The Whole Star

For the last several weeks I’ve been posting Electoral College predictions on a hallway grease board at Texas Southern University, where I’ve been teaching journalism for the past two years. The last story I put up reported that nine different aggregations of polling data predicted Obama to win.

But folks at this historically black college are understandably nervous. The secretary for the dean of the School of Communication, Linda Wynn, asked me if I was really sure about all those numbers I had posted on the grease board. Are you hearing something else? I asked. Well, yes, she said, and then I noticed the twinkle in her eye. Fox News, she said.

Another reality. I’m not sure how Fox gets its numbers, but there is a lot of gut feeling, from Rush Limbaugh to George Will, that Romney will win. To them this is a signal moment in American history, to turn back the big-government, socialist handouts and “take back” the country. This morning on Fox a black commentator declared that Obama might win if he stayed on the East Coast and looked after storm victims. Instead he is campaigning on “revenge.” Revenge is an interesting projection, a word that seems to fit the Republican campaign rhetoric more than the Democratic.

I suppose it would be rude for Republican pundits to declare that Nate Silver of the New York Times is right and the polls show the momentum belongs to Obama. Tomorrow will be a new day, a day to talk about revenge if Obama wins, a day to talk about revenge if Romney wins.

My students say that those African Americans who are opposed to Obama’s re-election bring up his support of same-sex marriage and abortion. A few are opposed to his health care bill. That is, social issues rule rather than the economy.

There was a little flurry of excitement this morning when students brought up the issue of Romney and tampons. Seemed he was against women using them and the Republicans might abolish them. A learning moment. When we Googled the story it seemed to be a hoax that some naïve liberals fell for.

The ever-alert Fox News had a picture this morning of a Black Panther, dressed in black beret and black combat fatigues tucked into paratrooper’s boots. Now there is a scary image. He was supposed to have been standing near a polling place in Philadelphia. William Kristol thought he bore more investigation.

The Philadelphia Panthers have been a sore point with a Houston-based group of tea partiers called True the Vote. True the Vote believes that the Panthers engaged in some electoral shenanigans that Eric Holder at the Justice Department refused to investigate thoroughly. A black conspiracy. True the Vote will have its poll watchers at the elections. Two years ago some of them were accused of intimidating voters in Houston’s Third and Fifth Wards, predominately black neighborhoods.

The other image that is lingering is that of a photograph of an Obama effigy hung with a rope noose at a Shell gas station. The gas station is supposedly in Jacksonville, Florida, but that doesn’t seem certain.

My students are offended but not horrified. They’re surprised that there might be that level of residual hate. Most of them have been stopped by police while driving and have been treated rudely, and were indignant.

They agreed that the shadow of racism hangs over the country and the election. I told them about Faulkner’s famous saying: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.

Two years ago at St. Mary’s Church, a polling place in the Third Ward, one of the tea party activists pitched a scene at St. Mary’s and was asked to leave. But it had been quiet all day, said the campaigners camped out a hundred feet from the polls. The True the Vote poll watchers are probably not needed in Texas, which is guaranteed to vote Republican. Reports from Ohio indicate that some of them have shown up there.

I had hoped to camp out at Obama headquarters in the Third Ward and wait for the results and talk to the campaign workers. But the Obama campaign is tightly controlled, and I would need permission from Chicago. A couple of my emails failed to get through and I decided to watch at home. Silver gives Obama very high odds for winning. Some indignant pundits, such as Joe Scarborough, have been saying it’s a tossup. Fifty-fifty. A cliff-hanger. That makes a better story, perhaps, but never argue about numbers with a man who can run 25,000 different computer simulations in the time it takes to make a pot of coffee.

Obama’s headquarters in the Third Ward are housed in a remodeled gas station, the old-time kind covered in stucco with a portico. Texas has been written off. For weeks a team of volunteers has been making calls to Florida voters. Laptops dial thousands of phone numbers of uncommitted voters and when someone answers, a volunteer picks up a cell phone and makes a pitch.

If Florida goes for Obama, some of the credit will be owed to the volunteers in that old gas station, said Daniel Boettger, a young man who’s been working there for the last two weeks.

This is Boettger’s first campaign. He didn’t manage to vote in the last presidential election, when he was attending Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches. He’s as optimistic about the numbers as Nate Silver. He said he’s been so busy at the volunteer center he hasn’t had time to cash the small checks the campaign has sent him. If the Republicans are making out this election as critical, so is Boettger. Electing Obama was one thing. To fail to re-elect him would be a terrible setback.

After the election he’ll have to figure out what’s next. He had a sales job, but hated it. He’d like to do something to make a difference. He’s thinking about law school. I get the feeling he would like to settle down somewhere. He grew up “all over,” which is to say, his parents were both in the Air Force. His father was German, his mother, African American. He has green eyes, a light tan complexion and reminds me of the man he is campaigning for, the man Nate Silver says has a 90.9 percent chance of winning.

