Presidential Grammar

Last night on All Things Considered, Robert Siegel outlined the official NPR rules for presidential grammar in a response to a letter from an irritated viewer. Being a total geek, I was thrilled to know that that there was an official policy and to hear it explained, but I must admit I’m not sure I understand it. The rules seem to be:

1. For a current president, use “President X” for the first reference, then “Mr. X” for all remaining references
2. For an elected but not yet serving president, who happens to currently be a Senator, use “President-Elect Y” for the first reference, then “Senator Y” for all remaining references

I can understand that President-Elect Obama is a long and inelegant title and that Senator Obama is more compact. However, it seems to me that “Senator” includes the same number of syllables as “President” and is, if anything, a less valued title given that presidential approval ratings are in the 20%’s (Who on earth are the people who still approve of him, by the way?) but Congress hit 9%. So why does the President get demoted to “Mr.” while the President-Elect gets demoted only to “Senator”? Grammar nitpickers in my reading public, please help!

Voting Day!

Sorry, I have about four half-written blog posts about cool NPR stories that I haven't gotten around to finishing, but it's election day! NPR is full of stories about electioneering, voter fraud, and general voter excitement, which is what I experienced.

Today was my last ever vote at a real polling place because King County is going absentee-only after this election. Given that 90% of King County votes absentee already, I was really surprised to see the crowds at the polling station this morning, and excited crowds at that! Unlike some places on the East Coast, I only had to wait about a minute before checking in and getting my ballot, but there were more people there than I'd ever seen in an election, including the last presidential election.

It's really too bad that we're going to get rid of this opportunity for educating our kids and just getting together to do our duty as citizens, especially since in order to tally absentee ballots we apparently have to go through a lot of rigmarole (see this description from The Stranger). There are also lots of stories of people who have signatures on their ballot envelopes that don't match their signatures on record, or who accidentally signed their ballots and invalidated them (you can't sign the actual ballot, just the envelope). Does this really seem like a good system?

Either way, happy voting everyone! And if you haven't yet (and you live in WA), go vote Yes on I-1000.

Voting the Issues

This seemed to be a good day for folks interested in health care as a political issue. First, this morning on Day to Day, they compared Senator Obama and McCain's health care plans. Trudy Lieberman explained that under McCain's plan families would get a $5000 tax credit to buy health care, but

(a) this wouldn't grow as health care costs went up,
(b) average cost for health care for a family of 4 is $12,000, and
(c) if you get health care from your employer, you'll have to start paying taxes on it.

For the latter, I'm not sure what happens if you work for a self-insured company like Microsoft - would I pay taxes on a set amount per year that Microsoft pays to "insure" me or would I pay taxes on any money spent on my personal health care? If it's the latter, it seems like people who are really sick could potentially end up losing income because they have to go on disability at the same time they might have to pay astronomical tax bills. Obama's plan is supposed to allow anyone currently insured by Medicare or their employer to keep their current coverage while people who don't have either will have the opportunity to buy "government" insurance. The latter is a little unclear, but at least it doesn't sound catastrophic like McCain's plan. I can't see how his plan helps a single person, but it certainly could hurt quite a few.

Then, on Marketplace Jeremy Hobson interviewed some laid off Wall Street workers about what regulations they thought were needed and would influence their vote in the next election. One of them was laid off in February and while he had enough money to cover expenses, the fact that he lost his health care as part of losing his job meant his health care bills shot through the roof right when his income tanked. (Correction: as my good friend B, who worked in the benefits industry in a former life, points out, he didn't really lose his health care, but he had to start paying for COBRA out of pocket.) I hadn't really thought about the fact that having health care tied to your job really means you get hit right when you're down, but it just shows that even Obama's plan doesn't go far enough in really providing health care as a right to all Americans as it is in every other developed country.

Ultimately this election I'm doing a lot of voting against people. I'm voting against Dino Rossi rather than for Chris Gregoire for Governor because he's a creepy lackey for business organizations. I'm voting against Toby Nixon rather than for Roger Goodman for State Senator because Toby sent a flame mail complaining about something I'd done at work years ago that had no basis in reality (go ahead and call me petty, but I'm not voting for him!). And I'm voting against McCain (and most decidedly against Palin - don't even get me started there!) rather than for Obama. McCain's crazy health care plan is just one more item on the list of reasons I think it would be a disaster if he won.

15 days and counting.

Wednesday Silliness

NPR seemed to be getting it’s sillies on last Wednesday, and it made for a great day of radio.

First of all, A pointed me to a fabulous story on Morning Edition about Russian leaders. This could have been a very serious or even depressing story, but instead Robert Krulwich chose to focus on the fact that Russian leaders have alternated through history as bald, then hairy, then bald, then hairy etc. And not only did he cover this very silly issue with aplomb, but he then created a song!! I couldn’t possibly do it justice by writing about it, so I suggest you check out the whole story and song here.

Then, on All Things Considered Robert Siegel decided to do some investigative reporting on the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” after the most recent Obama/McCain contrived controversy. For those who haven’t been paying attention, especially to manufactured insults, the “controversy” went something like this:

1. Obama said McCain was just like Bush and that his policies would not be real change, but just “putting lipstick on a pig”.
2. The McCain campaign accused Obama of sexism because Palin had made a joke about lipstick last week saying that the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull was lipstick.
3. Obama said that was foolish.

