I know the system is close to broken. We’ve been subjected to negative ads because candidates believe–unfortunately, with much justification–that they cannot be elected unless they “define” their opponents. Districts have been gerrymandered. In Indiana, Republicans have worked to make it more difficult for people–especially poor people–to cast a vote. There are numerous flaws we can point to–or use as an excuse not to participate.
If we use those flaws as an excuse, however, we’re complicit. We’ll never fix what’s broken unless we participate in the political system, and the absolute minimum participation is through exercise of our franchise.
He traced the social change that has elevated “capable, hardworking, high IQ” people into positions of power and authority–the quintessentially American belief in rewarding talent rather than social class–and he notes that it is precisely these “high IQ” people, at least in the financial arena, who have taken us off the economic cliff. He attributes the problem to “pride”–the belief entertained by many successful “self-made” people that they are invincible, that the rules that apply to others don’t really apply to them.
Douthat says that the rest of us have responded to that arrogance by embracing ignorance. (Hint: this is probably not a good idea.) And he attributes the current Republican primary field to that rejection of meritorious arrogance. He says the field can be attributed to “a revolt against the ruling class that our meritocracy has forged, and a search for outsiders with thinner resumes but better instincts.”
As Douthout points out, it won’t do America any good to “replace the arrogant with the ignorant, the overconfident with the incompetent.”
It may be time to redefine “merit” to include self-awareness, and to recognize that “intelligence” is more than IQ points. A bit of humility is the beginning of wisdom–and what America desperately needs right now is less self-assurance and bluster, and a lot more wisdom.
I’ve made no secret of my opinion that Greg Ballard has been an unfortunate mayor–a nice enough guy who assumed office mostly because the incumbent ran a terrible campaign, and whose total lack of background and understanding of what the job requires has allowed him to be “managed” by insiders who’ve been making out like bandits.
He may win re-election (although I wouldn’t bet any real money on that possibility), but I have to wonder about his campaign’s decision to hit Melina Kennedy for decisions made by Bart Peterson. I’ve seen several ads now that essentially say “When she was Deputy Mayor, X happened and X was bad. She was responsible for X. Vote Ballard.”
Granted, in the Ballard Administration the current Deputy Mayor (who actually can define “urban” and “governance”) has been the prime mover of policy, but in most administrations, Deputy Mayors take their marching orders from the guy who won the election. They may be consulted–especially in matters where they have expertise–but they certainly don’t set policy.When I was in City Hall, the two Deputy Mayors disagreed with decisions made by the Mayor on several occasions. They communicated their opinions to the Mayor, and (appropriately) supported his policies publicly.
Deputy Mayors are assigned specific areas and tasked with implementing policy in those areas. If they do a poor job, it is certainly fair to criticize that performance, but trying to blame them for things their boss decided–or worse, for things that “happened” while their boss was in office, as they do in one of these commercials–is just silly.
Wouldn’t you expect that the people airing these campaign ads know that? Wouldn’t you think they’d expect voters to understand it?
Obviously, the folks doing Ballard’s ads don’t think we know that. They also don’t think we understand that tax rates–which Ballard’s ads tell us have “gone down during the Ballard Administration”–are determined by the Indiana General Assembly, and not by the Mayor, who deserves neither praise nor blame for the coincidence.
Granted, I am biased in this race, and further granted, I follow all these issues for a living and as a result, I’m probably more familiar with the way government works than most folks. But I find it difficult to believe that most voters don’t understand who calls the shots in an administration, and I find these ads offensive–not because they are negative (both candidates have run very negative ads), but because they assume that we voters are too stupid to know who does what.
Maybe they’re right. In which case, we are really in trouble.
Yesterday, WISH TV and Franklin College released the first independent poll of the mayoral election. It had something for everyone–Ballard is polling significantly less than 50%, typically a danger sign for an incumbent. On the other hand, he was ahead of Kennedy. The number of undecideds was huge this late in the race, and the early voters favored Kennedy by a wide margin, suggesting more enthusiasm for the Democrat.
Of course, when a poll has a 4.9% margin of error, any results should be viewed with some skepticism.
Actually, political polling has fallen on hard times. Last year, Brian Vargus–the Political Science Professor who has long been regarded as the local expert on political surveys–came to talk to my class. His message was that most political polling is worthless–that accurate, reliable surveys are prohibitively expensive, and campaigns and media outlets simply don’t do them anymore. That’s why you see such large margins of error.
A good poll will be representative of those actually likely to vote. That means including minority communities that are historically under-polled (Julia Carson routinely polled 15-20 points lower than her vote on election day). It means including younger voters who use cell phones exclusively (and accounting for the fact that they’re less likely to vote). In other words, a good poll requires both accurate sampling and the use of methodologically predictive algorithms.
According to this morning’s news, Vargus raised several questions about the WISH poll, based upon some internal inconsistencies. But even assuming it is reasonably accurate, what it tells us is what politicians have always known: what matters is the poll taken on election day, and that poll depends on who does the best job getting out their vote.
A recent study of 155 elections involving incumbents showed that voters who were undecided two weeks prior to the election broke 80%/20% for the challenger. Evidently, if the incumbent didn’t have them by then, he wasn’t going to get them. That’s good news for Kennedy–if her campaign gets those folks to the polls.
When you teach political science or public administration, you try to explain to students the importance of systems–the rules of the game.
Most Americans watch political campaigns much the same way as they watch football or baseball–as a contest between two (or more) competitors. May the best team win. We recognize that there are rules, that fouls should be punished and not rewarded, but it all seems pretty transparent.
The rules that govern elections aren’t so easily observed, and partisans work hard to rig them. As the Indianapolis Star observed in an editorial this morning,
“state law also has discouraged voter turnout. Indiana’s polls, for example, close at 6 p.m. on Election Day, an earlier cutoff than in many other states. The early close at the polls makes it difficult for many workers, including those with children to drop off or pick up and those with lengthy commutes to work, to show up on Election Day. Indiana also has been slow to adopt innovations such as early voting centers and Election Day voting centers, which eliminate the need to turn out at a specific polling site on a specified day.
Indiana also presents third parties with a higher threshold for ballot access than many other states. The inability to get their candidates on the ballot discourages would-be voters who don’t fit within Democratic or Republican silos.”
This year, Indianapolis voters saw a particularly egregious example of efforts at vote suppression, when the local GOP adamantly refused to authorize satellite voting centers. The rule is that such changes must receive a unanimous vote from the Election Board, and the Republican member consistently blocked the Clerk’s effort to establish convenient polling places. Initially, he argued that setting up satellite sites would be “too expensive.” When a local union offered to pay the (really pretty modest) cost, he still refused–although if he offered a justification for his intransigence, I didn’t hear it.
Coming on the heels of Todd Rokita’s efforts to make voting more difficult for the poor and elderly, by requiring the sort of IDs that most of us privileged folks–who are more likely to vote Republican-already have, it is hard to see this as anything but a continuation of efforts to make voting more difficult for populations that skew Democrat.
The pious justification for the ID requirement was prevention of fraud (although the only documented cases of voter fraud involved absentee ballots, which were not part of the “reform” effort). There is no justification for prevention of satellite voting centers.
As the Star points out, it’s the height of hypocrisy to bemoan Indiana’s low turnout at the same time lawmakers are doing everything possible to keep people from the polls.
