In Praise of Brokering
David Weigel | February 5, 2008, 4:23pm
CNN's
account of the West Virginia convention praises the triumph of raw politics
Romney's campaign was furious over the "Washington backroom deal."
"Unfortunately, this is what Sen. McCain's inside Washington ways look like: He cut a backroom deal with the tax-and-spend candidate he thought could best stop Gov. Romney's campaign of conservative change," read a statement from Romney campaign manager Beth Myers.
Front-runners McCain and Romney have engaged in bitter exchanges over their conservative records in recent weeks.
"This is raw politics as it's really practiced," CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider said. "The McCain supporters who were third in the first round decided to throw their weight behind Mike Huckabee in order to stop Mitt Romney from winning this convention. And look at that -- they did."
Schneider gives too little credit to the Armies of Ron Paul, as the combined McCain-Huck vote was only 49 percent: Paul supporters sealed the deal. But the whole experience reveals how much more fair these second-choice contests are then the primaries most Republicans and Democrats will be voting in today. If you're a Ron Paul backer in Connecticut, and your absolute last choice for the nom is John McCain, tough luck: McCain will win every delegate even if he gets less than 50 percent of the vote. If you're a McCain hater in Missouri and you can't decide between Huck or Mitt, you're helping McCain secure a plurality win in a take-all contest. We'd have a far fairer, better sense of what voters wanted if everyone piled into caucuses/conventions... or, better, if they could mark the ballots with their 1st and 2nd choices. (That would clean up a lot of the wasted Fred/Edwards/Rudy absentee votes we'll see today.)
James Anderson Merritt | February 5, 2008, 4:54pm | #
My son attends UC Berkeley and lives at one of the student co-op houses near campus. This past weekend, they held elections for house manager -- online. The ballot was ranked-choice (although there were only two candidates), the voting process was easy, and confidentiality was built into the system -- along with accountability. All voters were each given unique encoded ID keys, which nobody could trace back to any individual, but which the voters could use to verify that their votes had been collected and counted correctly, once the anonymized results -- every vote -- were posted for public scrutiny.
It seems to me as if a system that were only a little more sophisticated than this could be used in elections such as we are participating in today, and would offer at least as much confidentiality, accuracy, speed in tabulation, and protection against tampering, as the systems we use today, especially if the source code for key software were available for inspection under open-source arrangements.
I said this back in 2000, before HAVA and before I had ever seen a real system such as the one my son used this past weekend. We know what we want and need. We know that systems fitting the bill (or almost so, with only a little improvement necessary) are available and currently in use -- so definitely within the capability of "professionals" in industry or government to produce. SO WHERE ARE THEY?
The fact that my son can use ranked-choice voting in a sufficiently secure and accurate online voting procedure for co-op house manager today and yet we don't have such a thing for our official elections after eight years of sturm-und-drang over -- and millions of dollars thrown at -- our supposed electoral system "crisis," seems to indicate that people really aren't serious about elections here.
let's fire the bozos and get people who are truly committed to making sure that everyone's vote is securely, confidentially, accurately collected and counted. And if the bozos complain about being discharged, let's remind them that, in previous eras, the alternative punishments included jail time or even tarring and feathering. I'm tired of the scams. Aren't you?
Someone Who Doesn't Want to Lose His Job | February 5, 2008, 6:14pm | #
Tara,
Reason types and NRO types might both hate on McCain, but I doubt very much it's for the same reasons. NRO and Reason's view-overlap is not really that big. In the case of McCain, NRO's biggest complaints are (in my opinion) his not-anti-immigration enough positions, his lack of sufficient support for torture. As you can see from Fluffy's comments, if Reason types are opposed to McCain on torture, it is that he isn't opposed enough to it. Also, most Reasonites (sorry, LoneWacko) view his old immigration stand as more reasonable than the new version.
The NRO people tend to be very into War-on-Terror, national security, border fences, anti-immigration, law and order, and other such "National Greatness" right-wing Nationalism ideas. A common topic on NRO is the "National Question" which covers a lot of this. Reason-types tend to hold the opposite views on most of these issues, as the NRO view is generally one in favor of expansive government power. Also, NRO tends to be more socially conservative than does Reason, which again, tends to hold the opposite view on most or all issues important to social conservatives. The only overlap I've seen between the two markets in large part is on economics, which, though both populations tend to mostly agree on direction, shows a marked difference in the importance placed on these issues. NRO and Reason may agree on which direction the economy should go, but agree in neither how far it should go, nor how important the economy is.
This is one of the reasons I tend to get confused when people view libertarians as essentially conservative. If you look at things in terms of the mythical three-legged "Reagan stool" of yore, libertarians usually only
agree with conservatives on one of the three legs of the stool (the economic one). Further on the other two legs (the social behavior one and the national security-greatness one), the source of the friction isn't that libertarians view the legs as unimportant, but that libertarians actually hold the
opposite view from the standard conservative one. This doesn't make a very good alliance in my opinion, and it doesn't make a very good case that libertarians are just Republicans who don't want to be called Republicans, either.
