not falling down

1. It’s raining like a fuck outside.
2. “In every case of party lines, reality is seen through a lens, and the lens distorts.”
   –Margaret Atwood
3. My cousin Josh is going to Iraq.
4. Unlike almost everyone I know, I am not voting for John Kerry.

Now, you can make a great many assumptions based on those three statements–or rather, on my restatement and emphasis of them. These assumptions may or may not be correct. What you can deduce, correctly, is that this post is going to be about my own views on politics. If you don’t want to read the rest of this, I heartily support you; I hate talking about politics on my weblog, because I hate reading about politics on other people’s weblogs, and I think other people’s amateur political views are boring and inconsequential. I am writing this to have a record for myself, because my own positions and beliefs have changed a great deal in the last four years, and in the next four they will likely change again.

I will try hard to make this the only explicitly Candidate X Is Y post I write. If you don’t want to hear about it, stop reading now.

Thoughts on the Election

1: Rain and Multiplication

I believe the Electoral College is a good thing. I figured out why as I was walking to my polling place, with squelching shoes, through several inches of rain.

Leonard, who has more experience with the profession of politics than anyone else I know, has been posting some thought-provoking articles about political power on his weblog. The latest has a brilliant and clear explanation of what he calls “vote multipliers”–an explanation of political campaigning as a game on the system, by which a person can take credit for more than one vote, or share in the credit for others’ votes.

The rain outside is acting, right now, as a vote multiplier. I believe it will suppress at least 25% of the vote in this area of Louisville, maybe more. My vote gains a fraction of power for every person who sees that it’s raining and chooses not to vote. This isn’t the good kind of vote multiplier, but the negative kind, the one Leonard mentions in his postscript; this post could have acted as a positive multiplier, but I already know that everyone reading this who lives in Louisville is too psychotically anti-Bush not to vote, rain or shine.

Whether or not it’s a good vote multiplier, though, it has the effect of strengthening my vote slightly. While I was thinking about the downward pressure of the rain–literally, as it falls, and metaphorically, as it suppresses–I was also thinking about another statement of Leonard’s:

For now, I will end on a partisan note by pointing out that one of the major American political parties benefits, on average, when one more person votes; the other one benefits, on average, when one fewer person votes. Even with my cynical view of human nature I would rather align myself with the first party or, if I couldn’t bring myself to do that, try to make the second party more like the first in this regard.

I am making the presumption that the first party Leonard mentions is the Democratic Party, and the second is the Republican Party; if such is the case, this statement is arguably untrue. It is true that Republicans benefit when a percentage of the population, applied to each state, does not vote, and that the converse is true for Democrats.

The anomaly, though, is that our population is not spread flatly across the country; it’s spread very thin and lightly in some large areas, and highly concentrated in some very small ones. This is the basis of the thought experiment I’m about to present.

Say it was raining today not only in Louisville, but everywhere in the United States. In our heads, let’s divide the geography of the US into an arbitrary number (at least 1000) of equally sized square regions (this is impossible, but let’s assume the best available approximation). And say that where this rain falls, it dissuades not a percentage, but a constant number of people from voting–that, as Leonard put it, on average, one fewer person votes.

Big deal. This will not impact the election, which counts votes in the tens of millions. So let’s multiply it; let’s say that in each of those geographically equal regions, a thousand fewer people vote, equally divided among all political parties.

Now things are changing. For example, Kentucky has its population pretty evenly spread, except for one small city in the center and a much larger urban region in the northwest. Before it was raining, in our thought experiment, the urban center was voting about 70% Democratic; since it concentrates literally half of the people in the state, that means that about 40% of the vote in Kentucky will be Democratic–90% of the rest of the state votes Republican. The Republicans take their 60% and walk away with the state and its eight electoral votes. Note that I’m completely making up these percentages, but this is pretty close to the way things resolved in 2000.