Because McCain’s accusation was so ridiculous I was frustrated to hear that Mr. Siegel was going to give it any credence at all by reporting on it, but he went beyond the normal “here’s what happened” to doing a classic investigation.

First, he did some research into how long the phrase has been around and played some classic examples – such as McCain himself calling Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan (and note she’s a woman too!) “putting lipstick on a pig”. Not content with that, Mr. Siegel called up Joel Salatin, best known by foodies around the world for his role in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma as a sustainable-growth farmer. Salatin was out in his field with 50 pigs and some “ruby red” lipstick and proceeded to attempt to actually put lipstick on the pig. He complained that the pigs didn’t have much lip and it was more like putting lipstick on a hairbrush, and also that the pigs seemed to prefer to eat the lipstick rather than wearing it, but after a short struggle he was able to report back that the pig indeed did not look any better with the lipstick on. Excellent reporting, and very, very silly.

The Really, Really Big M's

On All Things Considered last night, Adam Davidson talked about what would have happened if Fannie May and Freddie Mac had failed, and I was shocked to hear that the amount of debt that they’re in for is $5 trillion dollars, which puts them at a larger debt than any other country (aside from the credit-riding US of course). What that means is that if Japan or the UK went bankrupt, it would have a smaller financial impact on the world than the potential bankruptcy of Fannie and Freddie. This is pretty scary news and really gives a perspective on both how important and how crazy these two companies are. As someone who’s averse to any kind of debt, it seems to me to underscore a lot of what’s wrong with our American culture.
One thing to note is that I was surprised at how much debt Fanny and Freddie were carrying, but at least I know that they were private institutions. That’s more than I can say for Sarah Palin, who seems to think that they’re taxpayer funded but doesn’t see her complete ignorance of important issues (among many other things to be covered in an upcoming blog rant) as a problem.

Primaries

Yesterday was Primary day, and I was unprepared. As I said in my prior post, I've been a bit distracted, and although I am the PCO* for a neighboring district and spent a couple hours leaving Primary-day endorsement pamphlets (i.e. cheat sheets) on the doorsteps of Democrats in my precinct, I hadn't had a chance to read through and mark up my voter's pamphlet the way I usually do. Plus, at around 7pm I was at C's house as per my normal Tuesday night tradition and realized I had totally forgotten to go to the polls! Luckily, C was understanding so we hopped into my car, drove home to get my voter registration card, voter pamphlet, and one of my left-over cheat sheets, and walked to my polling station.

We arrived in good time - there didn't seem to be many people there and the older women who always (wo)man the sign-in tables seemed excited to see us. I think I was a little more excited than most people who come through there, because they asked me if it was my first time voting, and then were very excited that C was there as an international observer. The poll worker reminded me that if I didn’t want C to look over my shoulder, I had a right to tell her to go away, which was not necessary but kind of cute. We decided to try the electronic voting machine again just for kicks, and headed over to the one machine available. (During this time, perhaps 5-10 people came in and voted, all using paper ballots.) Some things I noticed beyond what I shared during last November’s election:

• This was the first (and I really hope, last) year of the top-two primary. In this new system, Washington voters who for some reason have missed the fact that the purpose of the primary is to let party loyalists choose their candidates for their own party can now vote for anyone they want, with the top two vote-getters ending up on the general election ballot. Although in most cases this means a Democrat and a Republican will end up there (which cuts out the smaller parties completely) there are some areas and races where, after the election yesterday, two Democrats or two Republicans will end up on the ballot. This seems pretty dumb to me because if you have, for instance, three really capable Republicans and two really capable Democrats on the ballot, and assuming you have approximately a 50/50 split of voters for each party, you could end up with each Democrat receiving 25% of the vote and each Republican receiving 16.5%, and then end up with two Democrats on the ballot because the Republican vote got split amongst more qualified people. I don’t get why this is an improvement.
• As part of this top-two primary, each candidate has to say which party they associate with, but there’s no way for you to tell which of the “Democratic” candidates is the one that the party is really backing. However, the Republicans have figured out a sneaky system. I’d heard that Dino Rossi, the main Republican gubernatorial candidate, was planning to say “supports the GOP” instead of “supports the Republican Party” to avoid negative connotations about the Republicans in this election year . It turns out that all the “official” Republican candidates were doing the same thing, while the unofficial ones didn’t seem to get the memo. For the Democrats, though, you had to rely on your cheat sheet, if you had one.
• Last November I said that my printed-out ballot was hidden behind a plastic cover so I couldn’t review it. It turns out you can lift the cover to watch it print out. I have no idea why they wouldn’t have just used a clear cover so you could see it at all times.
• C and I tried to select a write-in candidate for one office, and it turns out you need to type in the candidate name and also their party affiliation. I found this very odd – I guess you could just type in your party affiliation and hope, but what happens if you got it wrong?
• I was amused at how uncomfortable C was about looking over my shoulder while I voted, despite the fact that I’d invited her to do so. I don’t know if it was because the whole “secret ballot” thing was drilled into her as a child or if it’s a Canadian thing (always a good place to put the blame) but either way, you should know that if C comes to the polls with you, and you haven’t done your research on a particular candidate so you hand her the voter pamphlet and tell her to read it and tell you who to vote for, you will be privy to a pretty funny look of shock and horror.
• Finally, some voting machine humor from XKCD for your entertainment:

*Precinct Committee Officer (or something like that)

What's Next?

