Having been asked to write a short article on U.S. elections for the magazine of our club in Yokohama (where U.S. citizens are very much a minority), I wrote the following. 

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Why U.S. Elections are So Complicated.

An election is a simple thing. Whoever gets the most votes wins, right? Not in the United States of America.

When the Founders wrote the Constitution they were aware, as Hamilton puts it in Federalist No. 1 that

Happy will it be if our choice should be directed by a judicious estimate of our true interests, unperplexed and unbiased by considerations not connected with the publicgood. But this is a thing more ardently to be wished than seriously to be expected. The plan offered to our deliberations affects too many particular interests, innovates upon toomany local institutions, not to involve in its discussion a variety of objects foreign to its merits, and of views, passions, and prejudices little favorable to the discovery of truth.

One set of those particular interests that Hamilton mentions pitted the larger of the thirteen original colonies, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia, against the smaller ones,Rhode Island and South Carolina, for example. The former asserted the importance of majority rule, which would, if simply accepted, have given them control of the new country. The latter countered with right of minorities to be protected and have a voice in the new Republic. The result was a compromise in which the legislative branch would be divided into two houses, the House of Representatives, in which representation is proportional to the populations of the states as determined by the decennial census, and the Senate, in which every state, regardless of population, gets two Senators. In addition, the President would be elected, not by the national popular vote, but instead by an Electoral College in which the number of electors apportioned to each state equal its total Congressional delegation, Representatives plus Senators.

Thus, for example, Wyoming, a state with a population of 515,004, one Representative and two Senators, has three electoral college votes. Each of its Electoral College votes represents 171,668 people. In contrast California has a population of 36,457,549, fifty- three Representatives and two Senators. Each of its Electoral College Votes represents 662, 865 people. Thus, a voter who casts his or her vote in Wyoming has, roughly speaking, nearly four times the impact on the election of a California voter.

A further set of complications is introduced by the fact that how elections should be conducted is not specified in the Constitution. That is left up to the states. The Constitution, moreover, makes no provision for political parties. Thus, not only does how votes are cast and counted vary from state-to-state, so does the choice of processes by which the parties nominate their candidates.

Current options on the table include primaries, caucuses or, in at least one recently notorious case, “the Texas two-step,” both. Primaries are run like other elections, with people going to the polls to vote. Primaries may be either open, allowing independents and members of the other party to vote in a party’s primary, or closed, allowing only voters registered as members of the party in question to vote.

Caucuses are party meetings, typically open to anyone who shows up and signs a declaration that he or she is a member of the party. Historically, caucuses have given the edge to politicians whose supporters control the local party machinery, are able to get supporters to attend, and have mastered the often byzantine rules under which caucuses are run. They have also been favored by smaller and poorer state parties, for whom
running a primary may be seen as too costly, given the need to conserve resources for the general election. As recent events have revealed, however, an insurgent national campaign can turn the tables on the party hacks by getting its people to attend caucuses in large numbers and training them in caucus procedures in advance.

Feeling confused? Don’t blame yourself. Imagine yourself an American trying to understand cricket. The one thing you really need to know as the U.S. elections climax this November is, “Keep an eye on the electoral votes!” That’s the score that counts.

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Having heard that tomorrow’s national tracking polls will show a substantial bump for McCain-Palin, I take particular comfort from that final sentence and the electoral vote projection at FiveThirtyEight.com. I note, too, that polls reported on Monday tend to be biased by oversampling of old white folks who stay at home on the weekend.

The fun is over for now. It is time to get to work. Do you remember the presidential election of 2004? There is a picture of how it went over there on the right, just in case you have forgotten.

While you are planning the best course for the Obama campaign, enjoying the debates, railing over the outrageous lies, and the like, you need to do your part by getting everybody and their second cousin to register to vote. The opposition is still full of really really bad guys, and if you doubt that, let me remind you about the seamier side of Sarah Palin.

They will try everything they can to maintain power. They are the corporatists, the Republicans, the Cheneys, the oil and medical and war interests. They will misallocate voting machines, lock doors, reprogram computers, remove legitimate voters from the rolls, vote two or three or four time, and do lots of other things that we haven’t thought of yet. They will target brown districts and democratic districts. We can’t stop everything they will do.

But we can overwhelm them. They can’t steal all of the votes. Democratic registration is up while Republican registration is down. But that isn’t enough. We have to get every single possible person registered now and get them to the polls later. We can’t give them a chance to steal this one. It is too important.

With all due credit to John Kerry who pointed out so brilliantly that while he is friends with John McCain, the senator, he does not recognize John McCain, the candidate. I say turn that into an ad, although running Joe Biden in LC’s post below would do the trick. Nevertheless, here is a proposed TV ad:

Visual: Split screen. One titled Good John, the other titled Bad John. Corresponding pictures as the VO and text change with each of the following statements.

