi- and multi-racials to “identify” as black even with little or no visual indication of African heritage. Obama did not craft an individualist “I’m just me” persona, but one much more specific — a definitively black one. John Punch may have married a white woman, but his eleventh great-grandson did not.

Did society require a studiously black identity of Obama, or did he embrace it for other reasons? Probably both, but if there’s a lesson in it, it’s that in some ways we are less past race in 2012 than Punch was 400 years ago.

However, the Obama story also teaches that getting past race in America will not only be about getting past blackness, but whiteness. Post-racial or not, the whites in America who elected Obama were open to his blackness — and even turned on by it — in a way that would have seemed like science fiction just 25 years ago. Who knew in 1987 that before long, blackness would help a man get elected president? Among younger whites (and many Asians), not only is rap their main music, but “Ebonics” and its associated mannerisms are now in the cultural DNA. White twentysomething men a generation ago were not calling one another “bruh” and greeting one another with the brotherly hug nearly as much. The color of America in the future will be café au lait.

That, rather than vanilla, will be the feel of the America “past race.” Barack Obama’s life choices and cheek-swab genetic history are not what can tell us that — but the signs are all around us if we know what to look for.

John McWhorter is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of many books on language and race. 

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Layoffs Hit Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily Despite Reassurance Against ‘Haters’

Earlier this month, News Corp.'s expensive iPad newspaper experiment The Daily was reported to be "on watch" and "at a crossroads" as the company spun off its less successful publishing business. To that, editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo insisted that his staff ignore "the latest misinformed, untrue rumors of our imminent demise." In a public memo, he urged employees to pay attention to the publication's 100,000-plus subscribers, "not the haters," and added, "As something new and different, we are an easy target for erroneous wishful thinking. But make no mistake, we will be nimble and we will compete." Being nimble, it turns out, includes laying off 50 of its 170 employees.

All Things D reports, "Employees who produce the paper’s editorial page and sports coverage will be heavily hit by the layoffs, and the Daily will run skeletal versions of those sections from now on. But the cuts will affect other parts of the Daily, including its design and production staff."

Soon after the news broke, The Daily published another memo from Angelo that alludes to staff cuts, but not before noting changes to the product:

He then adds that the sports section will rely mostly on photo galleries and content from Fox Sports, not original reporting, while the editorial section will be absorbed by news.

In a longer note, News Corp. confirms "50 full-time employees, 29 percent of the full-time staff, will be released." Angelo adds, "Unfortunately, these changes have forced us to make difficult decisions and to say goodbye to some colleagues who have worked hard to make The Daily successful. These moves were driven by the needs of the business."

"We have consistently remained one of the top-ranked paid news apps since our launch, we have steadily grown our subscriber base, and we have the world's largest media and publishing company behind us," said published Greg Clayman. "Like all good digital products, however, we must change and evolve to remain fresh, competitive and sustainable." But in a horrible instance of bad timing, Clayman was reported this morning to have recently closed a deal on a $1.16 million townhouse.

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