Just a quick rant about the latest Senator Obama news. On Tuesday every show on NPR was full of news that Senator Obama is now denouncing Reverend Wright, with whom he formerly disagreed but couldn’t part because he had been a good friend and mentor for 20 years. He claims he’s denouncing him because he “is not the same man I met 20 years ago”. What did the Reverend do to deserve this? Did he share new, more offensive opinions? Actually, no. All he did was spend the past few days re-stating the same illogical and hateful views, including that the US government created AIDS and that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians is the equivalent of Apartheid. But somehow – clearly because public opinion demanded it – Senator Obama now claims that he’s so horrified that he has to denounce him.

There are two problems with this. First, I can’t believe that someone who listens to hateful speech for 20 years doesn’t pick up some of it, even if he claims he disagrees. There’s a reason the UK has one of the highest rates of anti-Israel sentiment, and I lay the blame firmly at their skewed public media source, the venerable BBC. Similarly, if all the churchgoers at Trinity United heard absurdities every day, some of it will stick – and I’m concerned about a president who subconsciously believes these things.

Second, and almost more important, is what the media will find out next about Senator Obama. Throughout this campaign, few have looked beyond his charisma, and this is the first piece of dangerous information to come out about him. Both Senators McCain and Clinton have been in the public eye for long enough that it’s unlikely we’ll find out anything serious and new about them. But if Senator Obama wins the Democratic nomination, what additional dirty laundry will be aired between now and November? And will it be ugly enough to make him lose the election? I’m not a huge fan of the Senator, but I still think four more years of Republican rule would be much worse for the country, and possibly the world.

Surveillance

I'm not usually a stickler for privacy. When people freak out over people tapping phones without warrants, or covertly checking out someone's library record, I usually shrug. It's not that I don't think that these things could be taken out of context and used to build a case against someone who doesn't deserve it, but I guess I have a naive faith in the justice system and assume that if such a thing happened, it would be unpleasant but the truth would prevail. There just seem to be bigger things to worry about, and frankly, my list of library books or transcripts of my phone conversations would most likely either bore anyone paying attention.

That said, I was definitely concerned about a story on Morning Edition last Monday in which Vicki Barker reported on schools in London using surveillance camera data to figure out whether someone actually lived in the school district as they claimed. (And tracking under-age smoking, along with other minor crimes.) There are a few things about this privacy breach that put this in another class for me, and I don't know which is the one that upsets me the most:

1. The information is not going to affect national security; is it really necessary to use subversive means to obtain it?
2. There are other easy ways to get the information (ask for phone records, utility bills, or even ask neighbors).
3. They asked parents for private information in order to even make use of the surveillance camera data (like car license plates) but didn't tell them what that information would be used for.
4. The footage is video footage, which somehow seems more intrusive than text.

Either way, I'm befuddled as to how this tracking was done. I've often heard reports that even though London has an insane number of video cameras (one for every 14 people) that capture every street, it's so expensive or time consuming to retrieve a particular camera's footage that even when crimes such as car theft or muggings could be solved with it, they don't bother to get the footage out. Add that to the fact that I was unaware that video software was good enough to truly track a particular car, and the fact that I don't know how the information that your car goes from place to place is a perfect indicator that you live in a particular area, and I become really confused, and concerned.

It sounds like a few people are starting to sue and protest this behavior, although they're not getting very far. Britain's Information Commissioner warned people a few years ago that they were, "sleepwalking their way into a surveillance society". I can't help but agree - to me this type of surveillance steps way past the slippery slope and may just hit the chasm below.

No Longer (Thank Goodness) A Presidential Candidate

As you may recall, E and I saw Mitt Romney a few months ago when he was on his campaign stump and I was kind of creeped out by him. That hasn't changed. However, a week or so ago, All Things Considered reported on his speech at the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner, in which he gave a top ten list of the reasons he left the presidential race. I was shocked to hear him be amusing, but even more so because he did it partly by making fun of himself. It doesn't mean I would have wanted him to be the Republican nominee - he agrees with Bush on everything and with himself on nothing (talk about a flip-flopper!) but I was impressed to see a more appealing side of him. A couple of my favorites are below (you can hear the whole thing here).

There weren't as many Osmonds as I thought.

I was upset that no one had bothered to search my passport files.

I needed an excuse to get fat, grow a beard and win the Nobel prize.

And my favorite:

There was a miscalculation in our theory: "As Utah goes, so goes the nation."

Faux Russian Candidate

Yesterday on Morning Edition Gregory Feifer reported on what I think is a brilliant and scary plot by Putin to create a fake opposition candidate. All the candidates that have any chance of getting significant backing or media (like Garry Kasparov) have been blocked at every turn with claims that the signatures they needed to make it on the ballot were forged. However, now there's a new candidate, Andrei Bogdanov, whom no one has ever heard of but who had no problem getting his candidacy approved. Mr. Feifer interviewed plenty of Russians who had no idea who this guy was either, and his interviews with the candidate made him sound like an absolute novice who was really excited because, although no one showed up to see him on his campaign stop, a few people in the street recognized him.