But since a thousand people per geographical region aren’t voting today, most of the regions that fall in Kentucky will have a drastically reduced output. Some of them will have total vote counts in the tens. In the region or regions that cover the aforementioned urban center, there will be very little impact (in fact, I’ve already predicted that thousands of people in Louisville won’t vote today, with little effect). Now the urban center suddenly makes up 80% of the voting population instead of 50%, and the balance has shifted; with the 56% vote from the urban center alone, the Democrats carry the state in an upset.

Kentucky’s eight votes don’t make a big difference, of course, but this scenario is easily applicable to other traditionally Republican states–Indiana, for example, or Missouri. Or Florida. Or Ohio. You remember Florida and Ohio, right?

2: Quick History Lesson

You could say that this hypothesis is thoroughly flawed and unrealistic, and you’d be right. The point of it is to make the case that when you go by geography rather than sheer demographics, one fewer person voting, on average, actually helps the Democratic Party–or, more significantly, transfers power to urban centers. This is not personally important to me, but it’s important to my argument for the Electoral College.

The Electoral College gives each state as many votes as it has, combined, Representatives and Senators. Because every state has a constant number of Senators, no matter what its population, this gives a mildly disproportionate amount of electoral power to states with small populations. An extra two votes isn’t much for New York, which already has 29; it is quite a bit for Idaho, whose votes it actually doubles. This often upsets people who want the President to be elected by sheer popular vote. It is not hard to guess that most of these people live in large urban centers.

If a smaller percentage of the whole population votes, divided by person, the less populous states gain power. If a constant number of fewer people per region vote, as demonstrated in that thought experiment, the more populous states gain power.

It is trite, axiomatic and true that all politics is local (and local politics are boring, ergo all politics are boring, ergo this post is boring, but anyway). Without the Electoral College, the power to choose the President would be effectively concentrated in the hands of people in the urban centers of California, Texas and New England. Candidates would be free to promise lavish federal pork toward the city-dwellers of these states and ignore the rest of the country entirely; whoever looked prettiest and promised the tastiest pork would win. The balance of power is already disproportionate, and the Electoral College is an attempt to rectify it.

The problem, of course, is that it goes too far. Instead of being concentrated in a few urban centers, the power to choose the President shifts to a few undecided voters in a few undecided states. The problem becomes worse instead of better. Florida makes everything suck.

My guess is that you’ve heard all this before, but it’s important to remember, just as it’s important to remember that voting is not a perfect solution to the problem of choosing leaders. It is merely the least worst solution. I believe a slightly less worse choice than the current system would be to have electors vote by district (as in Nebraska and Maine, and maybe, soon, Colorado), which would break the power of the swing states while preserving some of the extra muscle given to sparsely populated states. I don’t know when that will happen, however, since most swing states (except maybe Florida) relish their power, and aren’t likely to give it up soon.

Personally, one thing I gain from the Electoral College is the freedom not to vote for anybody who’s going to win buy the presidency with his relative’s money. Since it’s not raining on the rest of Kentucky, it will certainly go Republican no matter what I do.

3: Other People’s Choices

This is the part where we get to my cousin.

Josh is less than a year younger than me. He and I used to look alike, though the resemblance has faded as we grew older. He’s dyslexic and had a rough time in high school, but he graduated, thanks in part to the relentless encouragement of my mother. Since then he’s mostly worked in his dad’s garage; he went to business school for a while, but it didn’t work out. About seven months ago, I think, he enlisted in the Army.

Josh isn’t dumb. He knew that this country was at war, that it wasn’t likely to end soon, and that by enlisting he would almost certainly end up overseas. Nobody drafted him. He chose to enlist, get a bad haircut, get yelled at and be put in danger of his life, all for very little pay.

On Sunday morning, Ian drove the two of us down to Casey County for a farewell brunch for Josh; he’s shipping out before the end of November, and this is the last chance that most of our family was available to get together. Josh isn’t a big reader, but because he knows what’s coming, he requested that anybody who wanted to get him a present give him a book. I gave him my copy of Dave Barry’s Big Trouble, which is funny and quick and adventurous, and which I believe he’ll like.

