Twenty-five years of hippie punching

1988.  Willie Horton. The Pledge of Allegiance. The “card-carrying member of the ACLU”. George H.W. Bush, with Lee Atwater at the controls, ran a campaign that was almost completely free from issues and instead turned on equal parts “you never had it so good” and visceral appeals against The Other.  Never mind that Michael Dukakis was as radical as warm milk. (Side note: stop trying to make Massachusetts candidates happen, America. They aren’t happening.)

From there, the Perot split, the Congressional realignment as senior Democrats packed it in, and the decision by the GOP to place its destiny in the hands of Southern leadership.  Newt Gingrich, of course, and Trent Lott and Bill Frist and Mitch McConnell and Bob Livingston and Dick Armey and ultimately, George W. Bush, aided and abetted the whole way by the rise of AM talk radio (with Rush Limbaugh as the apotheosis of Republican thought) and then by Fox News and ultimately by the creation of the entire media ecosystem necessary to nurture an entire alternate reality.

In this world, it was Mitt Romney who was the stalwart conservative, rather than a complete political cipher. It was a world where anything involving the seashore was obviously Obama’s Katrina, where the confusion around an attack on an American embassy was a bigger cover-up than Watergate and a bigger scandal than “Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US”. It was a world where rolling the dice on saving General Motors, or on taking the shot at killing the aforementioned Bin Laden, were things that weren’t important when Bush couldn’t or didn’t do them, and then became things that were easy and obvious and no-brainers once Obama had done them.

Mostly, though, it was a world free from objective measurement.  The employment figures and economic indicators are suddenly ticking back the President’s way? Obviously being doctored by evil government bureaucrats.  Polling numbers that showed Romney leaping forward after the first debate are now showing him slipping? Obviously those polls are being manipulated by a biased media. Statistical analysis of the state-by-state by a fastidious statistician, whose math is out there to be checked and who ran 49 of 50 states in 2008, shows Obama in the lead? Obviously he is a mendacious little weasel whose very manhood is open to debate, and whose conclusions have less validity than the gut feelings of a has-been speechwriter.  No, Peggy Noonan just knows how things will turn out.

And yet.

Barack Obama won re-election last night, with electoral college votes and popular votes both in excess of anything George W. Bush ever got when he claimed his “mandate” to spend his political capital on disemboweling Social Security. He won all the critical states that Mitt Romney had to swing in order to win: Ohio, Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire, and (in all likelihood) Florida.  The Romney-Ryan ticket became the first in forty years to lose the home states of both its ticket nominees (Paul Ryan’s much-vaunted hometown of Jamestown, Wisconsin went decisively for the President).  And the Senate – in a year where the Democrats were defending more seats and were in a vulnerable position – will convene in January with at least two more Democrats added to the majority.

Karl Rove created his own reality, sure enough. And last night it collided with actual reality, and the result was…well, the result was a complete epistemic meltdown on Fox News around 11 PM Eastern.  Half a billion dollars lit on fire in the cause of convincing America that the truth is other than what could be measured by reason and logic and empirical evidence.  It didn’t work.

In fact, this really was the last call for the Old Ones, and it showed – things we thought had been settled decades ago were suddenly dredged up as issues that were supposedly in debate. We had to argue about things like whether insurance was obligated to cover birth control, whether rape pregnancies were some sort of divine blessing, whether – again, inevitably – whether the President of the United States was legally entitled to citizenship and eligibility for his office. And the GOP thought these were winning issues, and the party in the electorate convinced themselves they were winning positions to take.

And then the rest of the world failed to participate in their reality.

Look, I endorse Obama for a reason, because he’s like me: liberal in goals and conservative in sensibility. By rights, in a world that didn’t have its head up its ass, I would probably be a Red Tory. But conservatism in this country is entirely bound up with the South and its sensibilities: the big mules, the wealthy and powerful, securing themselves in their position by constantly whipping up the working classes into a fury of bigotry and ignorance to lash out against The Other.  Black, gay, foreign, smart, it doesn’t matter. Right now, in 2012, this is all the GOP has, and as of this morning, it’s officially not enough. And as the nonwhite population of the country grows, as young voters continue to turn out in reliably advantageous Democratic numbers, as the ability to win an election entirely with an aging white base who remembers segregation dwindles, it may never be enough again.

Hippie-punching won’t get you into heaven anymore, Republicans. It’s time to start the 21st century.

No Future 2012

If you’re looking for some changes to the way things run in this country, forget that too. The Senate Republicans have shattered the record for filibusters in a single session these last two years, and that’s with a President who could still veto things if they somehow got out of Congress. With a Democrat-controlled Congress (and probably by a larger margin in both houses) and a Democratic President, they’re going to dig in their heels. Scorched Earth, just like 1992-94. Every initiative will be tied up forever in the Senate, while the usual talk-radio scum bellow on about how the GOP is saving America from the depredations of the horrible socialist terrorist-worshipping Democrats…and the political media will bemoan the fact that Obama has failed to change the tone in Washington and cannot get his program through Congress.

– me, September 7, 2008

 There you have it. No less a paper than the Des Moines Register, which had endorsed Democrats every presidential election from 1976 on, has succumbed to Stockholm Syndrome and endorsed Mitt Romney because he’s more likely to be able to get a program through Congress.  Because presumably Democrats won’t go the full Braveheart/300, and Republicans definitely will.

