Tag: Presidents

The Arthurian election reform article

What IS the solution to a fairer voting process?

After the 2012 Presidential election – thank every deity it is over – you may recall that only a handful of states were crucial to the decision – Ohio! Florida! Virginia! The Democratic “blue” states – New York, California – were not in play, nor were the Republican “red” states such as Texas. Candidates didn’t campaign in those because of most states’ “winner-take-all” mechanism when it came to the Electoral College. All the electoral votes of a state would go to one candidate. (The upside is that I missed the vast majority of the political ads.)

So the recent Republican plan to change states from winner-takes-all, the way every state, except Maine and Nebraska, does it, to awarding electoral votes by Congressional District, seems to be fairer. And it would be if Congressional boundary lines were drawn equitably.

But as Arthur@AmeriNZ noted a few weeks ago, “Republicans… worked hard, and spent large amounts of money, to win control of state legislatures in 2010 precisely so that they could write the congressional district maps to ensure Republican victories — they now even admit that was their plan all along. This gerrymandering by Republicans is the reason that they control the US House of Representatives even though they received fewer votes than Democrats did. Now, they want to do the same thing in presidential elections.

“Were it not for gerrymandering, the Republican plan would be closer to a proportional system for electing a president than the current winner-take-all approach allows for.” That’s why I had originally thought of such a solution, which seemed obvious at the time, years ago. “However,” and I also noted this at the time, “because of gerrymandering, it instead cynically twists that goal to ensure Republicans win the presidency even if they lose the popular vote—something that could very well happen every election under the Republican plan. So, what we’d end up with is something far less democratic than what we have now.” Which is not very democratic at all.

“If the US were to pass a Constitutional Amendment requiring all states to use truly non-partisan commissions to draw the boundaries of Congressional Districts based solely on population—and forbidding them from taking party voting history of areas into account—then it might be possible to make the Republican plan credible.” This, of course, will NEVER happen. In New York, there were lost promises of having nonpartisan boundaries drawn. “However, most state legislatures would never give up their power to draw the maps, and Republicans aren’t about to walk away from the one thing that could ensure their minority party retains power for at least the next decade…

“The best possible solution would be direct popular election of the president — abolish the Electoral College altogether.” That would be true in the abstract. But the sad fact is that in the real world, I don’t know if I want my vote in New York State, in a close national election, compromised by voter suppression in Pennsylvania, incompetence in Florida, or outright fraud in Ohio.

Arthur noted that, in the current system, “small states are overrepresented,” and of course, that is accurate, but also intentional. A state such as Wyoming has one member of the House of Representatives, so three electoral college votes for the one House seat, plus the two Senate seats. New York has 27 members of the House, so 29 electoral votes. Wyoming has in fact about 3% of the population as New York; changing it to direct vote would, in fact, make the folks THERE less likely to cast a ballot. No small state would pass a Constitutional amendment to make their voters have less impact.

What IS the solution to a fairer voting process? Failing the suggestions put forth, such as fair reapportionment, which simply won’t happen, I have no idea.

Movie Review: Hyde Park on the Hudson

There is no shot I can recall of the Hudson River, sad, because the view of the river from Hyde Park is quite lovely.

The back story, part 1: The movie Hyde Park on the Hudson is based on the papers of some fifth cousin of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When she died at the age of 100 or so, it was revealed that FDR and Daisy had had a sexual and emotional liaison.

The back story, part 2: My family went to Hyde Park just this past summer, which is largely why The Wife and I decided to see this film this past Saturday, at the Spectrum 8 Theatre. The room was about 2/3s full.

The strength of this movie is in many of the details that it gets right, in no small part because it was filmed, in part, at Hyde Park. The look is right. The controversial anti-British cartoons after the War of 1812, which were on the bedroom walls when King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth, mother of the current monarch, came to visit in 1939, I have seen. It was the house of FDR’s mother (played by Elizabeth Wilson), and that Eleanor (Olivia Williams) was very uncomfortable being there was an open secret. The press was aware of Franklin’s physical limitations and yet didn’t report it.

