Hillary: A Bush in Democrat’s Clothing
Disgusting is the politician who uses his opponent’s skin color and religion to fear people into voting for you. Hillary became disgusting when she said Obama’s not a Muslim “as far as I know“.
Pathetic is the politician who attacks people because they disagree with him, especially when he is incredibly wrong. This is what Hillary became today. From Reuters:
“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal.
“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.
Sadly, the attack-when-wrong tactic is a tried and true method of convincing people that you are right. But if this is your strategy, then who needs to be right? Tired is the politician who conforms the world to his worldview, rather than making the adjustments to his worldview that would cause it to fit the world.
“Mission accomplished,” right?
I’ve had enough of this bullshit for the last 8 years to last a lifetime…Â how about you?
Jack on 05 May 2008 at 1:02 am #
You know, if we didn’t have winner-take-all elections, many of the perverse incentives wouldn’t exist. We’re all just slaves to the median voter, and you can’t blame a slave.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 05 May 2008 at 9:48 am #
Convince me that the alternative you are suggesting is a) easy enough for people to understand and b) plausible to install given our political context, and I will refrain from making fun of your STV fetish.
Is it in Hillary’s interest to act as I have described above? One could argue that it’s this type of politicking that has hurt her in the first place. People see Hillary as self-serving and untrustworthy. Recall that she had massive leads in the polls just a few months ago. She had to lose these leads before she had to play catch-up, and she was not the victim of the type of negative campaign that she has waged against Obama. And through this experience, Obama has resisted from shining the spotlight on her reluctance to reveal the donors for the Clinton library…
It may be in her political interest to lay the smack down on Obama right now, I’ll agree with that. But she should not have the incentive to endeavor to win by amassing ‘negative’ legitimacy. She should be building her own legitimacy as opposed to simply destroying his. It’s unclear as to why her supporters are not more willing to reign her in given the incentive for the party to win the presidency. A bunch of superdelegates have recently flocked to Obama, but not enough - apparently - for her to change her tactics.
I gave $50 to Hillary when she was running against Rick Lazio for her Senate seat in New York. She lost me on her own volition.
Jack on 05 May 2008 at 10:50 am #
*ring ring*
“Hey, Hill. This is Mandelbaum. I’ve got a check for $2 mil here that says you won’t go negative.”
“By the way, I’ve just graduated from Georgetown. Any leads on a job?”
In all seriousness, I was not being serious. Even if there is a shred of truth in the point. With respect to those worms, I lay down my can opener, having recently skimmed the lit on negative campaigns for a fellow reformer of winner-take-all elections.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 05 May 2008 at 12:08 pm #
Fine, dis my $50… but are you dissing the power of The Democratic Piece?
The only reason I mentioned my $50 is to show that I’m not just a Hillary Hater, as I believe there is a vast contingent of people in this country who have hated her from the beginning. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt at one point in time and, for that reason, I think my position is somewhat more meaningful (if not more influential).
So, go ahead, make fun of my petty contribution… but you’ll still have to deal with my anti-STV antics.
MSS on 06 May 2008 at 4:01 pm #
“Convince me that the alternative [vote] you are suggesting is … easy enough for people to understand…”
Opponents of STV and IRV always reach for the argument that the voters can’t understand it (with precious little–usually no–evidence).
I find it rather ironic that Andrew raises this matter in a comment to a post of his very own in which he (correctly) derided Clinton for pandering to the anti-intellectualism of simple voters.
Jack on 06 May 2008 at 7:15 pm #
I confess to not understanding the mechanics of seat allocation when I first learned of STV in my adolescence.
But the instruction to voters is pretty simple. “Rank your choices in order of preference. If you vote doesn’t count for your first, it’ll count for your second.”
The strong form of the too-confusing argument turns on culture-bound innumeracy.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 11 May 2008 at 8:52 am #
The seat allocation is obviously the big issue, and I would bet it’s at least part of the reason why only about 2% of people in Australia select the ranking option.