Personally, I think this sounds like it's right out of a novel. Not only does Putin have pretty much absolute power to go with his popular support, but he's not content with that and needs to exert complete control by actually creating a fake candidate to consolidate the opposition on someone harmless. How much do you want to bet that right before the election Mr. Bogdanov comes out and says that he supports Putin after all?

Firming up my status as a wannabe Canadian

It's not NPR, but after spending the weekend in Montreal with C and her sister J, I now have a favorite CBC radio catchphrase, "this show will be on at 8pm, or 8:30 Newfoundland". Apparently everything in Newfoundland happens a half hour later.

Also, in Canadian-wannabe-ness news, I went to the primaries today to vote in our election that doesn't count. I had to declare a party when I signed in, but then received a ballot that, though it had both party options on it, was as close to Canadian in simplicity as any I have seen. I think even C would have been happy to vote on this one!(Sorry for the fuzziness and strange yellow lines; I only had my cell phone camera with me.)

In which the Democrats teach us to do math

So the caucus was pretty interesting – although in our precinct the votes went 1 for Clinton and 4 for Obama, I was glad I was there and it was great to see so many people there all excited about electing a Democrat to the White House!

I got there an hour and a half beforehand to help set up. In our Legislative District, six precincts met in one big auditorium and had what they call an “area caucus” where the Area Captain (AC) read the rules for everyone before we were going to discuss and vote as individual precincts. To make it more obvious where to go, we set up colored balloons for each area and then I stood outside with a map helping people figure out which color they needed to go to. I also put up a bunch of Hillary signs – it was frustrating because I was the only one of the early volunteers who was a Hillary supporter, and when I asked the AC to make sure it was okay to put up signs in the auditorium she said, “as long as there’s an Obama sign there too” and was mildly rude to me all day. But eventually J showed up with our official “International Observers” C and E (I’d given the AC a heads up that they were coming and she actually called them out as “our Canadian friends who wanted to see how their wacky friends down south do politics” – it was pretty funny) and we got started.

At that point the AC let one speaker for each candidate give a two-minute speech. I’d spoken with another woman supporting Hillary and agreed that she should give that speech because she had a background in marketing and really wanted to do it, but unfortunately she wasn’t super-eloquent. The Obama speaker talked about how he’s so much more electable amongst swing voters and how he was inspirational. (We heard that a lot, and as E said, “what’s wrong with these people’s lives that they need to be inspired by a candidate? Can’t they find inspiration themselves and look for someone who can actually get the job done??”) We then broke up into our precincts to write down our names and initial votes, and I ended up giving my one-minute speech for Hillary at this level. They’d asked us to focus on one issue that was especially important to us, so for those who are curious, this is more or less what I said:

I work at Microsoft, so I see every day how hard it is for us to find and hire college students with a strong foundation in science. And that’s a problem, because maintaining our leadership in science and technology is what’s going to keep America strong and thriving, grow our economy, and help us start making a dent in fixing our environment.
So when I read Science magazine’s rave reviews of Senator Clinton’s science platform, I knew I had to support her. She’ll raise funding for the NSF and NIH, she’s got a bunch of creative ways to motivate more research in the right areas, and most importantly to me, she’s made a 100% commitment to take politics out of science.
I’m supporting Hillary because she’s smart, she can hit the ground running, she’s wildly competent, and she can win in November. Please come join me!

I got a lot of applause, but no one changed their vote because of my speech or any other discussions. It was interesting to see how different the various precincts were – some of them had long, long discussions and arguments back and forth; ours just had my speech and a response speech for Obama, something along the lines of, “I’m not just supporting Obama because I’m black; I’m supporting him because I have a friend who knows him and says he’s really nice.” I'm not sure about you, but I wasn’t super impressed. Then one woman got up and said she was voting for Hillary because we’ve been dealing with the politics of fear for so long, and people need to stop fearing that Hillary can’t win in November and should vote for her because she will make a better president. Finally someone else got up and gave another “Obama didn’t vote for the Iraq war” speech. That speech seemed to be very popular in the other precincts too, which just goes to show that math is not people's strong suit since Obama was not actually a Senator during the vote and wouldn't have been able to vote either way. C says she supports Hillary because she didn't vote for the war in Vietnam.

Anyway, next they tallied the votes (this was done by all the precincts at once with instructions from the AC – “copy column A to column C. Now multiply column C by column B. Now…”. It felt like a huge elementary-school group math lesson) and asked if anyone wanted to change their votes given the speeches (no one did) and then we chose delegates. I would have run as the one Clinton delegate or alternate, but there was a woman who really, really wanted to be a delegate and someone else who wanted to quite a lot, and I didn’t want to get in the way of energized people getting involved.

Overall, I’m happy I was there. J's been griping about the whole primary system because Florida and Michigan got disenfranchised (he has a good point; I think that’s appalling) but he seemed to have a fun time hanging out with a couple of our neighbors and cracking jokes with E and C about how the Democrats were teaching us to do math.

