Howling in a vacuum

Hello again. As Chief Broom says at the end of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”: I been away a long time.

Actually, it hasn’t been all that long; I last checked in here not quite three weeks ago. That’s an eye blink in geologic time, but apparently forever in blog years.

Mostly I’ve either been immersed in or desperately trying to avoid the elections.

But something related to national elections in general -- though totally irrelevant to the 2008 elections in particular – came across my desk last week: a packet from an outfit called National Popular Vote. It’s got a Web site and an impressive bipartisan roster of backers, and the general idea is that the Electoral College system of electing presidents pretty much sucks.


The NPV folks make the point – and it’s a matter of historical record -- that there have been elections when the system put minority (as in votes, not race) candidates into office, and a couple of close calls when the holder of a substantial majority of popular votes could have lost by a narrow edge in a single significant state.

F’rinstance . . . Four times in 55 elections, most recently in 2000, winners of the popular vote lost the presidency. (Clearly there was more to Al Gore’s loss than just the flaws in the Electoral College system, but that’s another story.)


In the most recent election, even though President Bush led by more than 3.5 million votes nationwide, a shift of just 60,000 of those votes would have elected John Kerry.


Those are rare and extreme scenarios, and you could make the case that even a tainted election, or a revival of Bubonic Plague, would have been preferable to the Bush presidency anyway. But that’s not really the point here.


The more universal problem is that in an all-or-nothing system like the Electoral College, citizens on the losing side of even the slimmest popular vote margin are effectively disenfranchised.




Case in point: I currently vote in Alabama. My vote for Barack Obama will be the civic equivalent of howling in a vacuum, because Obama has about as much chance of winning a presidential race in Alabama as I would.


Yet even in Alabama, somewhere between 40 percent and not quite half of the people who go to the polls on Nov. 4 will pull the lever or touch the screen or punch out the chad for a guy who won’t take a single electoral vote in the state. Tens of thousands of people will make the purely ritual civic gesture of casting a Democratic presidential vote in a state 100 percent of whose electors will be Republican.

The NPV folks are right. That sucks.

The problem hits both ways, of course: A Republican in Massachusetts or Minnesota is just as homeless in most national elections as a Democrat in Alabama. And aside from the obvious unfairness of a system that leaves literally millions of Americans literally unrepresented in choosing the leader of the free world, it’s one hell of a deterrent to voting.


I’m not sure the NPV folks have the right idea, either; you can make that call for yourself. Their idea, as I understand it, goes something like this:


The Constitution gives states the power to decide how they allocate their electoral votes. Under the NPV formula, if enough people in a state go along, the state enters into agreement with other states to give all their electoral votes to whichever candidate wins the most popular votes nationwide, thereby ensuring that the winner of the popular vote wins the presidency.


Here’s the rub: The NPV plan is that the system would go into effect only if enough states with enough electoral votes to elect a president under the current system agree.


Got that? A proposal to change the current Electoral College system of electing presidents would depend on a majority of votes as apportioned by . . . the Electoral College.


Personally, I have my doubts. It’s still an all-or-nothing system, and the thought of all my state’s electoral votes going to whoever the rest of the country prefers doesn’t make me feel any less disenfranchised than what we have now. I still think a formula for proportional distribution of electoral votes could be workable.




Meanwhile, I’ll just go to my local polling place – still the fire station, I think, unless they’ve changed it again without telling anybody, in which case some belligerent county bureaucrat will respond to any and all complaints by insisting with huffy righteousness that there was more than adequate notice and if a few hundred voters didn’t get the memo it was their own fault, etc. etc. etc. – and plug in a futile Democratic vote that goes round and round and round and comes out for McCain. While I’m at it, I might buy a lottery ticket, too.










Oh, wait – I still can’t do that in Alabama.

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Hotel California

You probably saw the story a couple of weeks ago about how celebrities (and let’s use that word guardedly) were already coming out (and let’s use that phrase guardedly) for their presidential candidates of choice.

As a general rule, the political insights of movie stars or musicians or jocks don’t tend to be especially insightful, although there are of course exceptions; some are smarter and/or better informed than others, as is the case with the rest of us.

Most of the time, Hollywood political endorsements come off as exercises in pure self-indulgent, self-important posturing, and when egos get in the way, that can backfire pretty loudly. Remember that Kerry-Edwards fundraiser back in 2004, with Whoopi Goldberg cracking lame sexual puns on the president’s name? Yee haw.

Do prominent people get more attention for their political stands than the rest of us? Yeah. Of course. But the effectiveness of those stands, at some basic level, should come down to whether or not these people know what the hell they’re talking about. The idea that somebody has political acumen because he or she is pretty or can remember lines or plays a kickass guitar is as self-evidently stupid as the idea that somebody is a role model for your kids because he can take a running back’s head off.

If you vote for a Democrat because Leonardo DiCaprio or Matt Damon tells you to, or for a Republican because Patricia Heaton or Kelsey Grammer tells you to, you are – not to put too fine a point on it – a complete cretin. Give your vote to somebody better equipped to use it responsibly. Like your dog.

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The gorilla in the room

As the U.S. economy seemed ready to go into full meltdown, there was all the usual speculation and debate about causes, reactions, solutions and, of course, blame.

But something has struck me as increasingly curious ever since this financial crisis began in earnest: The number of ways some have found to talk about this without ever mentioning pure, naked greed.



It’s the proverbial gorilla in the room, and yet some of our fellow Americans seem determined to come up with other explanations, any other explanations, except the silk-suited one dragging its hairy, ring-studded knuckles across the floor in front of us.

It’s a classic Occam’s razor issue: The simplest and most obvious explanation is probably the right one. Money was there and now it’s gone. Tens of millions of people have less, and a supernaturally lucky few somehow have way, way more.

It would be stupid to deny that plain bad judgment – some of it, surely, prompted by the best of intentions -- and simple economic bad luck are a big part of the problem.

It’s even stupider to argue that some plain old-fashioned robber barons at the center of all this haven’t known exactly what they were doing.

Like the drooling dimwits who claim people “blamed Bush for a hurricane” in deploring his clueless and callous incompetence after Katrina, there will be those who insist that holding boardroom thieves accountable for this economic disaster is mere scapegoating. The inevitable sanctimonious protests of “class warfare!” will come echoing down from penthouses where there are those who want you to believe class wars can be waged, and economies looted, only from the bottom up.

Wherever this economic crisis proves to be a matter of circumstance or of honest human misjudgment, let all thought of blame be dismissed as moot. Wherever human fingers have been gleefully dipped in the till of the American economy at our expense, let the owners of those fingers rot in prison and fry in hell.

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