The Dish

Final note on Ames, I promise:

Third-place finisher Sam Brownback says he spent about $325,000 to win his 2,192 votes. That’s $148.27 for each vote.  Second-place finisher Mike Huckabee spent about $150,000 and received 2,587 votes. That’s $57.98 per vote.  Winner Mitt Romney has not said how much he spent. The reporting in this Washington Post article suggests at least $2 million and possibly more than twice that much. Assuming $2 million for 4,516 votes, that’s $442.87 per vote. But it could top $1,000.(my emphasis added)

Pricey, aren’t they, them Iowans?

www.lizmair.com

As I watch the coverage of the Iowa straw poll, I can’t help once again feeling incredibly annoyed with the political process.

I live in California. Our population is over 37 million, representing 12% of the total US population. Indeed, if we were a separate country, our population would be larger than that of all but the 34 biggest countries in the world! We’re responsible for 13% of US GDP. Indeed, if we were a separate country, we’d be the 7th largest economy in the world. We produce cutting edge technology, world class wine, and much of the nation’s food crop. We ought to matter. And yet, we’re virtually irrelevant to American politics other than as source of money that candidates then go spend in places like Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

Iowa? A population of less than 3 million, that at 96+% white is utterly unrepresentative of the country as a whole? A state of which Dave Barry wrote:

If you’re looking for a vacation travel destination that blends excitement with huge amounts of corn, I strongly recommend Iowa. I recently spent a few days there, and I can honestly say that it was comparable to experiences I’ve had in sophisticated, prestige travel destinations such as Paris, in the sense that I was not once engulfed by hog manure. … Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that everybody who visits Iowa will be engulfed by manure leaking from storage basins. Some people could also be hit by manure shot from guns. You think I’m making this up, but that is only because you did not read The Wall Street Journal article about the Iowa hog industry, written by Scott Kilman and sent to me by many alert readers. This article states that Iowa’s large hog farms have "huge waste lagoons, some emptied by ‘manure guns’ that fling their cargo through the air onto surrounding fields — and occasionally onto passing cars."

Joke: What’s considered a solid hour’s reading in Iowa? The back of a cereal box.

New Hampshire? Smaller than Iowa. Whiter than Iowa. And, as Alexander Theroux once observed, " is literally shaped like a dunce cap."

South Carolina? The birthplace of secession? A state of which it has been justly said that:

Throughout American history, South Carolinians have led the fight to preserve and defend slavery, white supremacy, racial segregation, and race fear. South Carolina is the soul of the Confederacy. It is safe to say that South Carolina gave birth to Dixie, so much so that it is a matter of pride to many South Carolinians that their state was the first to secede from the Union and that Citadel cadets fired the first shot of the Civil War.

How is it that we persist in allowing these unrepresentative, yahoo infested, pissant states decide who gets to run for President? The notion that the Ames straw poll matters would be preposterous were it not so pernicious.

For those who don’t know, in my current home state of Virginia, drivers who speed are now subject to some heinously large fines for speeding.  Including, apparently, if you’re speeding because you’re pregnant and think you’re about to have a baby– and you’re trying to get to the hospital.

I’ve got no beef with someone getting fined lots of money for driving 80 in a 55 zone purely because they’re running a little late, or like Sammy Hagar, they just can’t drive 55, but there is no reason why this particular woman should have been slapped with a penalty, so far as I am concerned.

www.lizmair.com

My concern, Liz, was less about what a president could do, than it was about the simple fact the base of a major political party believes in this stuff. The simple fact that so many of these people don’t believe in science, and they’re the ones with whom a Republican candidate for president first has to pass muster, should really be disturbing.

And on a side note, the power to appoint Supreme Court justices to hear future church/state cases is a cause for worry, though certainly towards the bottom of the list of reasons to be anxious about the modern GOP.

Eric comments on the strength of candidates who believe in creationism at Ames.

