The Vote Heard 'Round the World

I voted today from Argentina. My parents sent me the ballot, I completed it, and dropped it off in the US embassy. Before going to the embassy I assumed it would be a little oasis of America but no. I had to speak Spanish to get into the place and I had to go through a security check point. Anyway, I am proud to say that I have voted, although being from Washington and with our beloved electorate college my vote doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of difference. Why the hell do we still have it? It makes the entire election become the decision of a dozen or so "battle ground" states. Just think, if we hadn't had it in 2000 we would have avoided the worst president in the history of the United States, according to some, George W. Bush. L.B. Johnson was pretty bad as well. So I handed the sealed envelope to the employee in the embassy and he said everything was good. But think, the employee could easily shred my envelope after I had left, or he could put it in a larger envelope and shred that envelope and I would never find out. Anway, that's all I've got. I just wanted to inform everyone of my commitment to freedom and liberty.







(I accidentally embedded the video twice and i was going to correct it, but then I played both simultaneously with a one second lag and it was too awesome for me to take it out.)

Comments

MZ said…
LB Johnson was one of the greatest presidents, according to others, I guess -- he was a civil rights pioneer who helped put minority rights forward 20 years.

The one major reason we still have the electoral college is so that the inordinate sums of time and money that the candidates spend already in campaigning do not become even more inordinate; for example, neither McCain or Obama will have to bother campaigning in Texas (which is staunchly republican) or California (which is staunchly democrat). Otherwise, the candidates would focus all their limited time and energy on California, Texas, New York, and Pennsylvania and not give the slightest shit about such small "battleground" states as New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado, or Iowa.
October 28, 2008 at 4:29 AM
taylor said…
And he was the main cause of US escalation in the war in Vietnam from 16,000 soldiers in 1963 to 550,000 in 1968. But you have a good point with the civil rights. In my international relations class we just cover, well..., international relations and thus things like civil rights get missed. Aren't there better ways to curb excessive campaign spending than the electorate college? They could easily remove the electoral college while at the same time passing legislation that caps spending. Theoretically speaking, a candidate could win the US election with a popular vote somewhere in the neighborhood of 25%(if they win half the states (electorally)by one vote and lose by 100% in the other). It just seems like a useless relic of the past.
October 28, 2008 at 4:07 PM
MZ said…
Touche... But you could argue with your prof that domino theory was almost ubiquitous amongst mainstream politicians at the time.

Spending can't be capped... who would be responsible for it, and how would it be enforced? This is no military dictatorship! And anyway, isn't the point to get as many people as possible all over the US to believe in a candidate's message as much as possible?

Yes, the Electoral College does have its blips, as we all got to witness firsthand in 2000 when Bush lost the popular vote yet still won the election. But here's the upshot: if there were a better system, it'd already be in place.
October 29, 2008 at 2:19 PM
taylor said…
making a spending cap on campaign advertising doesn't make us a military dictatorship and i don't think keeping tabs on spending would be too difficult either. As for informing the public of the candidates, a larger responsibility would have to be taken by the media (something else that needs reform I might add). In terms of the argument "if there were a better system, it would already be in place," i have to disagree. People are incredibly resistant to change(why the fuck do we still have the penny for example), and it's really hard to get reform of this kind and importance through Congress even if it is ultimately better than what's in place. It seems it is brought up every four years and then everybody forgets again.
In terms of the domino effect, yes you could argue that Vietnam was a logical progression of the policy of Containment, but Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara proposed a comprehensive strategy for withdrawal early in the campaign and he was ignored by LBJ. Likewise, Kennedy was working towards a deescalation when he was assassinated, had he lived it is likely we would have never been entangled in Vietnam.
Mike you study economics right? If you have to do a research project/paper in the future, you could look at the role petro dollars played in the US housing market bubble.
October 29, 2008 at 5:28 PM
MZ said…
The military dictatorship quip was to illustrate the difficulty in enforcing the cap. The government has enough trouble tracing how it spends its own money (thus the $20 billion or so that the government mysteriously “loses” every year). How would it check the accounting sums for every single candidate? How much would the act of spying on the candidates’ balance sheets cost in itself?

And it’s not ordinary people who decide what system we have; it’s those in Congress and the Senate. You could probably say a lot of really clever things about the constituency of those two bodies as well, but I certainly trust them to represent us better than the average citizen could.

I don’t really have much to say about that since you obviously have much more information about it than I do, but I don’t think we disagree about “containment” being the prominent theory at the time.

Hey man, econ is more quantitative and less qualitative than you think! It’s not history; we don’t do papers!
October 30, 2008 at 10:40 AM
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