We are all Joe Gloria
On Wednesday, a news conference was held outside the offices of the Clark County Election Center, located a few miles north of the heart of the Las Vegas Strip.
As even young children across the nation have learned this week, Clark is Nevada’s most populous county, encompassing more than 2 million people in Las Vegas and its ever-growing suburbs. As I write this at midday Friday, it remains a key tossup state in the presidential race to secure its six electoral votes.
You can watch the entire news conference on Youtube. As it begins, Clark County Registrar Joe Gloria, a stout man in a a golf shirt emblazoned with county logos, is fielding a question from a reporter about the number of ballots still to be counted when there erupts what is referred to in the theatrical world as “noises off ” — specifically, someone shouting, “The Biden crime family’s stealing the election! The media’s covering up!”
As the camera pulls back, a man enters from behind Gloria’s left. He has clearly just been shipped in from Central Casting: His flowing hair, thinning on top, is streaked blond and brown, adding to his resemblance to an angry Jimmy Buffett after too many trips to the buffet. Indeed, he is wearing camo cargo shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt that reads “BBQ BEER FREEDOM,” an ensemble that follows the dress code at the singer-songwriter’s Margaritaville chain of restaurants. (There’s one on the nearby Strip, tucked into the Flamingo Hotel and Casino.)
Gloria stands there patiently, hands clasped over his midsection, as another official interposes himself between a forest of microphones and the uninvited guest, who is hopping and gesticulating like Hulk Hogan feverishly describing to a pro wrestling crowd how he’s going to demolish Bobby “The Brain” Heenan. His blue face mask is pulled down, serving as nothing more than a chin brassiere.
“We want our freedom for the worrrrrld!” he shouts, for the moment leaving out BBQ and beer. “Give us our freedom, Joe Biden!” He momentarily falls silent and walks out of the frame; the mics pick up a sigh, though since Gloria is masked you can’t tell if it came from him.
The Clark County registrar turns back to the semicircle of reporters and says, “Where were we? What was the last question?”
And that, dear readers, was when Joe Gloria entered the American pantheon of heroes, non-combat bureaucrat division.
It was Rudyard Kipling who wrote in his poem “If ” that “If you can keep your head when
all about you/are losing theirs and blaming it on you ... Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” I’m not sure about the last part — and there are a lot more “if ” requirements listed in the poem — but last week brought ample evidence that America’s greatest strength, as in every other nation, is people who show up to work every day and perform with care and precision. When they interact with the public, they speak in clear sentences that are based on the facts as they know them. They know the law and do their level best to adhere to it consistently.
Kipling’s poem says nothing about guys in cutoff T-shirts baying about conspiracy theories, or guys in blue suits and long red ties doing the same at a slightly lower volume from behind the podium in the
White House press room. Sometimes, it can seem like the Earth and everything that’s in it is theirs.
It’s not hard to determine what President Donald J.
Trump has been up to since Tuesday night: He is not trying to win the election; he is trying to lay the foundation for another long-running fiction in which his failure can be blamed on someone else. In 2016, his loss in the popular vote must have been due to voter fraud in, say, California; this time around, it will be laid at the feet of alleged flaws in the mailin ballot system — the same one Trump used to cast his primary vote.
Gloria was praised last week by the Las Vegas Sun, which noted his years of effort to streamline the county’s voting systems and expand access to polling places.
The paper noted that, as the top elections official in the county that includes more than two-thirds of the state’s population, he was instrumental in Nevada’s efforts to distribute mail-in ballots to every active voter as a tactic for fighting coronavirus infections.
On Thursday, Gloria held another news conference, this time inside a large warehouse space. As you might expect from someone who had been subsisting on little sleep, he was at times slightly snappish with the press, almost getting exasperated at repeated questions about when exactly the count would be complete.
Perhaps thinking of the previous day’s goofy interruption, one reporter asked him if he was worried about his safety.
“I can tell you that my wife and my mother are very concerned for me, but we have security here — we have law enforcement who are protecting us,” Gloria said, adding that his real concern was for the safety of his staff.
Who are also heroes.