One of the unfortunate aspects concerning the movie is that it came out after The King’s Speech (2010) and the characters of the monarchs will inevitably be compared with that movie, unfairly, since George’s stutter is only part of the story here. And this Elizabeth (Olivia Colman) was at least as good as Helena Bonham Carter.

It took a while for me to forget that it was Bill Murray as FDR, and while he didn’t mimic the 32nd President, FDR’s essence eventually came through. My favorite scene involved just Franklin and George (Samuel West).

Casting trivia: Elizabeth Marvel plays Missy, a major role in this film, and she’s good; she also played the minor part of Mrs. Jolly in the 2012 film Lincoln.

An odd choice: there is no shot I can recall of the Hudson River, sad because the view of the river from Hyde Park is quite lovely.

The real flaw of the film, though, is that the presumable core story, the relationship between FDR and Daisy, isn’t all that well-drawn, or interesting. Laura Linney, probably the greatest living American woman on film today not named Meryl Streep, is wasted here; her character is a cipher.

This is a small movie, mostly focused on one weekend in June of 1939. As a Presidential buff, I enjoyed enough of it that I’m glad I went, but it is by no means a great movie.

40 Years Ago: My 1st Presidential Vote, for George McGovern

I got to see George McGovern at a rally at my college, SUNY New Paltz in the autumn of 1972.

There were a LOT of people running for the Democratic nomination for President against Richard Nixon in 1972. The general consensus early on, though, was that Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine would be the selection. He had been the Vice-Presidential nominee in 1968 and had been a credible candidate in a close race. But he was sunk early on by the crying incident, which, to this day, I find utterly bewildering, and dropped out of the race early on.

This seemed to give segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama some momentum, much to the chagrin of all right-minded people. An assassination attempt in May paralyzed him and effectively ended his campaign.

Many of the leading candidates – Muskie, and other 1968 candidates Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy – would have been OK to me. I was suspicious of the hawkish Scoop Jackson, though, especially after he later led an “Anybody but McGovern” coalition “that raised what would be known as the ‘Acid, Amnesty and Abortion’ questions” about the South Dakotan. My preferred candidate, though, was Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first black woman to win a primary (New Jersey), though, by the time of the June primary in New York, the race was all but over.

Still, I liked McGovern. He was one of the early opponents to the war in Vietnam and having flown nearly three dozen missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, he had a lot more credibility than today’s chicken hawks, who haven’t seen a war they don’t want to fight, or rather, would send our young men and women to fight.

Unfortunately, his Vice-Presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton proved to be a disaster, when it was revealed the junior senator from Missouri had received psychiatric care, which was bad enough in those days but also had twice been given electroshock treatments, which brought up unfair comparisons to Frankenstein’s monster. This incident reflected poorly on McGovern’s decision-making, and eventually, he forced Eagleton off the ticket, to be replaced by Kennedy in-law and former Peace Corps head Sargent Shriver.

As you can see from these not-too-great pictures, taken by me with a point-and-shoot camera, I got to see McGovern at a rally at my college, State University College at New Paltz in the autumn. That was one of the first of many times I saw Pete Seeger perform, too.

Of course, McGovern lost that election badly, carrying only one state, plus the District of Columbia. Many folks, in 1973 and 1974, during the Watergate scandal that McGovern had complained about during the campaign, had bumper stickers that read, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts,” referring to the one-state the senator carried, whether they were or not.

George McGovern died this week at the age of 90. It seems, though, that he saw vindication of his positions in his lifetime, and never sold his soul.

For instance, from his acceptance speech for the party’s nomination:
“The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny. There is a depletion allowance for oil wells, but no depletion for the farmer who feeds us, or the worker who serves us all.”

