Eric The Blue

More election results

Hendrik Hertzberg looks at the election scoreboards.  In the presidential race, it was Obama over Romney by four million, and, in the electoral college (hisssss!), by 332 to 206.  Meanwhile, in 33 elections for U.S. Senate, Democrats got, in the aggregate, ten million more votes than Republicans, and boosted their advantage from 53-47 to 55-45.  Unless the filibuster rule is changed--Hertzberg's on that case, too--it may not help much, since 55 < 60 as surely as 53 < 60.  The surprising result was in the 435 races for U.S. House--surprising because, while Republicans remain in the majority, Democratic candidates received about a million more votes.  Who's drawing the boundaries of congressional districts?  Granted, we Democrats, by crowding together in the nation's big cities, make it easy for those who would balkanize us to balkanize us.  Here in Minnesota, we have one House district for Minneapolis and a few of its inner-ring suburbs and another for St. Paul and some of its inner-ring suburbs.  Both are represented by liberal Democrats who get around seventy per cent of the vote.  The three suburban-exurban districts that surround these two urban districts are all represented by Republicans--the execrable Michele Bachmann is one--who receive on average about 55 per cent of the vote.  If these five districts were shaped like slices of pie that came to a point at the East Bank campus of the University of Minnesota, then possibly neither liberal Democrat could win in any of them--but there would be more Democrats in all five. 

But, no, we Dems all hang together in the 'hood and make it possible for Republicans to argue that the election result shows that "the American people" want them in charge of the House of Representatives.  If there weren't so many carefully drawn lines around "the American people," it would be easier to tell that this argument is a crock.

Lincoln on the editorial page

Everyone is talking about Lincoln, the movie, including one Edmund N Santurri, "a professor of religion and philosophy and director of the Ethical Issues and Normative Perspectives Program at St Olaf College in Northfield, Minn."  It takes balls of brass to disagree with him, because "[h]e has taught a seminar on 'The Religious Sensibility of Abraham Lincoln,'" but here goes.

Dr Santurri's point is that the movie gives short shrift to Lincoln's religion.  It's possible, however, that he overstates the case.  I think at the very least he gives short shrift to Lincoln's skepticism, which, in his telling, is essentially the pose of a callow youth who in his mature greatness acquired a religious soul.  That doesn't really stand up, however.  When Lincoln, age 37, ran for Congress in 1846, his opponent, a Methodist minister, accused him of "infidelity."  Presumably, the charge was something more than a pure fabrication, and Lincoln felt compelled to respond--in the form of a campaign handbill.  Here it is--quite an interesting document, I think.  Lincoln gives no explanation for not being a church member, a current fact.  He has never denied the truth of Scripture but does not now affirm it.  He says that he has never spoken with intentional disrespect of religion but does not say that he believes in it now.  He does not now disavow the skeptical views to which he admits being attracted as a younger man.  Now, Lincoln was an ambitious man, and being connected in any way with enmity toward religion wasn't going to aid his prospects for advancement.  The handbill therefore is interesting mainly for what it does not say.  Lincoln does not say that he is a believer. 

The Lincoln who was seeking a seat in the House of Representatives in 1846 was not a posturing college student in the thrall of whatever philosopher he had last read.  People do not often change their views on these questions after age 35, although I admit that presiding over the Civil War is the kind of thing that might cause one to rearrange some furniture.  Santurri's account of Lincoln's spiritual development, however, has the effect of reducing Lincoln.  Yes, two sons died, but who really thinks Lincoln was the kind of man whose view of things would be overturned by death under his roof?  It's indisputable that he used religious language in his presidential oratory--most memorably, in his Second Inaugural address.  It's possible, I think, that Lincoln knew his audience at least as well as Dr Santurri knows Lincoln's mind.

 

Thanksgivings, present and past

Yesterday, while Amanda was whirling about the kitchen, I tried to be helpful by putting a load of clothes in the wash.  When a half hour later I went downstairs to make the transfer to the dryer, I was greeted by a pool of water on the laundry room floor.  Happy Thanksgiving!  "Well, it's not an emergency," says Amanda.  "Get your butt up here and start peeling potatoes."