It’s fucking nuts.  You have a candidate who has held every position imaginable – one whose manager, in fact, explicitly said that clinching the nomination was like an Etch-a-Sketch, shake it up and start over.  You have a candidate who has made assertions about an “apology tour” and about car companies shipping jobs to China and about the President relaxing welfare rules – assertions that have been repeatedly proven false – and his response is to push those false assertions even harder.  You have, in short, the first ever openly and unashamedly post-truth campaign for the White House.  And at this point, there are people willing to throw their hands in the air and give in, just to make it stop.

This is what “no future” means.  This is unsustainable. When people are endorsing a candidate on the basis that everything he’s said for the last year and a half is false, and what he said before that is true, and obviously he’ll go back to the way he was, and the people who pushed him to the right will go along with this – that is insane.  If logic doesn’t matter, if reason doesn’t matter, if the words coming out of the candidate’s mouth don’t matter, then there’s no point in even attempting to have a democracy or anything like it.  If truth means nothing, if reality means nothing…well, welcome to everything people bemoaned back when I was in college English. Welcome to the truly and completely postmodern world. If we as a nation actually decide that the truth is whatever you want it to be…well, maybe there’s enough medication and booze to help me see the world that way.

I guess we’ll find out.

The electoral latch

For the bulk of the 1980s and early 90s, there was a concept known as “the Electoral Lock.”  Because of California and Texas, it argued, and because of the GOP hold on the South and West generally, the Republican party had an inherent advantage conveyed by the Electoral College; no matter how narrow the margin of the popular vote, the states where they could presume victory were sufficient to get over 270 and win the race.  Indeed, in 1992, Carville and Begala merely claimed that they had picked the electoral lock, not smashed it – and rightly so, given that the winner-take-all and first-past-the-post system used most everywhere allowed a commanding electoral college victory with only 43% of the popular vote.

This was the first huge problem with the Electoral College, although nobody seemed to grasp it at the time.  Bill Clinton won fair and square, under the existing rules and system, and he certainly had a stronger claim than the candidates behind him with fewer votes – but because he was under 50%, the GOP promptly decided he was not legitimately President, and embarked on the scorched-earth approach that takes us down the road to…well, to where we are now.  Eight years later, everything went shit-shaped, but the Democrats’ outrage was limited to the shenanigans in Florida.  Once that was resolved, there was still the inconvenient fact that more people had voted for Al Gore than George W. Bush, and Dubya was President only by a quirk of the math – but the Democrats never gave that much of a push, and the attacks on September 11 pretty much swept the whole thing under the rug for all but the most bong-watered granola-shavers.

Now, the polls are getting down to the nut-cutting, and the GOP is back on the Rove plan: keep proclaiming you’re winning until people believe it.  The state-by-state polling suggests something different, and when matched against national polling showing a tighter margin, it’s paved the way for many a pundit to suggest that Obama could win re-election in the electoral college but not gain a majority of the popular vote.

And if you think the GOP would let that go as easily as the Democrats did in 2001, you’re fucking high. But even if it elects Obama, and they do everything in their power to dislodge or cripple him, they won’t campaign to scrap the Electoral College.

Because the electoral college really does skew the board in favor of one kind of state: narrowly-balanced medium-large ones.  California, Texas, New York: off the board.  Pennsylvania, Illinois, Georgia: slightly more competitive but not terribly so. Ohio, Florida, and now Virginia? Well, that’s another story.  Those states get to be the pivot point because they can between them shift about 60 electoral college votes, between a fifth and a quarter of everything you need to win the whole shooting match. If Obama has California, Illinois and New York on lock, that’s 94 right there, or 35% of the way to victory without ever spending a minute or a nickel in those three states.  Similarly, if the GOP can count on Texas, Oklahoma and the old SEC states (other than Florida) that’s a whopping 118, or 43% of the way there.  Get those states plus the Ohio-Florida-Virginia axis, and that makes 178, and you’re two-thirds home while only making an effort in three states.  Hell, those GOP lock states gained 5 votes on redistricting in 2010, so that’s a 10-vote swing – as much as winning Wisconsin or Minnesota, without lifting a finger.

This is why the GOP won’t argue to get rid of the electoral college.  They’ll argue to get rid of Obama, but they’re not about to give away a system that lets them gain 2/3 of the votes to win the White House by merely waving a rebel flag and campaigning in three states.  There may not be an electoral lock anymore, but there’s an electoral latch, and the Republican party has everything to gain by making sure it’s intact.

It rather makes you ask why we even need the electoral college – why not just use, you know, the popular vote?  Well, the biggest reason is that right now there’s really no such thing as a national popular vote (barring perhaps Dancing With The Stars or the like).  What we have are a bunch of aggregated state and local elections, which in may ways prevent bigger problems: how do you administer an election from the federal level? Imagine Florida in 2000. Now apply it to every single polling place where it might be possible to swing a hundred votes.  Imagine a bunch of teatards trying to shake down voters here and there, and suddenly the numbers look a lot more fungible.  The Electoral College has the effect of abstracting away the effects of tens of thousands of locally-administered elections, and for all its limitations does simplify things inasmuch as it makes tampering with any one local election pointless.

But it also sets up a very difficult problem: inasmuch as the white vote in the South is probably going to go at least 75% for Mitt Romney, it creates a real non-zero chance that Obama can win the electoral college and the non-Southern popular vote, but lose the national popular vote off the back of wildly disproportionate balloting in the old Confederacy.  And thus does the Civil Cold War grind on.