Michael Berryhill is associate professor and chair of journalism at Texas Southern University. He is also the author of The Trials of Eroy Brown, the Murder Case that Shook the Texas Prisons, from the University of Texas Press.

PHOTO BY EMILY MATHIS

Lining up to vote outside a Massage Envy.

At the age of 20, I lost my voting virginity on November 6, 2012, between 10:30 am and 12:30 pm in a defunct Washington Mutual bank sandwiched between an H-E-B and a Massage Envy in Austin. I drove to the voting site feeling a strange mix of apprehension: What if I voted for someone I would regret, someone that I would be ashamed to tell my grandchildren I voted for?

With the shaky confidence of a rube in a big city, I got out of my car and, before I took two steps toward the polling station, was approached at my car by a fellow voter.

“Ma’am, are you a racist?”

I assured him that I was not.

He proceeded. “I need some gas for my car, and I’ve already been turned down by two people. If you’re going to vote for Obama then you’ll give me gas money so I can get my car started.”

I informed him that, although I was not a racist in any way, I did not have any spare change with me. He abruptly moved on towards another unsuspecting voter exiting his car.

The bizarre turn of events, as it happened, settled my voting nerves, and I approached the line for the polling station with a new confidence.

I then waited in line for two hours.

You could tell which people were newbies like myself. Every voting alumnus had a book with him or her to pass the time, while the rest of us resorted to staring at cracks in the cement. The guy behind me, who was wearing a neon green Ron Paul shirt and an “I LOVE RON PAUL!” wristband, got in an argument with an election official for his political attire. The man stubbornly refused to discard his Ron Paul gear for five minutes until, in an act of dramatic defiance, he stripped his shirt and continued, bare-chested, to wait in line. I had forgotten about the rule against campaigning at the actual voting site (I was fondly reminded of an oft told family story, in which my older brother, still in a stroller, excitedly yelled “Dukakis, Dukakis, Dukakis!” at a 1988 voting site while my mother and election officials frantically tried to shush him).

After two hours, the line finally came to an end – I had successfully jumped through the various hoops of confirming my address and my name, and, finally, was next in line to vote.

My turn came, and I courageously marched up to my assigned voting booth. I punched my access number. And then, the ballot itself.

I progressed carefully, double-triple-quadruple checking that I did indeed select the candidates that I desired to win. That final moment came: “Cast ballot?” I hesitated for a final second before clicking “Yes”.

That was it. I walked from the voting site to my car feeling light. I had just joined the elite in the world who could and would vote for the next leaders. I wanted to eat a burger and watch a football game in front of a TV that cost as much as my small car – I was an American.

I got into my car and buckled my seatbelt, ready to return to work. So what if the whole process was a touch anticlimactic, and I might have built up the event itself to be much more exciting than it actually was.

I still got my sticker.

PHOTO BY EMILY MATHIS

Priscila Mosqueda

Seven years after the Texas Legislature passed a bill calling for the state to add 500 megawatts of non-wind renewable power to its energy mix by 2015, the Public Utility Commission has yet to enforce the law. Solar power advocates are urging the commission to enact rules that would implement the change and add another 2,500 megawatts to the target by 2025.

The Renewable Portfolio Standard passed in 1999 under Gov. George Bush was largely responsible for kick-starting wind energy in Texas and making the state the national leader in wind capacity. Advocates say the 500 MW non-wind provision could do the same for solar energy.

But the commission has declined to adopt the rule. PUC chair Donna Nelson has said the target set by the Legislature is not a mandate, and that the commission doesn’t have the authority to enforce the rule. The Sierra Club and a dozen other groups filed a petition with the commission in September requesting they open a rulemaking process to claim that authority, but the commission has until November to decide whether it wants to do that or not.

Clean Energy Works for Texas, a coalition of environmental organizations, rallied outside the commission’s offices Thursday, where renewable energy advocates and industry representatives talked about solar power’s benefits and delivered petitions.

Two businessmen said their solar companies have grown from two to about 25 people in a few years, and both are poised to open second offices. Both will be in California.

“I would rather it be in Dallas, San Antonio or Houston, but the reality is California has taken a stand to support the development of the solar industry seriously by setting statewide goals and local support for their solar companies,” said Resolve Solar CEO Tim Padden. “I want to see this happen here in my home state. These could be Texas jobs.”

California leads the nation in installed solar capacity, partly thanks to ambitious renewable energy standards and generous incentives to businesses and homeowners. The state has set a goal of 3,000 MW of installed solar capacity by 2016 and is already at 1,342 MW. By comparison, Texas ranks 13th in the nation in installed solar capacity. According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Texas has 124 MW of installed photovoltaics, though Kaiba White of Public Citizen says many users don’t immediately report their units, so the number is probably about 20 MW higher.