VO with abbreviated text:

The Good John (said softly) server his country well. The Bad John (said forcefully) voted against an increase in Iraq veteran benefits. The Good John says he is a maverick. The Bad John voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. The Good John spoke out against torture. The Bad John caved into to George Bush and changed his mind. The Good John says he cares about people like you and me. The Bad John voted against increasing the minimum wage 19 times over the 26 years he has been in Washington. The Good John is for campaign finance reform. The Bad John does special favors for special interests and he was one of the Keating Five. The Good John says he will change Washington. The Bad John as been part of the Washington problem for 26 years. Etc.

Now The Good John doesn’t want you to know about The Bad John, but if you vote for what you think is the real John McCain, remember he voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. We can’t take a 10 percent chance on the change we deserve.

I’m Barack Obama and I approve this message.

This is exactly what needs to happen for the next two months, not just from Joe but from every Dem who takes a mic, especially the guy at the top of the ticket. Must view.

Unless the Dems successfully reposition the Republican party as extremist. Which by the way, it is. It’s not going to be enough to win the policy debate–for the past 20 years it hasn’t been enough. The Dems have to rip the mask off that fraudulent flag-waving humble small town talk and reveal the Pugs and their new darling Sarah Palin for who they really are and what they really stand for–she and her party are as mainstream as a Pentecostal snake handler. When was the last time you heard anyone say extreme right wing?

82% of voters are crying for change. Poll after poll cite more voters in line with Dem values instead of Pug values and yet, as of today, this race is tied at 42%-42%. How is that fucking possible? It’s because the Dems can’t seem to emotionally connect the pain and failure of the past 8 years to the Pugs. They can be completely disrupted and discredited by a duplicitous hockey mom with a sharp tongue and a beehive. For all of the heft and fact base of their positions, for all of the yearning on the part of the electorate for real change, they have no emotional answer to this psychotic Sally Field knock-off and her crazy uncle.

The Dems cannot let McCain get away with what some are calling the amnesia strategy, which is what he tried to do by distancing himself from Bush in his speech last night. The Dems surrogates went on air today and rightfully pointed out that McCain voted with Bush 90% of the time. Nice piece of data with no emotional wallop whatsoever.

Obama tapped into something in his acceptance speech that we haven’t seen enough of before or since. Real, justifiable anger. He should have peeled the bark off McCain and the surge on O’Reilly last night. Instead he conceded that the surge worked better than anyone’s “wildest dreams.” WTF? The Pugs have no fear of a well-timed distortion. Palin’s speech and the fraudulent repositioning of her “experience,” McCain’s flagrant disregard of his voting record and its consequences (not to mention his shameful record on Veteran’s issues), the lauding of family values when the spawn of that fine Christian family from Alaska has fucked herself into a forced marriage and the “hero” soldier became that as a consequence of a choice between going to jail and going into the army. That’s representative of mainstream American values? Jesus, I hope not. I’m not suggesting lowering the bar to match tit for tat, but it’s long past time to call bullshit, bullshit, in no uncertain terms.

What’s clear to me is that the Pugs have mastered the dynamics of hate radio and bring it to the podium every time. I couldn’t help thinking that Sarah Palin was Rush in drag– same bullshit, same speech cadence, same sarcasm and condescension. They know they can get tremendous ratings by translating politics into a grand episode of “Survivor,” a hand-to-hand battle of hyper-intense archetypes. Unless Obama and Biden get this and get this quick, they’re going to get voted off the island.

The race is on. What’s on your mind?

Now who is the elitest? I-have-so-many-houses-that-I-can’t-remember McCain let his wife spend over $300,000 on her outfit for her speech. That would go a long way to helping restore the funding for the hospitals and schools that McCain’s other wife cut in Alaska. This on the heals of the unemployment rate jumping to the highest in 4.5 years.

Here we go.

Excellent. Snark Shark.

Hope that team of fucking inner-city niggers community organizers shows up to play too.

(Photo by Barry Crimmins @ above Snark Shark link.)

Excellent angry links.

My team wins a championship.

Reagan Zombie, links, another pint bet.

A comment on Raising Kaine, I believe (I’m too damned lazy to try to chase it down again): that said,

“Christ was a community organizer, Pontius Pilate a governor.”

Check out the following YouTube of Obama speaking yesterday in York, Pennsylvania. Talk about a class act and very, very smart. The theme, that we’ve heard the Republicans talking a lot about John McCain and Barack Obama but they haven’t had anything to say about you, the American worker, the American voter, is brilliant.