Sounds – unfortunately – VERY Current.
***
A much wiser Arthur@AmeriNZ re: his feeling about McGovern, then and now.

A book I ought to read: Jesus for President

“We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world.”

 

There was a study of a book in Albany called Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. Claiborne was even in town, leading some workshops. But I was busy. Then I read this excerpt of the book in my church newsletter:
“Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”

Sounds like my kind of book.

From the preface:

This book is a project in renewing the imagination of the church in the United States and of those who would seek to know Jesus. We are seeing more and more that the church has fallen in love with the state and that this love affair is killing the church’s imagination. The powerful benefits and temptations of running the world’s largest superpower have bent the church’s identity. Having power at its fingertips, the church often finds “guiding the course of history” a more alluring goal than following the crucified Christ. Too often the patriotic values of pride and strength triumph over the spiritual virtues of humility, gentleness, and sacrificial love.

We in the church are schizophrenic: we want to be good Christians, but deep down we trust that only the power of the state and its militaries and markets can really make a difference in the world. And so we’re hardly able to distinguish between what’s American and what’s Christian. As a result, power corrupts the church and its goals and practices. When Jesus said, “You cannot serve two masters,” he meant that in serving one, you destroy your relationship to the other. Or as our brother and fellow activist Tony Campolo puts it, “Mixing the church and state is like mixing ice cream with cow manure. It may not do much to the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.” As Jesus warned, what good is it to gain the whole world if we lose our soul?

So what we need is an exploration of the Bible’s political imagination, a renovated Christian politics, a new set of hopes, goals, and practices. We believe the growing number of Christians who are transcending the rhetoric of lifeless presidential debates is a sign of this renovation. Amid all the buzz, we are ready to turn off our TVs, pick up our Bibles, and reimagine the world.

Over the last several years, the Christian relation to the state has become more dubious… Professing Christians have been at the helm of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, implicitly or explicitly referencing faith in God as part of their leadership. Patriotic pastors insist that America is a Christian nation without questioning the places in distant and recent history where America has
not looked like Christ. Rather than placing our hope in a transnational church that embodies God’s kingdom, we assume America is God’s hope for the world, even when it doesn’t look like Christ. Dozens of soldiers who have contacted us confess a paralyzing identity crisis as they feel the collision of their allegiances…

I’ll have to get a copy and add this book to my ever-expanding summer reading list.

President Rogers? President Picard?

As far as Star Trek, I assume we’re not going to worry that the candidates are not in fact American.

Chris writes:
Okay, another one:

What comic book hero would make the best US president? Or Star Trek character, your choice.

I ask this one because one of the best political discussions I’ve ever gotten into was “Who from Star Trek would make the best president?” I was utterly shocked at some of the choices!

Sounds silly, right? Ancient Greek philosophers talked about who from Mt. Olympus was fit for office…

Or both. Why not?

I think about Steve Rogers, a/k/a Captain America. I was watching a commercial for the upcoming Avengers movie. Cap says to the Hulk, “Hulk smash.” And the Hulk smashes. This mortal could control this gamma-infused monster. And it has long been thus; Cap’s first appearance in the comic book Avengers #4 filled his teammates with awe. Yet, Cap has had his doubts about America, at least in the 1970s, written by Steve Englehart, when the President was engaged in improper activities.

Other possibilities: Charles Xavier, the leader of culturally disparate X-Men; Reed Richards, head of the Fantastic Four. I’d consider Wonder Woman, depending on which iteration is offered.

As far as Star Trek, I assume we’re not going to worry that the candidates are not in fact American. I must admit that I know the first two series better than the subsequent series, though I did watch them all. I’d always want to look at the captains. Certainly NOT James T. Kirk, but quite possibly Jean Luc Picard, or the others. I wonder if Spock, or Data, would be too distant to lead (probably Obama’s problem), Scott and Chekov, and Worf too hot-headed. Maybe Sulu or Number 1.

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