AMERICANS went to work as usual yesterday. At some point during the day, on the way to work or coming home, perhaps half of them decided to vote.
People don't feel guilty about not voting and if they do they don't talk about it. But only half the voters carry out the first duty of a citizen.
"Let the other fellow vote," one man replied when questioned about this. "I'll accept the result. I won't stage a coup. Those who vote are a sample of the electorate. Everything is a sample nowadays, polls, pills, what have you. Why not voting?"
George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall understood the importance of elections from the age of 12 when he first went to work for the Democratic Party in Manhattan.
"You can't begin too early in politics if you want to succeed at the game," he wrote. "I began several years before I could vote, and so did every other successful leader in Tammany Hall."
Plunkitt hung "around the district headquarters and did work at the polls on election day ... Later on, I hustled about gettin' out voters who had jags on [were on a spree] or who were too lazy to come by themselves.
"Show me a boy," he said, "that hustles for the organisation on election day and I'll show you a comin' statesman."
A "comin' statesman" was Richard Croker, the famous (or infamous) Boss Croker of Tammany Hall, who, like Plunkitt, his contemporary, was brought up among the squatters of Central Park, called for that reason "the shanty Irish".
His political turf was the Gas House District on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His political mentor was the Gas House district leader, Jimmy O'Brien the Famous.
Croker left Cork for New York on a Famine ship in 1846. In 1902, he retired from Tammany and bought an estate called Glencairn near Dublin, where he died. He spent his winters in West Palm Beach, Florida. His horse won the Derby in 1902.
Boss Croker would not have understood why there are no organisations like Tammany getting out the vote in America today. When I mentioned this to a man at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, he laughed. These are different times.
The turnout was 50.1 per cent in 1988 when George Bush was elected. In 1992, it was much higher but he could not recall the percentage. It is expected to be much lower today, possibly under 50 per cent. If Clinton's share of the vote is under SO per cent, he'll be a vulnerable minority president in his second term.
Why don't people vote? "Many don't want to go through the business of registration," the man at the National Democratic Institute replied.
He offered other reasons. "There's a lot of apathy. Not voting is a form of protest. Some just don't really care."
Non-voters by definition have no politics. They are young and don't vote, usually because they are not registered or they don't think their vote makes any difference.
For the most part, they are poorly educated and belong to minorities such as blacks, Hispanics and Asians. They have the same right to vote, if they are citizens, as do the rich, the educated, professional and business people.
Political scientists say voter turnout rises with income, jobs, status, age, race, ethnic background. Non-voters belong to the categories Tammany once organised and politicised: the poor, the working class, the underclass.
From the 1870s until the late 1940s, the Irish ran Tammany Hall. Initially, they learned the value of politics in Ireland from a master, Daniel O'Connell.
One should have no illusions about Tammany Hall. It was corrupt, even if George Washington Plunkitt attempted to distinguish between "honest" and "dishonest" graft.
It was the prototype of the American big-city political machines, and the Irish ran all of them for a time.
How did they do it? Plunkitt would quote the Boss: "Richard Croker used to say that tellin' the truth and stickin' to his friends was the political leader's stock-in-trade."
During the 1980 election, Richard Wirthlin, Ronald Reagan's pollster, told the Wall Street Journal: "The under-35 group is a sleeping giant in terms of its potential to transform politics. But there's every indication that it will keep on sleeping this year." Sixteen years later, the giant is still sleeping and this election proves again that no one is trying to wake him up.
Tammany Hall, corrupt or not, knew how to get out the vote and enfranchise millions of immigrants.
The vice-president, Al Gore, tells meetings: "The name of the game is turnout." But he doesn't tell them how to do it.