One Vote to Rule Them All

Many years ago, perhaps in 2001, we recall reading a Republican Shill’s explanation for George Bush’s popular-vote loss: The rules dictate the campaign. If, instead of a state-based electoral vote, we elected Preznidents by actually counting everybody’s ballot, nobody would give a fuck about Ohio or Florida.

At the time, we considered the argument specious, coming, as it was, From The People Who Brought You Bill Clinton’s Non-Mandate Popular-Vote Pluralities. And while we’ve been more than happy to cite Al Gore’s Pyrrhic victory over the years, fact is, the Republican Shill was right.

How do we know this? We live in the eighth-largest city in These United States, and the closest we’ve come to this campaign is Mitt’s La Jolla beach house. In fact, of Our Exceptional Nation’s fifty largest cities, only eleven — Jacksonville, Columbus, Charlotte, Denver, Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Virginia Beach, Colorado Springs, Raleigh, Miami, and Cleveland — are located in a state deemed worthy of Team Obama’s or Team Mitt’s attention.

And none of those are in the Top Ten. Imagine an election where NYC, LA, or the Hub From Hell actually counted for something.

Depending upon the oracle you consult, Obama’s victory Tuesday night will range from dozens to perhaps a hundred electoral votes. Yet Mitt may prevail in raw votes from states that have been happily ignored all year.

Should that happen, we’ll be happy now, as we have been all our life, to entertain proposals for ditching an archaic institution that was created to soothe Rhode Island’s ego. But after 2000, and especially during our Teabagger Era of Tenth Amendment Fetishists, we don’t want to hear a goddam word from wingnuts bitching about a stolen election.

You want Federalism, assholes, you fucking live with it.

19 Comments

Haha. Silly Nojo. Of course the Teabaggers will shriek. Ignoring their own hypocrisy is way of life.

It just drives home the fact that we do not live in a democracy as some would like to believe.

I pray to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that this will all be over 36 hours from now. I can’t take much more of this, and I am neurotically re-loading FiveThirtyEight instead of trying to work.

@BobCens: “Representative democracy” is obviously tl;dr.

@SanFranLefty: He’s got next. Don’t worry about it. Save your worrying for California’s Prop. 30 — if it doesn’t pass, we’ll be looking up Mississippi’s behind in terms of education and infrastructure.

Test with two spaces after the period. Test with three. Nojo, are you forcing your hipster orthography on us?

Update: You are — but at least you’ve left us old guys the em dash.

@Dodgerblue: WordPress default — strips extraneous spaces from comments. And WP also automatically converts double-hyphens to an em-dash, although with my background, I have option-shift-underline in muscle memory.

Also — here we go again — THE ONLY REASON TO USE DOUBLE SPACES AFTER FULL STOPS STEMS FROM MONOSPACE TYPEWRITER FONTS. Don’t try that shit in a room full of sullen typographers.

@Dodgerblue: Come to think of it, it’s browsers that collapse multiple spaces — rendering standard. If    you    want    actual    spaces,    you    have    to    use    the    “non-breaking    space”    code.

@Dodgerblue: And we still don’t know who dumped 11 million into the No on 30 campaign in the past week. Who the hell has that kind of spare change?

@SanFranLefty: The LA Times believes that the Koch bros are at the end of the chain of money-laundering foundations that moved the $11 million into the state. Shocking, I know.

I don’t buy the complaint from New Yawkers or Missippians that their vote “doesn’t count”. You chose to cluster among like-minded thinkers, so enjoy the echo chamber. Those of us living in “battleground” states have to get up everyday and socialize at the Giant Eagle or Buffalo Wild Wings with people with whom we can’t talk about much more than the weather. It tests the limits of tolerance, sure, but keeps us humble – well, maybe smug.

@Beggars Biscuit: I live on the Left Coast but if I drive 30 miles inland, I’m in the kind of territory you’re talking about.

@Dodgerblue: Right – you’re near the land of the Son of Orange County! As well as Barstow and, um, Stockton. And New York has its rural, upstate conservative wing and Mississippi has, well – Sweetwater? Stillwater?

Every vote counts. It’s just some mean more than the others.

Nice Obama Volunteer Lady just walked up and hung a polling-info card on the neighbor’s doorknob.

Not my doorknob. Not the other neighbor’s doorknob. That neighbor.

I voted Barry by mail. The other neighbors can’t be anything but Barry voters. So why that neighbor? Registered Demrat? (I’m officially Indie.) No absentee ballot on record? Dunno.

But it was that neighbor, and none other. Your Obama Machine At Work.

@Beggars Biscuit: Eugene is also a lake of blue in a sea of rednecks. Which is why Pete DeFazio likes to remind local voters of his NRA membership.

@Beggars Biscuit: Yep, Frank used to live up in Laurel Canyon, sort of on the west end of the Hollywood Hills. The song Valley Girl, featuring his daughter Moon Unit, mocks the San Fernando Valley where I grew up. And btw, Moon Unit was dead-on accurate in Valley girl talk. As Frank said, watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow!

@Beggars Biscuit: @Dodgerblue: You mean the longtime high-school friend of The Artist whose books I designed and whose iPad app I’m working on? That Frank?

@nojo: I think so. Willie the Pimp is one of my favorite tunes. Has Capt Beefheart on vocal and Don “Sugarcane” Harris on violin.

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