“This is absolutely confounding, given our solar resource, our electric demand and our shortage of reserve capacity,” said Stan Pipkin of Lighthouse Solar. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Critics have long held that solar power and other renewable energy sources are too expensive. In a letter to state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, who wrote Commissioner Nelson asking her to enforce the non-wind provision, Nelson said, “I continue to believe that a non-wind renewable energy mandate would unreasonably increase the cost of electricity for Texas ratepayers.”

But a June 2012 study commissioned by the Solar Energy Industries Association and the Energy Foundation found that increased solar capacity would have meant lower average wholesale energy prices in Texas in summer 2011. According to the report, an additional 2,500 MW of solar would have reduced prices by $1.50 per megawatt-hour, and 5,000 MW would have reduced prices by $2.90 per megawatt-hour. That’s partly because solar performs the best during hot, cloudless summer days when power demand soars.

At the rally, speakers also stressed the benefits that solar power offers to local economies. They said they’ve tried several times to get the Public Utility Commission to create rules that would enforce the 2005 measure, and will continue to do so until it listens.

“No matter what these commissioners say in response to our petition, we’re not going anywhere,” said Dave Cortez of Texas BlueGreen Apollo Alliance. “We are going to carry this campaign through the Public Utility Commission sunset and we’re going to carry this campaign through the state Legislature in their January session.”

PHOTO BY NIKKORSNAPPER/FLICKR

As the deadline to extend a key tax credit for wind energy nears, threatening to deal a blow to the industry, advocates are asking two Texas congressmen to vote for extending the credit.

Texas leads the nation in installed wind capacity, with more than 10,000 MW of wind power providing nearly 10 percent of the state’s electricity. Advocates are urging representatives Quico Canseco (R-San Antonio) and Blake Farenthold (R-Corpus Christi) to demand a floor vote in the U.S. House before the lame duck session.

The representatives’ districts are big wind production zones, with 926 MW and 1088 MW, respectively, of installed generation. In Canseco’s district, the Anacacho Wind Farm under construction near Uvalde will add another 99 MW when it goes online next year.

On Thursday, members of the BlueGreen Alliance, The Wind Coalition and American Shoreline, Inc. outlined the need for renewing the federal production tax credit before it expires at the end of the year.

“Wind energy has helped grow our economy and has kept the lights on,” said Dave Cortez of Texas BlueGreen Apollo Alliance. “Congressmen Canseco and Farenthold have an opportunity to take politics out of this equation and put working families first by giving wind power the same long-term support provided to other sources of energy.”

There are 7,000 wind-related jobs in Texas, according to industry group The Wind Coalition. Director Jeff Clark says some of those jobs will be lost if the tax credit is not extended, citing the Sierra Club’s finding that nearly 2,300 wind jobs have already been lost nationwide since the beginning of 2012 due to uncertainty surrounding the credit’s expiration. The wind industry says 37,000 jobs will be lost nationwide if the credit expires, though there are not yet any projections for how many Texas jobs would be lost.

But opponents of the tax credit, which subsidizes wind power by 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour, say the industry will always need a federal crutch to compete with other energy sources. Mitt Romney upset some farm-state Republicans by saying he’d end the tax credit. Support for the wind industry has become an important election issue in states like Iowa, where farmers increasingly rely on wind turbines for income.

“Right now the wind power industry is getting a huge tax credit,” Farenthold said, according to the Raymondville Chronicle. “That is taxpayers’ money. I think they should be treated like anyone else.”

But wind energy advocates argue that all new energy sources initially need support, and that the tax credit is working as it’s supposed to.

“The capacity factors are becoming stronger and stronger and are competitive with coal and gas generation, but obviously innovation needs to be incentivized—the oil and gas industry was incentivized in its infancy,” Amshore Project Developer Jeff Neeves said. “Technology always needs to have some support to advance and to beat the monopoly of the status quo and the wind industry needs a temporary subsidy. I think that’s the big misconception, that this is some sort of long-term subsidy for the industry and it’s not; it’s just a means of incentivizing this new technology.”

A 2011 study commissioned by The Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C., found that the federal government provided energy incentives of $594 billion for oil, natural gas and coal between 1950 and 2010, $335 billion of which was in the form of tax concessions. In that same period, wind, solar and biofuels combined received $74 billion, or about 9 percent of total incentives.

If extended, the production tax credit, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush as part of the Energy Policy Act of 1992, would cost about $1 billion per year.

“I don’t begrudge wind farms,” Canseco said in May, according to the Midland Reporter-Telegram. “But we don’t just need wind farms. We are sitting on a mother lode of oil and natural gas,” he added, echoing the oft-used rhetoric that Obama is “picking winners and losers” in energy.

But Neeves said letting the subsidy expire could set the U.S. back decades and would result in lost jobs, revenue and grid stability.

“It doesn’t make sense to vote against that,” Neeves said. “To me it’s voting against the interests of your own district and constituents if you don’t support the production tax credit and you don’t support the incentivization of innovation and progress.”