But then, this morning, we discovered toilet paper pasted to the floor in an abstract pattern, and, floating near the floor drain, more alarmingly unpleasant matter.  Shit! Enough to make you envious of the Black Friday shoppers. 

For an evocative account of Thanksgivings past, I recommend this, James Wolcott's account of bucolic Amtrak rides from New York to Baltimore and then evenings of TV watching in a motel room.  These were accomplished during his bachelor days, which reminded me of all the Thanksgiving mornings I was on my own till, early in the afternoon, it was time to head out to the family feast.  Toward the end of this happily lonesome period I took to participating in a 5-kilometer "fun run" through downtown Minneapolis on Thanksgiving morning.   After one of them, I was having a hard time finding an open coffeeshop.  I finally tiptoed into one with an open door but no customer, or employee, in sight.  Almost immediately a small Chinese woman came out from the back.  Turns out, she was preparing Thanksgiving dinner for homeless people. Taking in my matted hair, stained gym bag, and tattered sweats, she concluded I was early and, refusing my money, set me up at a corner table with muffin and coffee.  Her English was not the greatest and I couldn't make her understand that I wasn't there for her dinner.  I guess the visual impression I made was more persuasive than my words.  When she bustled back to her kitchen, I was left alone with the book I had brought to read, which for some reason I still remember was a Library of America edition of Theodore Dreiser.  I sat there for an hour or so, reading and helping  myself to more coffee, then left a ten on the table and departed without ever seeing my benefactor again.  This was in Minneapolis's warehouse district, and I think the name of the place was Nikki's.  When I tried to go back during normal business hours, it was something else.

Happy Thanksgiving to my legions of devoted readers!

The book or the movie?

If you google "Anna Karenina," the first return is the Wikipedia article on Tolstoy's novel.  The next five returns all pertain to the current movie directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and Jude Law.  Under the header, "News for anna karenina," return #5 entices with the lede to a review of the movie in my hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "'Anna Karenina' rewires Tolstoy's classic tale of marriage-wrecking, reputation-ruining passion into a streamlined, sexy and playfully satiric. . . ."

These ellipses shall not be pursued by me.  Why are movies based on novels you love always such a disappointment?  Part of it is just that the medium doesn't translate.  I mean, novels, if they are good, tend to be impressive linguistic performances.  Movies, however, are made of pictures, not words.  The example I always think of is from The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald's short masterpiece and the inspiration for more than one star-studded stinker of a movie.  There is a scene in the novel wherein Fitzgerald is describing the people who come to the lavish parties Gatsby throws, and he writes, of one of them: "Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a blurred air to her face."  That is a fine sentence for which there is no cinematic equivalent.  The novel is as good as it is partly on account of the cumulative effect of Fitzgerald's hard, glittering prose.  Meanwhile, the movies--their faces are blurred.

The cumulative effect attained by all the words that make the novel Anna Karenina is largely a function of just how many words there are.  It's a very long novel in which, if you have a job and family duties, you can be sunk for weeks.  When you're finally done, you miss the characters, which is an achievement that a movie cannot hope to match.  Speaking of family duties, I think one of the many very memorable scenes in Anna Karenina occurs in Part 6, Chapter 16.  Dolly, while travelling to Anna's house for a visit, has a conversation with a young peasant woman, who mentions that she recently buried a daughter.  In response to Kitty's conventionally kind question, the woman says that it's all for the best, children are a burden, and anyway the "old man" already has enough grandchildren.  Kitty is at first shocked by the coarseness of this, but, stewing over things as the carriage rolls along, her interior monologue is recorded by the greatest of novelists:

'And what is it all for? What will come of it all? I myself without having a moment's peace, now pregnant, now nursing, always cross and grumbling, tormenting myself and others, repulsive to my husband--I shall live my life, and produce unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children. . . . Well, supposing the best: that none of the other children die, and that I somehow succeed in bringing them up; at the very best they will only escape being ne'er-do-wells.  That is all I can hope for.  And for this, so much suffering and trouble. . . . My whole life ruined!'  Again she remembered what the young woman had said.  Again the recollection was repulsive to her, but she could not help admitting there was a measure of crude truth in the words.