However, I’m also glad it’s over – I went a little overboard in my time and mental energy investment. I’m bummed about Obama’s win, but Clinton’s still got a chance overall and really the most important thing is that one of them winds up in the White House. And on that front, after all my phone calls trying to get some people to speak for Clinton at the caucus (that was horrible – I will never again agree to do cold calls) I saw a couple of people I’d talked to who were at the caucus because of my call, and interested in participating more between now and November, and my friend A ended up running her precinct’s caucus and getting elected to be a Clinton delegate after the training she attended with me a few weeks ago, so I guess I’m helping that goal at least.

With my caucus report complete, I'm going to do my best to stop writing about politics for a bit. We'll see how it goes.

Numbers I Can Work With

Today on Weekday Steve Scher interviewed several people about campaigns and politics, including Sheila Krumholz, Executive Director of the Center for Responsive Politics. She shared information on individual donations by people in Washington, grouped by the company where they work. Microsoft employees donated the most in the state, and specifically the top donation-getter was Senator Clinton (by quite a bit, actually - something like $130,000 to $80,000) while the top Republican was - are you ready - Ron Paul! That must explain all the Ron Paul signs I've seen around campus. Romney was next in line for Republican donations, but the best news was that Microsoft employees were the top donators to every Republican except Huckabee.

It makes me feel pretty good to know that the majority of employees here are not falling for the articulate but content-lacking hype which is Senator Obama. I'll get behind him if he's the eventual nominee, but if I have the choice give me someone who can hit the ground running, who is intelligent and thoughtful, who is practical and will get stuff done - I'll take Hillary Clinton any day.

And while you're at it, read this for an awesome articulation of what I've been thinking when I hear all the arguments and media coverage against her (thanks S for the link!).

Rock, Paper, Scissor for President...and Other Fun Caucus Facts

Last Sunday A and I went to get some good ol' fashioned caucus training. Being both frustrated by the complexity of caucuses (relative to our upbringing in nice normal primary states) as well as interested in the details of how they work, it was certainly an interesting experience. I thought I'd share a few of the things we learned, for those who are equally enamoured, although I certainly won't blame you if you aren't.

• First of all, apparently you shouldn't go to a meeting of the Democratic party if you don't want to really participate. I didn't mean to do anything more than learn a little bit about what my local Democrats were doing for the election when I went to their meeting last week, but somehow I ended up being elected Precinct Committee Officer (or PCO) of the precinct next door to me, being asked to give a speech about Hillary at the caucus, and going to caucus training a few days later. So be forewarned. But also go to http://www.kcdems.net/ to find out about your local district.
• Once you're involved, there are things you need to know. For instance, WA state Democrats allow you to vote for anyone in the caucus, even people who aren't running. There's no minimum threshold like there is in Iowa - anyone can stick with their candidate, even if they don't get enough votes to warrant a delegate.
• And by the way, Republicans assign all the delegates from any state to the winner of that state, while Democrats give proportional representation, so usually Republican choices are apparent way before Democrats are. This year might be different since so far three different people have won the three major Republican states that have voted so far. I'm just waiting for Thompson and Giuliani to pick up a couple states each too.
• The number of delegates that each precinct gets here in WA is determined by how many people voted for Kerry in the district, presumably in the last general election.
• When you enter the primary, you sign your name, your gender, your sexual orientation (optional, but strange that they would ask) and write in the name of the candidate you pick. After the votes are tallied the first time and people get the opportunity to try to change everyone else's mind, you can go back and cross off the name of the person you originally voted for and pick someone else. From what I can tell, this somewhat answers one of C's biggest questions (and mine too) which is - how do they report the percentages of votes in Iowa since the precincts just report the number of delegates? This was especially strange since Hillary came in third in the percentage of votes but second in the number of delegates that they think she'll eventually get from Iowa once they have their state convention later this year. Anyway, the sign-in sheet is public record, so the media must have access to it. I don't know how they calculate the percentages so quickly on caucus night since they have to decipher a hand-written stack of paper, but I'm guessing that's what they do.
• Delegate math is kind of like rounding but not. You take the percentage of people who voted for the candidate times the number of delegates being assigned by the precinct, assign each candidate the full whole number of delegates (so if candidate A got 2.4 and candidate B got 0.6 then A would get 2 delegates and B would get 0). Then you take the rest of the delegates and assign them according to who has the biggest remainder (in this case if there were three total delegates, B would get the last one). We were told that there were cases where this wasn't exactly like rounding, but I think that would mostly happen if you had exactly x.5 and it ended up rounding down instead of up...either way, it's pretty simple once it's explained to you. Unfortunately there seemed to be quite a few people who were confused. It doesn't help that they provide you a multiplication chart that makes it all look way more complicated than it is.
• After the tallying of votes and the fundraising of the money and the asking of people to become involved (and become PCOs), the next step is the electing of delegates and alternates. I have no idea what would qualify someone to be a delegate more than someone else. I guess stubbornness so you can trust that the person won't change their vote? Anyway, if not enough people volunteer to be delegates, then the precinct loses that vote. I guess if people aren't interested enough to go participate in the Legislative and Congressional State conventions, they can't influence who gets elected.
• Finally my very favorite thing - if you're distributing the last delegate and two candidates have the same remainder, you break the tie "by lot". According to our caucus training instructor, that means you can flip a coin or do whatever you'd like to randomly choose who gets the delegate. Which gives me an excellent image of people playing rock, paper, scissors to pick the next president.

