Interesting. FWIW, it's not even a universal practice at Pearson. I published a book in Addison-Wesley's Professional Computing Series, and nobody told me I couldn't talk about the terms of my book contract.
Hm. I'm not particularly proud of having Feinstein as my Senator. I don't loathe her, but I also haven't seen much sign that she's unusually distinguished, unusually courageous, unusually eloquent, or unusually effective. She seems like a pretty ordinary moderate-to-conservative Democrat.
Which isn't to suggest, mind you, that I have any plans to vote against her, ever. I don't expect her to have a primary challenger, and I would vote for her over any conceivable Republican opponent. (I can explain why I think that's rational if people want, but I imagine the explanation will be familiar to most people here.)
I'm skeptical of this particular October Surprise theory not because I think the Bush crowd has any scruples (like Patrick, I've noticed that I've been wrong every time I thought I saw a line they wouldn't cross) but because I doubt they have the competence to do it. I think that pulling something like this off would be hard, and I don't think they have the ability.
The one thing they're good at is using the US election process to their advantage, and that's what they're doing: fundraising, slime campaigns, press manipulation, voter intimidation, redistricting abuse, petty vote fraud where necessary. I hope Kerry can win by a big enough margin to overcome all this.
McCain is not and never has been a moderate. A lot of liberals have been delusional about him. I hope they stop.
I voted for Nader in '96, and it was a strategic vote. I didn't think he matched my views better than anyone else in the country (if that had been my criterion I would have voted for myself), and I didn't think he would be the best President out of the subset of people who had a realistic chance of winning. (First, he wasn't and isn't in that subset; second, I think it should be obvious to everyone, Nader supporter or not, that he would be a miserably incompetent President if by some miracle he did get elected.) I voted for him for purely instrumental reasons: I thought at the time that the country would be better off if the Green Party got permanent ballot access and public funding, and that voting for Nader in '96 would help accomplish that.
I didn't vote for Nader in '00, because I thought my instrumental reasons were no longer valid (if they ever had been). And that's even more true in '04. Regardless of whether you think that the country would be better off if there was a national institutionalized left party that could consistently poll at the 5% level, voting for Nader can't give you that: he isn't representing any such party. He's now attacking the Green Party more viciously than any Democrat ever did. He now represents nobody but himself and Karl Rove.
You know, the trouble with making an argument by sarcasm and snark is that it obscures whatever point you're trying to make. Sarcasm is occasionally useful, but it's a blunt instrument.
I can tell that Will thinks it's unfair to blame Nader for anything, or at least something of that sort. I simply don't know what his point of view is beyond that one-sentence summary, or why he holds that point of view, or why he thinks anyone else might want to hold it. Everything but the crudest and highest-level point he might be making is obscured by the thick sarcasm. If one's goal is to further a discussion among people of good will, that's not the best way to do it.
Yep. I imagine I'll be voting for him for President some day. (But no sooner than '12, I hope.)
(But how do you get four words out of Holy shit. Obama?
The first way to convince the Democratic Party to listen to your opinions is to join it and vote in primaries. Who do you think "the Democratic Party" is, other than its members? (Hint: it's not the DLC.) Who do you think decides on the Democratic Party's candidates, other than its members?
I voted for Edwards in my Presidential primary, and I did that precisely because I wanted the Democratic Party to give more emphasis to what Edwards was saying. I and people like me succeeded in that.
But if you want the Democratic Party to pay even more attention to your views that it does to the views of other Democratic voters---well, there's nothing particularly secret about that, either. There isn't a zero-effort way of doing it, but you weren't asking for a zero-effort way of influencing the Democratic Party, were you?
Roughly in increasing order of effort, here are some ways of making sure that the Democratic Party will listen to your views more than if you just voted in the primaries:
- Show up at your local Democratic county committee. Get to know the people who are there working for the party between elections, talk to them about your views, and become one of them.
- Get yourself chosen as a delegate to your statewide Democratic convention.
- Become a fundraiser. I know plenty of people who have hosted house parties, and I know at least one fan who's going to the convention in Boston because of the contributions she raised for Kerry. Nothing particularly magic about what she did: she asked her friends who donated to Kerry to say that they were donating under her auspices.
- Join a group that's working to influence the direction of the party, like MoveOn. Again: go to local meetings.
- Found your own 527. We need persistent foundations and advocacy groups that last beyond the next election, and nothing is as effective at changing the direction of a party as a well organized group with a constituency inside the party. (The Sunday Times published a great article about this.)
- Run for local office.
It's true that the Democratic Party won't pay much attention to you if all you do is vote for a Democratic candidate every four years. But y'know what? The Democratic Party will pay even less attention if all you do is vote for a non-Democratic candidate every four years. Change takes more than that.
Believe it or not, I had a serious point behind my quantum silliness. If I had written that post in a more serious tone, I might have put it like this:
The electorate was closely divided between Gore and Bush. If Gore had won by a 20% margin then it would have been fair to say that the typical American voter was a Democratic voter, but that's not what happened; Gore won by less than 1%. So we've got to say either that Gore voters and Bush voters are both typical, or that neither are. We can't characterize a typical voter as either Democratic or Republican.
Are there any useful statement you can make about the typical American voter? Not sure. Here are some candidates all of which I find plausible. (You'll note that I'm only claiming they're "plausible", not that they're all true. They can't be, since they're contradictory.)
- The typical American voter is strongly committed to one of the major parties. Even voters who say that they are independent, and who say that they are undecided months before an election, have predictable voting patterns that tie them to one of the parties.
- The typical American voter doesn't even think about politics between elections and doesn't make up his/her mind until the last couple weeks before the vote.
- The typical American voter feels alienated by politics, thinks that all politicians are crooks and that the whole process is corrupt, sees no important differences between the parties, and decides whom to vote for based on the candidates' perceived personality (as mediated by TV) instead of what positions the candidates stand for.
- The typical American voter chooses candidates based on ideology, but it's an ideology of cultural self-identification rather than an ideology that has to do with policy proposals.
- The typical American voter votes based on perceived economic self-interest. (Some voters vote against their own actual economic self-interest, but that's just because they're making factual errors about what their self-interest really is.)
- The typical American voter supports economic policies that are characteristic not just of the Democratic mainstream, but of the Democratic left. (Single-payer health care, for example.) The reasons this doesn't translate into overwhelming Democratic victories in elections are complicated.
- The typical American voter is really the non-voter.
I doubt that. I imagine your average leftist-who-wants-to-make-fun-of-Republicans would prefer making fun of Republicans in a way that's more closely related to the specific charactistics of Republicans that deserve mockery.
Generic snarkiness about politicians, in a way that airily floats free of specific policy issues and specific behavior by specific politicians, gets old pretty quickly. It's bad politics and it's bad comedy. What it feels like to me is an attempt to capitalize on a sort of formless discontent with politics without running the risk of offending any individual by talking about any of the things that might lie behind that discontent.
I wouldn't quite say that. I'd say the average American voter voted for something like 0.75 |Gore> + 0.66 exp(i φ) |Bush>. I'm not sure what the value of φ is.
(But the modal American voter voted for Gore, yes.)
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|---|---|
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| 2004 | 10 |
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