Regardless, it would be difficult to convince me that an STV or IRV system be implemented in a country without substantial democratic experience. In electoral democracies, the requisite of obtaining a result that all parties see as legitimate is priority one. While IRV or STV may, at the end of the day, may give a more fair reading of the constituency’s will, they are more difficult to comprehend. For this same reason, and perhaps more importantly, for a candidate interested in advancing her own self-interests in the wake of a losing effort, sowing the seeds of doubt can be an enticing option. STV and IRV seem likely to provide fodder for such arguments.
Although theoretical, this is my rationale behind the statement that Professor Shugart has taken issue with.
Jack on 12 May 2008 at 12:26 am #
I suspect most Australians don’t give their own rankings because (1) they are required to use all rankings and (2) election districts are fairly large.
“Priority one” depends on the needs of the country. In divided societies, for instance, the intuitiveness of closed list PR might be irrelevant when the resulting party system is bad for democracy.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 12 May 2008 at 9:50 am #
These are some of the tradeoffs that have to be made sometimes. A country can survive with a bad party system until the day that it can/must be reformed. I think Chile is a fairly good example of that (although Venezuela is a bad one). But if you don’t have legitimate elections in the first place, you’re not going to be making it quite as far as Chile has.
And a confusing electoral system can make a divided society from one that had not been previously divided.
BTW, the first reason you cite above for Australians not using their STV fits my rationale that it’s a complexity thing. You could argue that they should not have to rank oder the entire list, but I’d retaliate and say every electoral system has its pluses and minuses when you start talking about matching it with a certain society.
Jack on 12 May 2008 at 12:25 pm #
I’d distinguish between informational and mechanical demands. Ranking choices isn’t difficult if your world works in that way. Ranking over 20 choices is difficult because one needs to know a lot about the candidates. That is not a complexity issue, however.
I don’t know of a case where seat shares were so counterintuitive given vote shares that significant factions refused to respect the result. If anyone understands how seat allocation works, I suspect it’s the person contesting an election.
I disagree about the bad party system. Chile does not have a bad party (or electoral) system in that the parties greatly destabilizes democracy. The system(s) may be unrepresentative, but that is a separate issue. (Nor is Chile divided on sectarian lines.)
Yes, there are tradeoffs, but the types of parties one gets in light of underlying social cleavages should be a major - if not the major - consideration.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 12 May 2008 at 1:45 pm #
Ranking 20 choices is intimidating. If I’m a voter - not an democracy student - with a 9-to-5, I am told that my candidate lost cause other people chose someone else second, my candidate is crying bloody murder, and the guy who won only cares about his wealthy friends, I’m not going to care whether the voting system is complex, intimidating, or whatever.
We’re dealing here with perceptions of fairness, not fairness in and of itself. I don’t care if a country suffers from ’sectarian’ divisions or not (can class warfare be considered sectarian?): elections are not a wise arena for counterintuitive results. They need to be easily explainable and not easily manipulable by a disgruntled loser. The type of parties you get out of such a situation is, indeed, absolutely a critical priority… but getting people to sit at the table once again is priority one.
I raised Chile because it had an extremely unfair electoral law instituted in order to protect the Conservatives in the 1988 elections. This provided a crucial incentive for the center-left coalition to stick together, but the Concertacion’s success in maintaining the alliance cannot be attributed to the electoral system itself. The binomial system guaranteed over-representation of the Right by giving it equal power in a district if it could muster just 33.4% of the vote. Think of the U.S. with this system: there would be one Democrat and one Republican per district, unless one party got over two-thirds of the vote in a given district (enough to take 1st and 2nd place).
You would never recommend such a system in order to get good parties. Fortunately, the parties were good enough to press on and were eventually able to make some reforms to improve the fairness of the system.
Andrew G. Mandelbaum on 12 May 2008 at 1:46 pm #
by the way, more on Chile’s old system: http://aceproject.org/regions-en/jne/CL/case-studies/chile-constitutional-and-electoral-reform-1998/?searchterm=chile%20election