Pater Familias

NEBRASKA SPLITS ITS ELECTORAL VOTES. I have always skipped reading articles which argue for electing the president by popular vote or for electoral college reform. I can’t imagine it happening. I can’t imagine the smaller states voting to approve a constitutional amendment which would reduce their influence. It is possible, however for a state to divide its electoral college vote. Maine and Nebraska do. This year Nebraska split its electoral college votes between McCain and Obama.

MORE DMV INCOMPETENCE IN CONNECTICUT. I asked in this post why the passport office and the DMV are bywords for government indifference and incompetence–why governments don’t make sure they are putting their best foot forward. My daughter Annalisa registered to vote in mid-September at the Connecticut DMV, at the same time that she renewed her driver’s license. We remarked on how convenient it was. But when she went to vote today, there was no record of the registration. The workers at the polls had encountered several other cases like this, so they advised her to vote for President only at the city hall. At the city hall, we were told that there were a number of cases like hers.

ART IS WHAT REMAINS WHEN THE POLITICS IS GONE. In TIMEBENDS, Miller tells of overhearing an English couple at an English production of THE CRUCIBLE in 1965. They did not think of the play in terms of Senator Joseph McCarthy. One of them remarked that the play might have something to do with an American senator whose name they couldn’t remember. Miller was happy that the political dimensions of the play had fallen away: “The play had now become art, cut from its roots, a spectacle of human passions purely.”

REDBAITING AND GUILT. If Arthur Miller thought of THE CRUCIBLE as being primarily about false accusations against a man who feels himself guilty of other sins, are there implications for Miller’s views on the consequences of Redbaiting? I think Miller says so in TIMEBENDS. He describes the hardships that Redbaiting imposed on its victims—the economic hardships, the destruction of careers, the criminal penalties. But he emphasizes the emotional pain and guilt for the victims. He makes an explicit connection between the Salem witch trials and the Red-hunt: “What was manifestly parallel was the guilt, two centuries apart, of holding illicit, suppressed feelings of alienation and hostility toward standard, daylight society as defined by its most orthodox proponents. Without guilt the 1950s Red-hunt could never have generated such power…..Even [the former Communist’s} naivete in seeing Russia not as an earthly empire but rather as a kind of spiritual condition was now a source of guilt and shame.”

THE CULT OF THE SCOOP. James Surowiecki wrote here about how hasty misreporting of a speech by the CEO of GE led to a drop in the stock market of 370 points on the Dow-Jones average in ten minutes. He concludes: “[T]his is yet another example of how the cult of the scoop—of making sure your story crosses the wire five minutes ahead of your competitor’s—in business journalism can wreak amazing havoc.” I am pleased to see a journalist question the importance of scoops, especially the value of getting the report out five minutes early. Reporters value that kind of scoop more than I do, and, I suspect, more than most readers do. The cult of the five-minute scoop leads—in addition to inaccuracies— to leaks of a public document five minutes early and leaks of embargoed books two or three days early. I remember journalistic awards being given for coverage of a scandal several years ago. The awards went to the two journalists whose coverage had seemed to me notably partisan, but not otherwise very good; they had been a few hours of everybody else because they had been chosen by their respective sides as recipients of competing leaks.

FIVETHIRTYEIGHT (COMMENT). Molly in a comment refers to the FiveThirtyEight website which is bringing in the insights from sabermetrics to political statistics. Nate Silver, who is one of the two authors of the site, is a major figure in Baseball Prospectus. If you like Baseball Prospectus, you will probably like FiveThirtyEight.

AN EARLY THANKSGIVING STORY. On Thanksgiving two years ago, I gave thanks to the Americans who have gone before us for what they gave us (it was the 9th post on this blog). In that post I typed out the names listed in Herman Wouk’s WAR AND REMEMBRANCE of the 82 young men from the three torpedo squadrons who changed the course of the war in the Pacific at the Battle of the Midway. One of the names on the list was Wilfred N. McCoy. His granddaughter inquired about Wilfred N. McCoy in a comment, and the two comments of yesterday and today tell of how family members found each other through that comment on this blog. I am moved by this story which resulted from a tribute to heroism.

AN ECONOMIC THEORY OF VOTING AND MOUNTAIN BIKING. Both the book by David Tuck and the review by David Runciman that I have discussed for the last couple of days seem to attribute the argument that voting is irrational to the influence of economic thinking on political science. But many economists would not accept the argument that voting is irrational. They would observe that a large number of people find voting attractive, just as a smaller percentage of people enjoy mountain biking. People do lots of things that don’t change the world—including both voting and mountain biking. People vote for all star baseball games as well as for those who govern us. I can think of lots of reasons why they would want to do so.

IS IT IRRATIONAL TO VOTE? Kids, is it irrational for you to vote? Political scientists have been struggling with this issue for over fifty years. David Runciman has a review in the London Review of Books for October 9 of FREE RIDING by David Tuck. The central issue in the review is the problem created by the fact that, as Runciman puts it, “General elections are never decided by a single vote, so no one vote is ever going to be missed.” Runciman says that the question of why bother to vote at all “has haunted the study of politics for the past fifty years or more.” Since “the benefit you can expect to derive is precisely zero, since your contribution is literally worthless, then it starts to look like a serious waste of your precious resources.”

CAMERA ANGLES. During this year’s first Presidential debate, Jim Lehrer, the moderator, kept urging the two candidates to “Talk to each other.” He was unsuccessful. I imagine that the advisers for the candidates had cautioned them not to talk to each other, but rather to address the camera. After all, our authoritative newscasters look at the camera. And that is the angle that your advisers planned for. I once saw a videotape of a deposition where the lawyer conducting the deposition had placed himself at one end of the table and the camera at right angles. The witness kept looking instinctively from the questioner to the camera. The resulting videotape made the witness seem shifty—“shifty-eyed”, in fact.