Two things last week reminded me what a sad joke it is to believe we live in a democracy in terms of presidential politics. First, McCain "conceded" Michigan to Obama—effectively nullifying the presidential votes of all his roughly 2 million Michigan supporters in one fell swoop. I wonder what it feels like to have your presidential vote go from crucial to meaningless in one news cycle?
But it's not fair to blame McCain for that aspect of it. He was just bowing to the ineluctable reality of the Electoral College, which says that if a solid majority of the people in your state prefer a different candidate than you do, you may as well not bother casting a presidential vote. Of course that's just one of the electoral college's many sins against democracy; my personal favorite is the fact that the vote of any yahoo in Idaho (or Wyoming, or Rhode Island, or...) carries more weight than my trivial California vote. Not that it really matters to me, since my vote is already nullified by the zombie-like masses of habitual Democratic voters who dominate the state. But a "democracy" in which some people's votes effectively count several times as much as others'? A break, please, I beg you.
[Side frustration: liberals and progressives who seem incapable of internalizing the fact that depending on where they live, the electoral college may free them to vote for the candidate they genuinely prefer.]
And the second thing: this interview with George Farah, the founder of Open Debates, in which he details just how the two major parties collude in manipulating the presidential debates in order to maintain their collective grip on power. Well worth a read (or viewing) for wonderful anecdotes like this:
[In 1996,] when Ross Perot ran again, he was polling exactly the amount he was polling prior to the debates in 1992; he was polling at nine percent. He had $36 million in taxpayer funds. And yet, he was excluded. Why? Because behind closed doors, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole struck a deal.
Bill Clinton agreed to exclude Perot as long as Bob Dole agreed that there
would be only two debates instead of three debates, that they would abolish
follow-up questions, and that they would schedule those debates opposite the
World Series. Bill Clinton was winning by about twenty points in the polls, and
he didn’t want anyone watching these debates or any difficult questions
challenging his authority.
And that’s exactly what happened. Perot was excluded, despite $35 million in taxpayer funds. The debates were held opposite the World Series, resulting in the lowest viewership ever. No follow-up questions. Only two debates. And the American people had no idea, because the Commission on Presidential Debates secretly implemented the contract and took all the flak.
Most of what Farah had to say wasn't news to me (just as I'm sure it isn't news to many of you), but it's a reminder of how much effort goes into subverting genuine democracy at the presidential level in this country.
So I'll be voting on November 4th just as I do in every election—but not because of the inconsequential presidential race. No, as always I'll be spending the vast majority of my election-related time researching the ballot propositions, where my vote genuinely counts (especially the city propositions, which regularly pass or fail on margins of a few hundred votes and which have a direct impact on my daily life). I always find it ironic that so many more people come out for presidential elections, when those are exactly the elections where their votes count the least. In the US, the real democracy is local.
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