Presidential Candidate, the Fifth

A while back E and I got to see Mitt Romney in action as he visited campus. The event started out well from a comedic point of view, with both a greeter at the door and several of his campaign staff showcasing preposterous Amish-style haircuts. After having seen so many reports of his "presidential handsomeness”, I found him to have a smooth speaking voice and general good looks, but he really lacked a presence. He stood in the front of the room...well, like a guy standing by himself in front of a room. The fact that he moves like C3PO doesn't help either. Some more highlights and lowlights:

• A scan of his website reveals my favorite political website component yet - the MittMarket. "Do you have items lying around that you don't use? From bicycles that the kids have outgrown to old electronics or baseball cards, your stuff may be someone else's treasure. Now, you can sell these items with little hassle and the added benefit of supporting Governor Mitt Romney." Christmas is over, but if you feel like buying me a gift, please do not do so from the MittMarket.
• He had a couple of value statements ("pick the right team" was the lamest) but one that I can't help but agree with, and which was calculated to excite the geeky audience he was speaking to - "I love to bathe in the data". I can appreciate someone who wants to make decisions based on lots of data. Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to depend on his ability to process the stuff, based on what he presented to us next.
• After mouthing a bunch of platitudes geared towards his base, “use the vibrant economy, privatize everything, lower taxes, make people realize that everyone should get married before having kids, reduce dependence on foreign oil, invest in technology , science is good” he ended with, “open up markets” and decided that a PowerPoint deck was necessary for that last point. The deck, aside from having been created in what looked like a 10-year old version of PowerPoint and being full of typos, was basically about how protectionism hurts and other countries have been making trade agreements that don’t include us “because we’re tied to politics” and included a proposal for a “Reagan zone of economic freedom” (I wonder how long they worked to weave the name Reagan into his plan?). There were multiple slides that he looked at and promptly skipped through, and what was most apparent was that he didn’t seem to have a particularly good grasp of what the data he was showing actually meant. So bathing in the data apparently just involved hot water and bubbles rather than real contemplation.
• He often repeated his position that states and local government should have complete control over everything and therefore he wasn’t planning to put forward a proposal for actually fixing anything (heaven forbid the Federal government should actually accomplish anything itself!) On healthcare, despite his record of getting statewide healthcare in MA, he though each state should “have the opportunity” to do the same but have no federal mandate. On Education, states should give scholarships for strong students to go to college (you can imagine this went over well with the gushing Jeb Bush supporter and her whiny, “why can’t you spend more money on my smart kids” attitude) but receive no federal funding because, “states have money”.
• I found it interesting that the only time he mentioned our wildly unpopular president was to agree with him. Bush’s current plan for Iraq and the surge is great (“thank god we didn’t have Obama as president”). The only thing the Federal government should do in education is continue Bush’s great policy of No Child Left Behind. Etc.
• He did, however, close his inspirational speech with a perfect summing-up of his positions. “I want to make America strong, and I’d appreciate your help and all your money”.

Wasn't that handy?

Why Canadians make fun of our low voter turnout

Compare all the craziness of the caucus process, the challenges of voting either through our interminable scantron ballot or digital voting machines, and just generally the over-involved process us Americans go through to what C's Vancouver absentee ballot looks like:

(pencil added for size reference)

And is it any wonder Canadians are more likely to vote?

Tell me again why I care about Iowa?

I generally just ignore the "square middle states" as B's husband calls them, and I'm kind of grumpy that I have to hear all about what random people in Iowa think about presidential politics. NPR, along with everyone else, has been talking to tons of people in Iowa about who they're going to vote for, and I've been trying not to care because I think the fact that primaries happen on different dates in different states is completely broken. But that's not what I wanted to talk about here, on my first blog post of the new year. Instead, I wanted to talk about caucuses.

On the local news today I heard to my dismay that Washington state is going to continue to use caucuses this year, as they did during the last presidential election. Apparently the Democrats are going to entirely use the caucus results, while Republicans will use the primaries to allocate 51% of their electoral votes and the caucuses to allocate the other 49%. I'm pretty confused, because I thought that last time we switched to caucuses because they were cheaper than primaries even though they're extremely inconvenient and the number of people who have 2 hours to spare for voting and who bother to figure out the process is small. But if we're having primaries anyway, why are we still having caucuses?

Anyhow, a few minutes later on All Things Considered, Melissa Block reported from the home of Joe Loebach, who was hosting his 6th caucus tonight. First she mentioned that part of the caucus complexity is both getting folks to go (apparently bribing them with food, babysitting, and who knows what else is legit, based on other pieces I've heard on NPR this week) but also allocating people correctly. Each "district" within Iowa has votes according to how many people showed up to vote last time around, so if, for instance, a candidate got all her supporters out to vote but they all went to the same district, it wouldn't help her (Ms. Block compared it to the Democrats getting 10 million extra people out to vote in New York). But from what I understand, you don't have to go to the place closest to you so each candidate has to convince people to disperse around the various homes.

