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.

These are my choices

The five candidates running for governor and U.S. Senate are listed below, along with a little blurb on what I know about them. I feel confident that I am better informed than the average person; still I must admit that most of what I know comes from the ads they run, which are mostly about their opponent, or on the pretty superficial news coverage that tends to focus on either the horse race or personalities.

For U.S. Senate:

Charlie Crist is the current Republican Governor of Florida. As such he was a favorite of independents, but his moderate views led him to believe he could not win the Republican primary so he is running as an independent. He may be gay. Since his main opponent is very conservative he has become much more conservative in his views the past few months and is a world class flip-flopper. His main challenge comes from…

Marco Rubio, the Republican nominee and darling of the Tea Baggers. He is a financial deadbeat and has probably illegally used campaign funds for personal use. He is young and charismatic and of Cuban decent. Sarah Palin likes him and he is a dangerous, right-wing nut job. He is leading in the polls. There is a third candidate…

Kendrick Meeks is a black guy and the Democratic nominee. He is currently running a poor third in the polls. A lot of people seem to want him to quit so Crist has a better chance. I don’t know much about him since he has no money for ads, the other two don’t bother to pick on him and the press ignores him.

If any of them has a position on the Middle Eastern wars I haven’t heard it.

For the Governor’s job we have:

Alex Swift is the Democratic nominee. Her husband ran against Jeb Bush for Governor and lost in 2002. She was the CFO of Florida and lost billions during the ’08 financial meltdown. She’s a former Bank of America CEO fir Florida. She is a descendant of the Siamese twins Chang and Eng She has a really annoying accent.

Rick Scott is the Republican nominee for Governor. He owned a bunch of donut shops and was then the CEO of a heath care company that the Feds fined $1.7 billion for some kind of fraud – I’m not sure why but it was after he made millions. He lived in public housing when he was a kid. His mother loves him and he will cut taxes.

My Congressman is a guy named John Mica. He is a Republican and has had the office since 1992. He won with 62% of the vote in ’08. He’s running against a woman named Heather Beaven (above) who has never run for office before. I had to go online to learn even this. I’ve never seen an ad or read a word about either of them. Maybe there’s Tea Bagger running too but I haven’t heard.

So anyway, you can see why I’m so enthusiastic about this election. Heather is kind of cute. I'll probably vote for her.

19-0

That was the score of the response to the October 5 post asking which option you prefer between supporting the current national parties and a new independent party. The total number of unduplicated votes for the Indy party on both the Daily Blank and Facebook was 19. No one voted for the Redemlicrats; a few people voted for “none of the above” which is how I plan to vote next month.

What does this tell us? I think it tells us we are in the last decade of the dominance of the two big parties. Things are broken. They are fixing nothing. There are more registered Independents than R’s or D’s according to a recent Pew survey. The Tea Party is rising and this relatively liberal audience is just as fed up.

Bring it on I say. Then maybe we’ll address the real problems. We now spend far more time discussing “don’t ask/don’t tell” than we do with the wars themselves. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of that issue, but each day the New York Times lists the names, ranks, ages and home towns of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were seven yesterday. The oldest was 22; there were two 19-year-olds.

We all know they died for access to oil, and yet Congress has no energy to address energy. Did you read Tom Friedman’s recent column on Congress’ unwillingness to commit one billion dollars over five years to speed development of cutting edge energy research? That’s $200 million dollars per year. What does that buy? I believe that pays for 200 foot soldiers in Afghanistan for one year. At the current pace we will have another few hundred dead teenagers in that perpetual Western death-trap of a country over the next year.

But I’m sure the Democrats and Republican have a secret plan to make this all make sense, right?

The Three Stooges of the Senate

If you want to understand why our political system is so completely impotent when it comes to solving the major problems of the day, I strongly recommend and article from last week’s New Yorker, "As the World Burns" by Ryan Lizza. It is a non-partisan, clinical, dissection of the inner workings of the Senate as it contemplated energy policy legislation this past year. It looks in particular at the unlikely team of John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham as they attempted, in classic Three Stooges style, to draft bipartisan legislation.

I was moved to read it by a recent Tom Friedman piece, "An X-Ray of Dysfunction," which is the Cliff Notes version, but you must read the New Yorker article to get the full sense of how inept and morally corrupt the legislative process has become in the hands of the Republicratic party – or Demoplican if you prefer.

RIP Solomon Burke

Less well known, but just as talented as any of the super soul and R&B stars of the '60's, Burke's 2002 comeback album "Don't Give Up on Me" featured songs written for him by Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson and Tom Waits. Here's a link to a YouTube video of Burke singing "None of Us are Free" from that disk, backed up by the Blind Boys of Alabama. It's a treat. Solomon will be missed.

Joke of the weekend

A guy enters the “10 items or fewer” line at a supermarket in Cambridge, Mass. with an overflowing basket containing many more than ten items. As he begins unloading his cart, the comely young cashier says to the man, “Why, you must attend either Harvard or MIT.”

The man puffs up at this and replies, “Why yes I do, but how ever did you know?”

“Well, there’s a sign right in front of you that says ‘Ten items or fewer’ so either you attend MIT and can’t read, or Harvard and can’t count.”

[The above courtesy of “Car Talk” this morning. BTW, where did Larry Summers go to school?]