I'm guessing that this is one small episode that doesn't make it into Joe Wright's smart and sexy update. 

Last electoral college post till the next one

I've been thinking more about the electoral college--almost necessarily, for I sent an edited version of my last post to the Star Tribune, which published it as a rebuttal to the familiar defenses summarized, neatly but without irony, by D.J. Tice, and I have in the aftermath been hearing from people.  Thirty-one comments to the online version of my article!  I think that equals the number of all comments ever submitted to this years-old blog.  Who says traditional media is finished?  Not those of us airing our obsessions in the exurbs of the Internet.

I disagree with some people who seem to think of themselves as being on my side.  Keeping the electoral college, but dividing up the state-by-state award of electoral votes by congressional district (as Maine and Nebraska currently do), is neither a remedy nor a fair compromise.  In the real world, it would penalize Democrats for clumping together in the urban centers of the northern tier of states.  When all this year's presidential ballots had been counted in my district (Minnesota's Fifth, which includes the entire city of Minneapolis) and the one that adjoins it on its most northerly border (Minnesota's Sixth, represented by Michele Bachmann), Obama was ahead by well over 100,000 ballots.  But in the congressional district version of the electoral college, the count that mattered would have been 1 to 1.

Putting aside considerations of fairness, battleground districts are not an improvement upon battleground states, especially when there is an obvious remedy at hand--every vote counts the same, and the candidate who receives the most wins.  It's as if the electoral college is a bad habit that we can only hope to ameliorate.  No.  Just dump it.  Most votes wins.

I confess to being surprised when smart people think this question of the electoral college is a close call. Here is the usually sensible Michael Tomasky performing the on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other dance.  His major point is that a national popular vote election would have a polarizing effect, since both sides would strive to "turn out the base."  But it's not as if both sides do not now attempt to turn out their respective bases.  The question is how many people are in those bases, and what do those who aren't in either one think?  It seems to me that statewide races, especially in large states, are an experimental laboratory that disproves Tomasky's theory.  As I pointed out in my article, Hillary Clinton, when she was running for U.S. Senate in New York, did not confine her effort to Manhattan.  Instead, she devoted most of her attention to parts of the state where her support was much lower than in New York City.  If you consult your own experience and observations, I think you'll conclude that my Clinton example is the rule--one for which exceptions are difficult to discover.  Why would a national popular vote election be different?

 

D J Tice on the electoral college

It's hard for the electoral college to lose when its defenders, like D J Tice of the Star Tribune, declare it a national treasure just because it did not this year result in a pyrotechnic debacle.  By the same logic, he should recommend that we all take up Russian roulette.  Six games would result in five Tice columns concerning the upside of this pastime.

It shouldn't require the brain spatterings of 2000 to persuade us to drop the electoral college and elect presidents the same way we elect every other office holder--most votes wins.  This year's presidential election occurred in around eight states with less than a fifth of the country's population.  For Republicans in California and Democrats in Texas, the only way to have an impact on the outcome was to give large sums of cash.  The all-or-nothing allocation of electoral votes, which according to Tice brings "closure" to a tight election, does something tangible: it disenfranchises many millions of voters.

Tice nods in the direction of what ought to be deal-breaking flaws of the electoral college and then argues that they are trumped by airy nothing.  Note that he does not give an example of a presidential election in which the national popular vote was so close that the winner was in doubt.  That's because it's never happened, and there are mathematical reasons to suppose it never will.  The electoral college is far more likely to trigger a crisis of legitimacy.

What about Tice's notion that the electoral college "forces candidates to seek broader national support"? Yes, that would explain why President Obama spent so much time stumping among rural whites in Kansas and Nebraska.  The electoral college has the opposite effect of what Tice claims.  It doesn't force candidates to broaden their appeal.  It causes them to ignore wide swatches of the country.