Next Mr. Loebach explained how the caucus this evening will work, and it seems to be just as crazy as the regular electoral system and require regular citizens to (gasp!) do math. People come in (he expects 30 but has room for 50) and say who they're supporting, and get broken up into different areas of the room. Since his house has 2 electoral votes, at least 25% (8 people) need to support a specific candidate for them to have any potential to get votes. If people's candidate of choice doesn't get enough votes, they can change their votes, leave, or go to the "undecided" section, and eventually the house works out whom to cast the two votes for. Then Mr. Loebach calls a magical phone number and punches in some buttons, which "instantly" let some messageboard in Des Moines update, and Mr. Loebach and his caucus colleagues watch this on TV. Simple, right?

So okay, I actually like the idea that you can come in and vote for your candidate and then select a secondary and tertiary candidate if yours doesn't have enough support, but you could do this on a regular ballot much more easily! And I especially dislike the fact that people who are susceptible to peer pressure (or, more common, spousal pressure) are forced to tell everyone who they're voting for, and possibly even shout down people who disagree. This is one of the many reasons I don't like enforcing vote by mail, because often women's husbands fill out their ballots for them and force them to sign. (It might be a good idea in our household if J persists in trying to tick me off by vowing to vote for Huckabee though!). Caucuses just seem to exacerbate this problem. They also remove all the people who can't afford or don't want to be away from their family, or work, or anything else for several hours from the political process. And they also require untrained civilians to do math, always a dangerous proposition. So overall, a bad idea.

That said, apparently I'll be reporting from a real-life caucus in a few months, since otherwise I can't get in my vote for Hillary. Let's hope she's still in the running after the square middle states get their opinions out.

Thankfully Not A Candidate For Anything, The First

Playing catchup here...A long while back, E and I heard Jeb Bush was in town and of course we had to go see him. I was really curious about what to expect - after all I loathe his brother but Jeb hasn't been given the chance to screw up the country (and hopefully never will!) so I thought I'd give him a chance. Overall, although I was happy to see that he doesn't suffer from his brother's embarrassing verbal skills, I was totally unimpressed. Jeb came to town to talk, not about the future or what he wanted to do, but about "great leadership" - i.e. how great he was when he was governor of Florida.

The audience was small, and consisted primarily of the conservative/libertarian group at work (called the CLAMs!). Jeb tried to pull out some Libertarian credentials - I couldn't quite follow them; something about government being a heart with clogged arteries, post-heart attack and unable to change - but mostly he answered questions from whiny parents and avoided all tough questions. A couple specific comments that struck me:

• He talked about some of the innovative things he did to help listen to his citizens. For instance, he gave people his email jeb@jeb.org and supposedly got millions of emails, which I'm sure he read carefully. He also held citizen hours, where he let anyone have 5 minute increments to talk to him. Apparently he learned about, “rodents in basements, varmints on streets, traffic lights misplaced”, all, “things important for a governor to know about”.
• He said that overall 60% of students in college graduate in 6 years, with the #1 degree being psychology. However, he says of psychologists, “we have enough in Florida”. He said he prefers occupations where people are creating wealth. It's interesting since even J wouldn't call psychology a "homeless degree" as he so considerately calls English degrees.
• Jeb spent a majority of time talking about how education is broken, but as with most politicians we've seen, neglected to come up with any solutions. When some folks in the audience asked for specifics, he offered, “teacher’s unions are bad because they lack accountability. The local Florida teacher’s union mortgaged their building to support my opponent during his campaign…I thought that was entrepreneurial of them.” I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like much of a "solution" to me.
• A bunch of parents in the audience whined about gifted kids not getting enough money from public schools. Jeb's response, “we’re losing our geniuses" and “high school is boring, even if you’re not smart” E's response:” I went to math camp.” My response, "You've got to be kidding; you work at Microsoft, you can afford to get your kid in some after school classes if it's so important." (The main whiny mom showed up to hear Mitt Romney when we went to see him too, and E and I noticed her clapping and glowing as though in the presence of a demi-god when Mitt said he'd give more money to gifted education too.)
• Jeb obviously thought interest in politics was something to take seriously; he said, “the fact that you showed up at a PAC meeting for a former governor on a random afternoon means you’ve got something funny going on with your life”
• Finally, the organizer of the event said, “who will be president - you’re off the record here”. Jeb's reply: “nothing is off the record!”

At least he was right about the last part.

Russian Democracy

A couple days ago on Morning Edition, Gregory Feifer reported on the upcoming election in Russia and how Putin is doing his best retain power. As R has reported in his blog several times, Putin has already served the maximum number of consecutive terms that he can under Russian law (depending on how you count, he might have actually served an extra partial term already) and there are lots of theories as to how he'll retain power. While I find all the potential political machinations fascinating, what I find scary is how little Russians seem to care. In fact, Putin is so popular in Russia that most people would welcome him staying in power indefinitely. This is scary on two fronts:

1. Putin's government is, for all intents and purposes, an authoritarian regime. He's using the same sort of fear propaganda that Bush uses against the Axis of Evil, referring to the enemies who "toppled the Soviet Union and sowed chaos in the 1990s" and saying a vote for his party as the only way to save Russia. Russia is cracking down left and right on freedoms and liberties, everything from disqualifying a political party because they aired an ad that said Putin is leading the country backwards to (according to a recent Business Week article) pulling a Pepsi ad showing teenagers playing music and just raising the volume when the neighbors complain because it was deemed that it incited anti-social behavior. But Russians don't care; they love Putin.
2. Russian Democracy is being dismantled after only a few years, and it seems like most Russians actually support it! They don't care if Putin changes the Constitution or changes laws, as long as he stays in control.