Good news, according to a Pizza Hut commercial playing today on ESPN, they have revamped and “simplified” their menu so that it has no more “confusing combinations or math.” Finally, someone is doing something to help people too stupid to read a Pizza Hut menu.

Great moments in the green movement: Earlier this week, Frito-Lay, the manufacturers of Sun Chips, announced that they will cease selling the snack in the world’s first compostable bag. The reason? Consumers complained in large numbers that the packaging was “too loud,” thus proving once again, that no personal inconvenience is too small to be rejected by consumers in their mindless pursuit of whatever the hell they want. Resistance took the form of at least six different Facebook groups protesting the annoyingly loud bags.

How I danced before my knees got old.

So if you could choose…

If you could choose to invest your time, voice, money, interest – whatever -- into one of the following political options, which would you choose?

Option 1 and 1a would be to support either the Democratic or Republican parties as they are today. That is: large, old, highly established organizations, with complicated hierarchical structures, increasingly dominated by the extreme end of one side of the political spectrum. Each is in the debt of numerous very large special interest groups, upon which they depends for billions of dollars in order to feed their machines. The two parties have alternated control of the country for 150 years.

They traded power 3-4 times just since WWII, a period of time in which the country peaked probably 35 years ago. In the subsequent years they have involved the country in 4-5 wars (depending on what you count), and the national debt has soared to alarming levels, all as they have changed the rules to make it easier for them to retain power. As the country’s problems multiplied, they have been frozen in inaction for 40 years arguing and fighting over largely tangential issues in an increasing partisan fashion. Meanwhile it’s been 37 years since the first oil boycott and there is still no national policy to decrease dependence on imported oil.

Option 2 is to throw your support to a new, third political party. Let’s call it the Independent party. (Roughly as many people in the U.S. today call themselves Independents as self-identify as either Republicans or Democrats.) The Indies would stand for moderate policies close to what used to be thought of as those of liberal Republicans or conservative Democrats, before those terms became oxymorons.

The leadership for the Indies would come from a loose association of very high profile, wealthy individuals, who, while they might also be politicians, are better known for their accomplishments in the private sector.

The Indies will show themselves to be pragmatic politically, and unafraid to bring difficult issues the country faces to the forefront of the debate, while offering realistic, achievable, measurable ideas for solving problems.

Some of these very public people might not be in your Top Ten, but even if you dislike them it is quite possible you dislike them for non-political reason. For example, you might not have a problem with his record as a mayor but dislike Michael Bloomberg for his billionaire’s aloofness.

So those are your choices. I’m sure everyone reading this can think of a couple of things that make this a Hobson’s Choice (Thomas Hobson, above), given the number of unknowns and the hypothetical nature of Option 2. But the big picture is correct, isn’t it?

It’s not really a very difficult choice once you see that Options 1 and 1a are not really two separate choices. They represent just one choice because the two parties have conspired to create a political monopoly, and they have absolutely no reason to change anything. There have no competition today.

You can have chocolate or vanilla, but if you want Chunky Money, or even good old-fashioned strawberry, you are shit-out-of-luck mates.

So which would you choose?

A cause for optimism?

It is funny how life sometimes intersects with itself at the strangest times. I was watching “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” this evening (sans commercials on Turner Classic Movies), not really paying much attention. In fact, only inertia kept me from finding the remote and turning to something else. The movie’s message that the common man, and common sense, can sometimes win the day over entrenched special interests and the political machine just rings so hopelessly naive in these days of hyper-partisan do-nothingism.

The scene when Mr. Smith begins his marathon speech did get a chuckle from me, as it was so unusual in its day (1939) that all the reporters jumped from their seats and ran to the phone banks screaming, “Filibuster!” it wouldn’t earn a tweet from a junior Senator today when it takes 60 votes to decide what to order for lunch.

So, a quick chuckle then back to this morning’s newspaper. I turned the page and started reading Tom Friedman’s column, “Third Party Rising,” and my spirits began to rise as well. Friedman claims that “at least two serious groups, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast,” made up of what he calls “the radical center,” are developing political parties to compete with the bankrupt, Republican and Democratic parties.

I’m sure some of you are already rolling your eyes, but he’s not talking about Ross Perot or John Anderson waging a lone Quixotic crusade. He’s talking about a real party and he seems to link these efforts (although he isn’t this specific) with wealthy technocrats and entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and elsewhere.

This would be a party of serious people, who not only believe in free enterprise, but have lived that life and understand that real problems are never solved unless we first speak them out loud and keep all options for solving them on the table.

Their commitment would be back by serious money; rich people with a real interest in finding solutions, so that their efforts can continue to keep them rich, and too much money to make them vulnerable to the pernicious, single-minded self-serving special interest groups.

I’ve been thinking for years that the only way out of our mess is to somehow take the money out of the election system, but I think I’ve been wrong. We need t fight fire with flame-throwers!

Imagine the combined fortunes of Michael Bloomberg, Meg Whitman, Jon Corzine, and Carly Fiorina, joining with Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison and the Google/Facebook geeks to back rational, problem-solving candidates from the “radical center” who actually speak the truth to the electorate without looking over their fund-raising shoulders.

Are they going to sweep the nation in 2012? Probably not, but if an honest conversation broke out we’d have a minor miracle right there. I hope you’ll read the article if you haven’t already; the description of the established parties by a Stanford political scientist is worth the effort alone.