While I am not a creationist, and personally am amazed that there are people who really do believe that a) the Earth was created in a matter of a few, 24-hour long days, just a few thousand years ago and b)  we do not in some manner have a common ancestor, way, way far back that we share with, say, chimpanzees (with whom we share the overwhelming majority of our DNA), let me just play devil’s advocate for a minute.

So Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback and Mike Huckabee are creationists.  Does it matter?  What influence does the President have when it comes to specific educational curricula (what tends to inspire the most concern among evolutionists for creationists being in elected office)?

I will grant you that with an expanded federal role in education, courtesy of Ted Kennedy and George W Bush and No Child Left Behind, perhaps the President has more influence on what is taught in schools, loosely, than before, but I still don’t think it’s likely that we will see the President, or any of his appointees, setting specific rules as to what, in terms of creationist theory, goes into 7th grade science textbooks anytime soon.

Of course, Huckabee plainly seems to be in favor of the Department of Education getting even bigger and taking an even more active role, so potentially, were he elected president, my non-belief might be tested… But for the time being, the only major concern that I have about electing a creationist, in terms of that specific belief, is that it demonstrates on some level, in my view, a willingness to discount scientific evidence to the extent even that the theory that I recall being mentioned in Inherit The Wind (i.e., maybe the Earth was created in just a few days, but each of those days lasted far, far longer than 24 hours) is discounted.  And that someone would be willing to discount so much evidence (as opposed to faith) suggests that they might be willing to make important judgments without taking on board similarly important and credible information.

But I think I can safely  say that I’d be much more concerned about electing a candidate for school board who wanted to take all references to Darwin and/or evolutionary theory and/or Stephen Jay Gould out of textbooks and replace them with references to God and the Garden of Eden and so on (which a school board could do with much, much greater ease within their legally-accorded powers than could a President) than I would a possible Commander-in-Chief who wanted the same.

www.lizmair.com

Think about this. The combined vote total at Ames for Mike Huckabee, Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo — the three candidates who have professed to not believe in evolution — was 47.1% among these core GOP activists in Iowa.

Sure, there must been some science-based people who voted for these faith-based candidates. But there were probably just as many creationists, if not more, voting for the publicly evolutionist candidates.

And we trust these same Republican activists to run the Iowa caucus, where they’ll pick the man who could be the next president?

I can only imagine what the political implications would be of trying to reinstate the draft in in order to support a war that has already lost the popular support of the country, and to do it under a president whose approval rating is just slightly north of the flu.

If it were attempted, I suppose we’d see a massive outcry against it and a move by Congress to pass legislation against conscription. If the Republicans backed up Bush’s vetoes, they’d really be signing their death warrants, and quite possibly giving the Dems a filibuster-proof majority in 2008.

And if the draft actually went ahead — I can only imagine that we would start seeing riots in the streets, and it would go downhill from there.

Good article in The Guardian this morning about the toll that the Iraq "surge" is taking on our troops. They are completely exhausted, worn out, and stretched to the breaking point. It is further proof, as if it was needed, that George W. Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War borders on the criminally negligent.

The root of the problem is that we never had anywhere close to sufficient resources to pay for the ambitions of Bush and his neocon pals. To fight the kind of war they want to fight absolutely requires a draft to obtain the manpower necessary. But they have never had the guts to admit this fact publicly because they know perfectly well that what little support there is for the war would instantly collapse to near zero.

It has long surprised me how little even the those on the left appreciate to what extent Bush’s prosecution of the Iraq War with a professional army has contained opposition to the war. The fact is that every single American soldier in Iraq is there because they volunteered. They may have gotten a lot more than they expected, but at least they weren’t conscripted the way many of those who died in Vietnam were. And certainly anyone who joined the army since 2003 has known with virtual certainty that they would end up in Iraq.