One of the quotes in the piece summed it up - a Russian woman said, "The thing is, people really feel a sense of stability and order right now. I'd be perfectly happy if Putin stayed for a third term and violated the constitution". It makes me wonder, how long does a country have to have Democracy before people become a true advocates of the system? We always talk about "bringing Democracy" to the Arab world, and it's clear there are countries which are not yet ready for it - where you need to start slowly and build up the economy and make people feel secure before you have complete Democracies so people don't immediately vote for the strongest candidate out of fear. But Russia has been a Democracy for a while now and it was, more or less, working out, so why don't people care that it's slipping away?

I try to compare it to the US - I think most Americans are extremely proud of being a Democracy and of every citizen having the right to vote*. If someone tried to break the constitution here there would be huge outcry (as there was with warrant-less surveillance). While I think I would have been tempted to set aside constitutional limits on how long a President could serve if it would have allowed Bill Clinton to stay in the White House instead of our current excuse for a leader, ultimately I would never have been in favor of it since laws like that keep also limit the amount of time a horrible leader can be in power. So how long does it take? Do you need to be a Democracy for 30 years? 50? more? before your citizens, who might not agree with each other on most things, at least feel like being a Democracy is more important than their differences?

I guess we'll all have to wait and see how far Putin's "cult of personality" takes him.

* Even though I heard another NPR story last week about how 43% of Americans would trade their right to vote for a $50 Olive Garden gift certificate.

Presidential Laddie Candidate, The Only

A few weeks ago, right before Hillary Clinton came out to speak, the announcer gave out a teaser by saying that someone even more exciting was coming the next week. At the time, I couldn't imagine who would be more exciting than the top-ranked democrat and first woman with a serious chance at becoming president, until I found out...her husband! Overall, I was definitely impressed with Bill. He is indeed the great speaker that everyone makes him out to be, especially when he starts in on one of his anecdotes - he is a wonderful storyteller and can really weave the story into the message he's trying to get out. His speech to us focused mostly on giving and the environment, and made a few key points:

1. Giving is growing - there's been explosive growth in NGOS - with 1,070,000 NGOS in the US, half of which were created since 2000.
2. Giving is getting easier with technology - he told a charming story about what he called his one duty as husband of a senator - going to the NY State Fair. He was there a few months after the Tsunami and a woman came up to him and gave him some cash for his charity. She worked at the state fair and told him that she'd prefer to give online but that she didn't have time to get to a computer, so she was giving him the money directly. He said the fact that even someone without much education and money preferred to give online made it clear that this was the way to go.
3. Environmental change is only going to happen if you make it economically advantageous - which it already is. All the countries that signed and are sticking to the Kyoto treaty have had their economies improve relative to countries that haven't. (He argued that this was because many new jobs were created by working on environmentally friendly solutions, although I don't know that you can assume that this was really what made the economies better.)
4. When Jeb Bush was in town (I promise I'm working on my write up - really! I know I have a lot of catching up to do) he spent his whole talk on leadership and never said one thing that was interesting. Bill Clinton was asked what distinguishes a great leader. He responded that great leaders understand where their people are in the sweep of history, can paint a picture of where they want to be and convince people that they should try to get there, and who lived what they believed. He gave only three examples - Rabin, Mandela, and Muhammad Yunus (last year's peace prize winner for micro-loans, who Bill said he campaigned for for years - apparently when Yunus won he told Bill that the head of the peace prize committee told him, "at least that Bill Clinton fellow will stop calling me now)
5. Someone asked him if he could be appointed Secretary of State. I loved his response - it made me remember that at one point we actually had a president who was smarter than me. Boy I miss those days! Anyway, he immediately explained that a law was passed in the 1960's to prevent a president from appointing a family member to a cabinet post. He explained the history of the law (Congress was responding to JFK's brother being so influential on his cabinet, although he was one of the best Attorney Generals there were according to Bill) and got in a jab at the Republicans (saying the Dems had passed the law because it was the right thing to do even though it wasn't great for them, something the Republicans wouldn't have done). He also said that he shouldn't be appointed because no one should be on the cabinet who the president cannot fire. He actually joked, "I know she could fire me, but the country doesn't".
6. He ended on a hopeful note talking about African countries which have a large Muslim population still being very pro-American because they see us a preferring diplomacy to unilateral action because of the work we've done to save their kids from AIDS, malaria, etc. He said it won't be rocket science to change our global image once we get a new administration - we just have to prove to these and other countries that America is back.

*As an aside - I found out that Bill was planning to head to UCLA the next day where my little sister would be seeing him, and I considered baking cookies and asking him to be a courier for me, but I thought that might be a bit forward. E wanted me to try to seduce him so that he could show up and get a picture with Bill, but I said no to that one too. Don't want to cause a scandal and hurt Hillary's rankings!