I met my three-month-old second cousin Connor for the first time at the brunch. He’s enormously fat, and beautiful. It’s hardly unusual, but it still brightened my day to point out that he has his father Clay’s eyes.

There is a small chance that Josh will die in Iraq, and a larger chance that he will be badly injured. There is a certainty that he will spend years on duty, away from his family and his home, tired and hot and bored and maybe, sometimes, afraid. He’s a skilled mechanic; I have no doubt he’ll be working on and travelling with convoys.

I don’t want Josh to go to Iraq. It wasn’t my choice to make, though, and I have neither the ability nor the right to abort the situation that’s putting him there.

4: Voting In Opposition

So in a month or so (after Josh does a little more training in New Jersey) I’ll join the many, many people who have a cousin or friend or whoever in the war. A lot of these people are very angry that they have to be in such a position, and are trying to get out of it by voting against George Bush. There is an underlying belief–part of the human condition–that if you get rid of the person who made a bad thing happen, it will unhappen. This is essentially what allowed a lot of people believe in the war, at the point where its driving reason was identified as the removal of Saddam Hussein. Get rid of Hussein, and Iraq will be better. Get rid of Bush, and the US will be better. The war will be better. It will go away.

A lot of people have, with what they believe to be great cleverness, reassigned the term “regime change” to today’s election. The irony is that in the regime changes made to Iraq and Afghanistan, the people in command had no adequate plan for what to do after the change, and neither do the people who are voting negatively today. As did the Bush administration, all they care about is taking out the leader. As did the Bush administration, they are going to get burned as a result of this myopia.

George Bush is a bad president. John Kerry will be a bad president. There is no evidence to indicate that he has any qualification or plan for winning the war or accomplishing a satisfactory withdrawal. He seems to believe that a “united world” will spontaneously solve his domestic policy problems when he takes office, as if those countries that refused to involve themselves in Iraq were only doing so because that one guy was in charge.

I’m sure that in John Kerry’s imagination, when he wins the election, he is greeted as a liberator.

The people who are relentlessly pushing John Kerry as the only other choice are propping up a shoddy, bad-president-producing system. I’m as angry at them as I imagine many Gore supporters were at people who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, but I believe theirs was a misplaced anger; it should have been directed, like mine, toward the false duality that put a crappy candidate like Gore up there in the first place. My antipathy towards this offensive polarization is so intense that you might assume I’d vote for Nader, the third-party candidate with the highest profile. I find Nader’s stated policies wildly obtuse, though, and I won’t vote for him.

I believe John Kerry will win the election today, and I believe things won’t get significantly better. The droning whine of people on the interweb who don’t like George Bush may be slightly muted; I’d be grateful for that. If anything, though, things will get worse, as Democratic media voices become blind or hostile to criticism of their precious President-elect.

A lot of my friends will voting Democratic, maybe a straight party ticket. That’s their right, and I wouldn’t dare to impugn it, but I am skeptical of buying into the Democratic Party’s rhetoric; that purchase, as Margaret Atwood said above, distorts reality. Voting for John Kerry is not the most urgent thing in the world. This is not the most important election we will ever see. (Personally, I think the last one was it, and I wouldn’t change the way I voted even now.)

The only voice I’ve trusted in any presidential administration, since I started noticing politics, was that of Colin Powell. I’ve found I can no longer trust him either, and that my initial tacit support for the war was wrong, and that no one is listening to my side on the issues that matter to me. I am becoming prime jaded-educated-adult material; I am undergoing the same kinds of stresses that persuade people to become negative and oppositional, to become antiactivists.

I am not going to do that. I refused, today, to vote for one man wholly on the basis that he was not another man; I don’t believe that a tautology is reason enough to vote for anyone. Instead, I determined to waste my vote on exactly the person I want to be President, the only candidate I perceived as remotely human in the Democratic primaries last winter.

I hope you voted or will vote today. I hope your vote is for someone, and not against anyone.

Now remember, vote! Or a black man will shoot you.