The best way to force candidates to seek broad national support is to award the presidency to the one for whom the most Americans vote.  When Hillary Clinton wanted to be a senator from New York state, she did not confine her effort to Manhattan.  Actually, she pretty much ignored Manhattan.  Instead, she barnstormed upstate, where her support was weakest. When a vote is a vote is a vote, it makes sense to try and win 47% instead of 42% of them in areas you know you will be outpolled.

Were the electoral college as splendid as Tice says, we would make little electoral colleges in all the states so that we could enjoy the undemocratic, distorting effects in our races for governor and US Senate as well.  There's a reason no one is arguing for that kind of election "reform."  We need the reform represented by the National Popular Vote movement.

Notes on the election

1.It was the parallel universe of Newt Gingrich, and of Michael  Barone and John Hinderaker and George Will, that struck a nonethereal object and crumbled.  The world according to Nate Silver and The New York Times turns out to be the real one: fifty-for-fifty, assuming Florida falls into Obama's column.

2. Regarding the marriage amendment here in Minnesota: when it comes to making you feel fine, it's hard to top the sensation of great waves of Schadenfreude rolling through your nervous system.  Republicans put same-sex marriage on the ballot to get their people to the polls.  Democrats came out, voted it down, and, while they were at it, turned the Republicans out of the legislature for good measure.  Almost a fairy tale.

3. On the other proposed amendment, which would have required photo ID at the polls, Governor Dayton and the (former) DFL minority in the legislature deserve buckets of praise.  Republicans passed it when it polled well, but despite the bill's popularity not a single DFLer supported it, and Dayton issued a veto.  Republicans then put it on the statewide ballot as a constitutional amendment, where it would be safe from the veto pen.  Dayton (and others, such as former Republican governor Arne Carlson) argued tirelessly against it, support waned, and yesterday the voters rejected it by a substantial margin.  Wouldn't it be pleasant if life were always like that?

4. It was a good night for Democrats and pot smokers, both recreational and medicinal.  I fully realize that this formulation sets up a joke concerning the degree to which these demographic groups overlap.  Don't look at me!  I only drink.

5. I spent most of the night clicking between CNN and MSNBC and thus missed the theatre of the absurd on Fox News when the numbers crunchers called Ohio, and the election, for Obama, thereby causing Karl Rove, the on-air commentator, to flip out.  "No, no, no, there are still a lot of Republican votes in Hamilton County!"  So the blonde anchor takes a long walk down some winding corridors to discuss the matter with the guys who have a grip.  Calm down, Karl.  Everyone knows your math is not The Math and, anyway, your guy is also losing Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa.  It's over.  Face the front.

6. According to Steve Schmidt, the on-air Republican at MSNBC, Romney was headed for 60 percent of the white vote, which has not been achieved since George  H. W. Bush did it in 1988.  Back then, that was good for more than 400 electoral votes; last night, it didn't get Romney within hailing distance of 270.  The country is turning brown and the R's reaction is to double down on old white guys.  "Show me your ID!"  "Self-deport!"  It's as if their desire to win elections is overwhelmed by an innate nastiness that the lizard mind cannot suppress.

Election eve

I  don't know what's going to happen in tomorrow's election.  As John Cassidy cautiously notes, in a post predicting Obama will accumulate 303 electoral votes (that's his electoral map I've copied in here), the only preferences that matter won't be known till tomorrow night.  But there are reasons for us blue-coats to be ruddy.  Nate Silver, who in 2008 made 49 correct calls (the exception being Indiana, which he put in the McCain column), gives all the most renowned toss-up states to Obama: New Hampshire, Virginia, Florida--Florida!--Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada.  (Willard wins North Carolina.)  Romney's lead in the national polls has pretty much disappeared, and Obama's lead in polls of the states that matter may be fairly characterized as small but consistent and, if anything, growing. 