I say this not to diminish their sacrifice, but rather to explain why the political reaction to Iraq has been so different than the reaction to Vietnam. The draft made the prospect of being killed in some far off jungle very real for every draft-age male and their families. It was tantamount to murder to put many of these poorly trained, poorly equipped, ill-conditioned, and undereducated young men into the field in Vietnam (the well educated, of course, had college deferments). It’s hard to convey just how pervasive the fear was that being drafted in those days was the equivalent of a death sentence. No wonder the protests against the war were so large and intense.

At least today’s professionals fighting in Iraq are far better trained and equipped. They have things like body armor that didn’t exist in Vietnam that have saved the lives of many that would have died in that war. While they are often tragically maimed, they still have their lives. This has held down the number of funerals at Arlington Cemetery to a level that has been to a large extent politically tolerable.

But the cost has been that we must work our soldiers into the ground, with extended tours, minimal time off, and all of the psychological and physical degradation that goes with it. Although it probably cannot be estimated, there is no doubt that a large and growing number of casualties must result from exhaustion, lack of sleep, stress and other pressures resulting from excessive time in the field.

The honest thing for Bush to have done would have been to ask for reinstatement of the draft to provide the manpower to pursue his ambition. Obviously, this would have made clear that we cannot afford the cost of the Iraq War and undoubtedly put irresistible pressure on him to end this folly. I consider it an act of cowardice that Bush has refused to accept the logic or consequences of his policy in this way.

I was talking to a friend yesterday who was complaining about all the money being spent on the presidential election. The $1 billion that will probably be spent could be better spent on any number of pressing social needs, he told me.

I don’t know what the campaign will end up costing, but $1 billion sounds reasonable. According to the Campaign Finance Institute, combined receipts of the various campaigns came to $333 million in 2000 and $674 million in 2004. If one assumes that the numbers double every four years, then it wouldn’t be surprising if all the candidates ended up spending $1.3 billion by the end of next year.

Is this a lot of money? Considering what is at stake, I don’t think so. Consider the fact that Procter & Gamble has an annual advertising budget of $4.6 billion. General Motors spends $4.35 billion. There are probably dozens of companies that spend more than $1 billion per year selling us toothpaste, automobiles and all manner of other things.

When we think about the impact of a president on our lives, the amount of money spent telling people who that person his, what he or she stands for and so on seems pretty trivial. Perhaps if Gore and Kerry had spent a little more it would have saved us from some of the disasters foisted upon the American people, not to mention the Iraqis, by George W. Bush. And we will be paying for these disasters long after he is gone.

So I say, let’s spend more, not less, on our presidential campaigns. Let’s spend as much as necessary to make sure that we really understand who these guys are and what they are going to do to us if elected. I think it’s money well spent–at least as well spent as one fourth of what Procter & Gamble spends every year to tell us why we should all brush our teeth with Crest.

This brings me to another peeve. People are too credulous about money being the "mother’s milk" of politics. Journalists love to total up how much each candidate has raised or spent as if this is the be-all and end-all of political reporting. They seldom report how ineffective most of that spending is or how often the guy who spent less went on to win.

Here’s a great website for those who think that money is all that matters in winning elections. It lists all of the self-financed congressional candidates in 2004 who spent more than $1 million of their own money on their campaigns. Only one was elected, even though some of these candidates spent extraordinary amounts of money. Blair Hull spent almost $30 million of his own money seeking the Democratic Senate nomination in Illinois and couldn’t even win the primary. For more on this phenomenon, check out Self-Financed Candidates in Congressional Elections by Jennifer Stern.

Of course, money is important in politics. A certain minimum is necessary to be able to compete. But it’s my observation that once over this threshold, most of the money is wasted. And sometimes it becomes counterproductive because candidates just end up buying more and more annoying television ads that mainly serve as reminders of what a jerk the candidate is. I know in my own case this has turned me against candidates I had planned on voting for.

The real problem of money in politics is that contribution limits make it incredibly time-consuming and complicated to raise the money necessary to be competitive. In the Internet age, full and immediate disclosure is sufficient protection against abuse. With such a system in place, there is simply no reason for any limits on campaign contributions by individuals.