Tag: New York Times

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National politics

Many Primary Ideas

There are a variety of ideas for how we can fix our primary election process. They range from a lottery system proposed in comments and a post earlier on my site to more authoritative proposals such as rotating regional primaries as outlined by Trey Grason (go to page 25 of the PDF – hat tip the Senate Site)

Unfortunately, it is too late to fix the process for 2008, but steps can be taken for 2012. The National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) is hoping to generate support for rotating regional primaries as a step toward that goal. The association’s bipartisan proposal, created by the nation’s chief state election officials, divides the country into four regions and establishes primary windows in March, April, May and June.

I was also interested in the proposal published in the New York Times by Jonathan Soros suggesting a national primary day where individual voters could opt to vote early.

There is, however, a simple way to establish a national primary and yet still allow retail politicking to meaningfully affect the course of the campaign over several months: allow early voting, with regular reporting of the tally.

Here’s one way it could work. Set a national primary date of June 30 and create a window for early voting that opens on Jan. 1. The early votes would be counted and reported at the end of each month from January through May. . .
If we began counting and reporting the interim results in advance of a national primary, the voters who cast early ballots would play the same role as voters in Iowa and New Hampshire do now: they could signal viability or create momentum for their favored candidates. These early voters would be self-selecting, trading the opportunity to watch the campaign unfold for the ability to demonstrate early conviction.

Most important, every voter, no matter where he or she lived, would have the freedom to make this choice. Right now, when one votes is determined by where one lives.

The national primary day has drawbacks, but I’m sure there are detractors to the rotating regional primaries as well and I know there are those who gripe about the lottery idea. I’m not ready to advocate for one idea over another, and I’m sure that all of them would offer an overall improvement over the current mess. What I would really like to see is an widespread, active, and public conversation now – not sometime after 2009 – to decide how we would like this system to operate because the current setup is going to lead to perpetual campaigning (like having candidates declaring six months into the four year cycle) unless we take steps to rein it in.

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National politics

Smart Presidential Candidate

LaVarr Webb commented today in Utah Policy Daily on a great column by David Brooks at the New York Times called The Happiness Gap. Brooks was talking about the gap between how happy people are with their own lives and how optimistic they are about government. I think Brooks is right that people are beginning to see through the fallacy that government solutions can fix personal problems, or that one level of government can solve the problems in another level of government. The more we trust to the federal government the more apparent it is that the federal government is not equipped to solve problems created by poor state governments. The same logic holds true with each level of government – state government can’t solve county problems, county government can’t solve city problems, etc.

The thing that really got me was Webb’s concluding paragraph:

I’ve written many times that the job description of the federal government has gotten so immense that it’s impossible to accomplish, hence the deep cynicism about the federal government. The nation’s founders intended for the national government to focus on a few things and do them very well. We need a national resorting of the roles of the different levels of government. A smart presidential candidate would do well to pick up on the mood of the people. (emphasis mine)

Webb was right on except that his last sentence left one thing out – there is a presidential candidate who has picked up on this mood. Ron Paul’s campaign is based on the principle of resorting the roles of the different levels of government – primarily reducing the role of the federal government and allowing states to take their proper place in addressing more of the issues they face. Right now the federal government is doing so much that it can’t even adequately address those issues that are properly in the sphere of the federal government, like national security and immigration. So he may not have known it, but Webb just endorsed Ron Paul as a smart presidential candidate.

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culture politics

Put Virtual Politics on the Ground

I have been thinking about the words of Tom Friedman when he wrote about what he calls Generation Q.

I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be. I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be. . .

The Iraq war may be a mess, but I noticed at Auburn and Ole Miss more than a few young men and women proudly wearing their R.O.T.C. uniforms. Many of those not going abroad have channeled their national service impulses into increasingly popular programs at home like “Teach for America,” which has become to this generation what the Peace Corps was to mine.

It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad.

But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. . .

America needs a jolt of the idealism, activism and outrage (it must be in there) of Generation Q. That’s what twentysomethings are for — to light a fire under the country. But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them.

Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual.

I am among those who feels right at home in the world of the internet whether I am pursuing my political interests, searching for some bit of information or trying to decide about my next major purchase. I see lots of political dialog on the internet, but I also realize that all the blog posts in the world don’t have the same power as a meeting with candidates or elected officials to discuss an issue. I know that talking about liking one candidate or position will never have the same reach of influence that speaking with my wallet has.

The main stream media is spending more and more time talking about the power of internet based politics and the parties and candidates are getting better at engaging within this new medium of communication. Perhaps it is easy for us “digital natives” to mistake this as evidence that this has become the primary mode for political action. We put ourselves and our views in danger unless we take time to remember that the primary means of achieving political influence is and always will be the same as it was when our country was founded. Writing posts may have replaced writing tracts or pamphlets, but the real power to make things happen comes in gathering together to share ideas so that people will be energized to go out and vote at the ballot box and also lend their resources (time, energy, and money) to bring about the goals that they had previously only talked about.

