A reason to vote and I told you so

With the election so close and my travel plans for next week tying me up, I devoted some time to the elections this week, mostly looking for a reason to even bother. Well, I found one. Florida has two amendments to the State Constitution on the ballot that will theoretically outlaw gerrymandering. As I wrote in a post earlier this year, gerrymandering is one of the principle reasons Congress is so ineffectual. It is inherently anti-democratic, and it produces safe seats that can be more easily held by one extreme or another, which then leads to further political polarization. I’ll show up to vote for them with enthusiasm.

As long as I’m being self-referential today, I posted a letter I’d sent to David Axelrod back in February 2009 in which I urged him to be more proactive in the administration’s defense of the stimulus bill. He never answered. But I see Austan Goolsbee (above), now the Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, just put out a short video in defense of their success on the jobs front. It is short, clear and understandable. If this were the 50^th video in a White House Economics-Made-Easy Series they’d be looking a lot better in the midterm elections than they are, but it’s a little late now.

President Obama should also have adopted my stimulus plan, but that’s another post.

For those of you who are interested, I've posted my Life 3.0 plan on the What's Next web site. Wish me luck.

Mrs. d’blank and I are heading to California for a week, so I’ll be off the air for a while.

The root of the problem

If you believe, as I do, that the country is facing a long list of huge problems, and that Congress is doing very little of substance to solve any of them, then what is the root of the problem? We often hear that a lack of bipartisanship is the issue, but what does that really mean? Just that the 535 people already in Congress can’t work together, but what forces put those people in the position to stymie the problem-solving role of government?

The problem is that our elected representatives no longer represent people as much as they represent an ideology. And ideology, like theology, has been argued for millennia without a winner emerging. There never will be a winner. There will only be losers, and we are them.

Why do our representatives represent ideology rather than people? It is at least in part, because of gerrymandering. This is one of the great examples of the laws of unintended consequences at work. Politicians, in an attempt to make their own offices more secure, have created Congressional districts that resemble metastasizing cancer cells or Jackson Pollock paint splatters more than they do a rational association of citizens with common problems and concerns.

Instead of districting so that areas with common issues and problems (suburban, urban, industrial, farming, etc.) are together, districts are created by politicians, that lump together people who are disposed to vote similarly, or by purely racial categories, regardless of how geographically remote they are from one another.

This lessens the practical common bonds among the constituents but allows their natural cultural and ideological commonalities to run free. So instead of debating the practical merits of policies and how they will affect our lives, we argue their ideological merits – a kind of massive, communal circle-jerk.

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David Brooks’ column today offers a fascinating look into why our leadership class in all fields is suffering from diminished respect and support from the people they lead. I highly recommend it.

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The Plan (an update). I was distressed to discover yesterday that Glenn Beck’s next book due out in August will be titled "The Plan." I’m going to have to find a new name for my scribbling on the process of developing my new life plan. Suggestions are welcome.

I learned about Beck’s book from a piece on the Daily Beast that was an excerpt from a new book called “Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America,” which appears to skewer both left and right.

Here is a really scary fact of Beck’s own admission: he smoked pot every day for 15 years. Instead of telling us smoking pot would make us heroin addicts, perhaps our parents should have warned us against becoming Glenn Beck. It might have been more effective.