What really makes me optimistic, however, is the dopey things Republicans are saying.  Whenever you hear one talk about the size of Romney's crowds, and their enthusiasm, you know they know they're losing.  So why should I disagree?  Saw Newt Gingrich tonight on CNN talking about "parallel universes."  There is the real world and then there is the world according to Nate Silver and The New York Times.  In the real world, Romney is surging as surely as are his crowds.  (Won't it be nice to retire that verb--"to surge"--till the next election season?)  Newt, like Michael Barone, projects an easy Romney win. 

Well, we shall soon see which parallel universe bumps into a nonethereal body and crumbles.

One more note: Scrolling around on The Internet for interesting election news, I find the following from Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei at  Politico:

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites.  That's what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign.  It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it's possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

Obama may win, but if he does, it's tainted, you see, because among whites he could only win the overcaffeinated, hypereducated ones.  "Real Americans prefer Romney."  That's what they mean, right?  When was a recent Republican win ever qualified by the observation that, having failed to win a majority of nonwhites, single women, and holders of advanced degrees, there could be no broad mandate?  Broad mandates, it seems, are for Billy Bob to confer.

Hume; Hinderaker

Super-storm Sandy and the dearth of election polls has so wrenched my daily routine that I find myself pursuing arguably more worthy pastimes--a perusal of David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion while the storm raged and Messrs Gallup et al left off placing calls.

Hume is not one of those philosophers, like Plato or Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Russell, that some people read just for pleasure.  His Treatise of Human Nature, which I recently slogged through, is no page-turner.  It was finished before Hume was 30, and he summarized the book's reception by saying it "fell dead-born from the press."  Pick it up, start reading: you'll see why.  The Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, on the other hand, was published  posthumously and is fun to read. It could have been sent to the press while its author lived, but being publicly skeptical about Christianity in 18th-century Britain was not good for one's career, or health, and Hume's friends advised him to keep it in a desk drawer.  His nephew oversaw its publication in 1779, three years after Hume died.

Nothing sparkles more than the tenth chapter, concerning the question of whether ours is the best of all possible worlds.  Here is the contribution of one of the characters in the dialogue:

Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into this world, I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence.  To turn the gay side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures; whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to opera, to court?  He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of distress and sorrow. . . .

When he is contradicted by one with a more cheeful view, this same character replies:

Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintance, whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life.  No! But the next twenty, they say, will be better.

And from the dregs of life, hope to receive
What the first sprightly running could not give.

Thus at last they find (such is the greatness of human misery; it  reconciles even contradictions) that they complain, at once, of the shortness of life, and of its vanity and sorrow.

The couplet is from the English poet Dryden; Hume changes the verb in the first line from "think" to "hope."  Inevitably we arrive at familiar, "unanswered" questions:

[God's] power we allow is infinite: Whatever he wills is executed: But neither man nor any other animal is happy: Therefore he does not will their happiness.  His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of nature tends not to human or animal felicity: Therefore it is not established for that purpose.  Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. . . .

Epicurus's old questions are yet unanswered.  Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? then he is impotent.  Is he able but not willing? then he is malevolent.  Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil?

Hume in all his works appears to anticipate modern biology in denying that human beings are somehow set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.  "Neither man nor any other animal is happy."  Schopenhauer perhaps was thinking of Hume, whom he admired, when he memorably weighed in on this general question:

A quick test of the assertion that enjoyment outweighs pain in this world, or that they are at any rate balanced, would be to compare the feelings of an animal engaged in eating another with those of the animal being eaten.

If you are of the right-wing, Christianist persuasion, and find this all too dismal to contemplate, allow me to suggest the election prognostications of Power Line's John Hinderaker.  Following Michael Barone, he has the following line-up of states in the Romney column: Florida, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin--and a total of 315 electoral votes for Willard.  The notable thing about the "analysis" behind this prediction is that it is unconnected from any polling data.  There were 22 polls of battleground states published yesterday.  Here are the results (courtesy of Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight blog):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John diagnosed his own case when, in a long-ago post (2004), he wrote: "One of the most powerful forces in human affairs is wishful thinking.  It's impact is incalculable."  Hume would concur.