Categories
National politics

Congress – Do Something

A month into the fiscal year and Congress has not presented an appropriations bill for the President to sign because they don’t care enough about making things work when there are accusations to be flung, fights to pick (like SCHIP), and post offices to be named. The New York Times takes issue with the fact that they are putting the 2010 census at risk by failing to fund it.

The sad part of all this dithering in Congress is that there are more funding issues like the census, where there is little disagreement about how much funding it should receive, than there are like SCHIP where there is much disagreement about funding. The other sad thing is that the things where there is little disagreement are generally more important for keeping the government functioning than the bills where there is contention. The New York Times suggests that Congress should fund the census with their emergency appropriations bill for the California fires. They also offer a decent reason to explain the combination.

I agree and I think that Congress should also set about submitting an appropriations bill on all the other issues where there is little disagreement on the funding – at least we could ensure that parts of the government are funded while issues such as SCHIP are being “discussed.”

Categories
culture politics

Subtle Biases

Among the many places I get political news and information is the new York Time Political blog, The Caucus. Unique among those sources, The Caucus displays a tag cloud which shows the tags they use on their posts with the tags displayed in a font size proportional to how often the tag is used.

The Caucus Tags

It is no surprise that 2008 is the largest tag (most common), but Hillary always seemed to be disproportionally large compared to other candidates. I always dismissed that as a result of the fact that her full name is spelled out and thus takes more space. After seeing the cloud so many times I finally got curious to see how much the various tags were really used. The result revealed an unspoken bias at the blog.

The top two presidential candidates for the Democrats have as many stories as the top 3 presidential candidates for the Republicans (548 in each case). John Edwards is tagged 146 times for the Democrats as well. Following to lower tier candidates the coverage of Democrats makes further gains despite the fact that there are more Republican candidates. Interestingly even President Bush receives fewer tags than either Hillary or Barak. The most telling statistic for me however was the fact that there were 62 posts carrying the tag “CONSERVATIVES” (yes, all caps) and not a single post with a tag for liberals (all caps or otherwise). I guess the reader can decide if that is because they don’t cover liberal stories, or if it is because they don’t consider anything to be liberal.

I am not complaining that there is a bias here. My feeling is that every information source is biased, even good, scientific data , but it is better once the bias is recognized publicly. If anyone wants to see the raw data I used they can download it – I have added some tags for sorting between candidates, parties, issues etc. – or they can go to The Caucus and view the page source to get up-to-date data.

Categories
meta technology

Linking to Newspapers

For today’s edition I thought I would share a tool I found back with my previous blogs. It is most useful for those who like to blog their reactions to news items. I used to link to New York Times articles and that would become a problem once those articles left the one week timeframe and were no longer accessible for free. I was not the first to see this problem because someone else made a tool which generates special links to articles in the New York Times which are freely accessible in perpetuity. (They do this with the permission of the people at the New York Times so there is no question regarding the legality of the tool or the practice.)

I don’t know how many other major newspapers pose this challenge for news bloggers nor if any of them also have such tools, but this is a great tool for anyone who does that kind of blogging and likes nytimes.com as a news source.

I was reminded of this tool when I linked to an NPR story yesterday. I don’t know how much I will need it since before I was often commenting on Op/Ed pieces which are mostly only Times Select (paid service) now. Since I don’t pay for that access I may not use the tool much, but hopefully it can be useful for other people.

Categories
politics

Cabinet Shuffle

Normally I don’t link to things where I have nothing to add, but this seemed like a good exception to make. From the New York Times OpEd Replace the Surgeon General position with the position of America’s Nurse.

Another reason to make this link is to lament that I will soon not be reading the OpEd section of the New York Times once they start charging subscriptions. It’s too bad, they often have good things to say, but not $50/year worth of good.

Categories
politics

Soul Searching

This is the type of thing to expect from a party that is trying to find its place in American politics. The Democrats are starting to think about their stance on abortion as they search their souls to find ways to appeal to more people. It is about time that they looked at their core issues to figure out the difference between what the American public wants/believes and how they are viewed in public opinion.

It seems to me that they are painted as favoring environmental protection while they are weak on military protection while most people are more interested in having military protection before they get too worked up about protecting our environment. To put it generally, the caricature of the Democrats is that they are strong on all the less important issues. If they will start to take a close look at what people feel strongly about they will be able to restate their positions and find a message that appeals to the primary values and needs of America and they will be able to restore balance to our political system by no longer being the little brother in our two-party system.

Categories
politics

Nugget of Truth

It is not often that I agree with Maureen Dowd more than grudgingly, but in her article about female interrogators torturing detainees in Iraq I found myself agreeing with her without reservation. She put the perfect perspective in one sentence: “However the Bush White House is redefining torture these days, the point is this: Such behavior degrades the women who are doing it, the men they are doing it to, and the country they are doing it for.”

There is no other point that could be made. It would be better in the long run to not have the intelligence gotten by such deplorable means then to stoop to such a level of depravity.

Categories
National politics

The Power of the Minority

I am very interested in the moves that the democrats will make as they try to get back to their winning ways. I found an interesting perspective by David Brooks in the New York times.

I really expect that American Politics are largely going to be determined – for better or worse – by what the Democrats end up doing in their efforts to start winning majorities at the national level.