The System is Gamed

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

It’s election year, a sure indicator being the recent run on weapons. The mythology that a Democrat in the White House will gather up all the guns as prelude to sucking our brains out through a tube, or similar nonsense, has been going on, decade after decade, since yer great-great-grandpappy toted his hog-leg with him to pick off varmints, human and otherwise. Besides gun-hysteria, there are other typical activities in preparation for possible switch of leadership, although if you talk to the old-timers, this year is something special.

To put a sharp point on it, this election year the rhetoric long ago crossed the line of acceptable speech. Candidate promises to relieve us of the horror of having that black guy in the White House are so unreasonable as to be sheer fantasy. While a certain amount of this is to be expected, we clearly lost our e-brake on ugly political hijinks back in 2010. It’s also apparent that the opposition party is having a bit of a nervous breakdown this year, babbling to itself within hearing distance of a worried nation.

With the hoopla of Super Tuesday behind us, Santorum, who is picking up speed among the Christocrats as a bona fide not-Mitt, still wants us to have many children, one for each sexual act, apparently. He isn’t so interested in feeding or educating them, though. I mean, wasn’t it Jesus who said, “The poor will be with us always?” That’s good enough for Rick, who seconded that motion and put the nation on alert to his intent regarding birth control and home schooling. In the minds of disgruntled Pubs, Santorum has taken on the mantle of populist freedom fighter.

Meanwhile, struggling against the meme of elitist wealth and privilege, Mitt’s pretty wife, Ann, is attempting to humanize him, saying that not only does she NOT feel wealthy with that quarter-billion in off-shore accounts, but also she often feels “poor in spirit.” That’s a hard sell to a struggling populace, but rather than dissect her intent, I’ll just comment that she shouldn’t have married the Mittbot, who claims his favorite movie is the one they saw on their first date: The Sound of Music. Poor Ann, wealthy and poor at the same time: my condolences on a plain vanilla life. And yes, Gingrich and Paul are still in the race, but for no apparent reason. None of these, according to the talking heads, are electable, but we’re addicted to the political theatre so we watch with rapt attention.

There are other circus acts available, of course. Like a DNA-compromised love-child of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, wild-eyed and off her meds again, accused Obama of wanting to limit the number of babies you can have with his intrusive health care plan and federal interference into our lives. She’s obsessed with child welfare, Michele is, having previously announced she wouldn’t do anything for those pesky “anchor babies,” which was no surprise since she’d proposed no policy except tough love and continued poverty to the nation’s children. Yet Michele is more than just comic relief. Why should we be interested in this failed candidate, you ask? Because — like Rush Limbaugh, only temporarily chastened by his loss of more than 50 radio sponsors, according to Kos – she speaks for the right in this campaign season and beyond. Crazy is as crazy does, to tweak Forrest Gump a bit. And while Rush is crazy like a fox, Michele is, to quote Matt Taibbi, a “rare breed of political psychopath, equal parts crazed Divine Wind kamikaze-for-Jesus and calculating, six-faced Machiavellian prevaricator.” Happily, Michele was an early casualty in the Pub war for candidacy.

Yes, it’s election season and there are always casualties, but some are more distressing than others. Dennis Kucinich, the man who unerringly spoke for progressives against the military industrial complex, has lost his job and the lefties have lost their anti-war advocate. Now that we no longer have Russ Feingold or Ted Kennedy, we can ill afford this loss. Dennis was the man who kept ’em honest, along with Bernie Sanders, who — unless we can re-elect Florida’s Alan Grayson — will now have to serve as the last voice shouting into the conservative wilderness. Thank John Boehner. Thank the Republican redistricting plan. Thank gerrymandering, and if you haven’t taken a look at that lately, you really should. Along with issues of voter registration and continuing concerns about secure voting machines, gerrymandering is an enormous problem in the nation, and in this coming election.

After eight terms, it was not by chance that reapportionment forced Dennis Kucinich to compete with another Dem for his seat. Republicans deliberately created a new district that snakes its way across a narrow strip of Ohio to link a portion of Cleveland with Toledo, where Representative Marcy Kaptur rests on her reputation as the longest-serving woman in the House and one determined to bring home the bacon (pork) to local military interests. Kaptur enjoys solid popularity in working-class Toledo. Pitting city-liberal Kucinich against Kaptur brought on a series of vicious attack ads, while Dennis chose, as usual, to take the high road by having Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Russell Simmons, Willie Nelson, and Gore Vidal come out for him.

To no avail. Ultimately, Dennis was the outlier to Toledo residents, and he lost the primary along with his position in the House of Representatives. It wasn’t pretty. As Cleveland Magazine senior editor, Erick Trickey, put it: “No one who looks at the creepy-looking lizard-shaped 9th district can deny it: Toledo and Cleveland were fused together unnaturally, just to throw Kucinich and Kaptur together into a cruel, friendship-destroying cage match.”

Reapportionment comes every ten years, as the census reveals changes in population over the previous decade. In order to fairly deliver “one man, one vote” and assure that all districts contain a similar number of people and enjoy equal representation in the halls of government, new lines are drawn around Congressional districts, shifting the demographic assigned a representative and — in Ohio, California and several other states this season — occasionally eliminating Congressional seats. In fact, migration shifted almost a dozen liberal House seats to the South and West this time around, giving the right a numbers advantage in a tight political arena.

You may remember me yelping about voter turn-out in 2010, not only to provide Obama a continued opportunity to get some of the nation’s work done, but also because it was reapportionment time. We remain a republic of diverse and independent states, each one with its own way of redistricting, most allowing the ruling political party to redistrict to its own advantage. In the majority of the states this year, thanks to Tea Party fever that flooded the House with newbie representatives, that influence is Republican.

Our political system is a complex, bloated and intricate piece of work. Remember big green Herman Munster and his pale bride Lily? When it comes to our political system, we’re all like pretty, clueless cousin Marilyn — we’ve been living with this bizarre scenario so long, we don’t realize it’s a monstrosity worthy of Dr. Frankenstein. And as long as the political game in this nation is winner-take-all, reapportionment will be wielded like a billy club and democracy will get a black eye as local politicos sculpt their maps to choose their voters, rather than allowing the voters to choose them.

A piece of long-ignored political intricacy, the art of gerrymander became a matter of national interest when George Bush’s House Speaker, Tom DeLay, rode into town. During Tom’s tenure as Speaker in Texas, he refined the art of “packing and cracking,” creating a map of improbable districts that defy the imagination. Some voting blocks solidified special interests, some districts were as thick and blocky as a Humvee, others stretched out in hour-glass fashion like the shape of a corseted matron in the Gilded Age. Others seemed as random as something produced by a can of silly string, but deliberately fashioned to marginalize voters along lines of race and wealth.

According to Wikipedia:

Gerrymandering is effective because of the wasted vote effect. By packing opposition voters into districts they will already win (increasing excess votes for winners) and by cracking the remainder among districts where they are moved into the minority (increasing votes for eventual losers), the number of wasted votes among the opposition can be maximized. Similarly, with supporters holding narrow margins in the unpacked districts, the number of wasted votes among supporters is minimized.

In the Kucinich case, House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio deliberately created an improbable district that stretched 120 miles along the Lake Erie coastline, at one point only connected by a small bridge and, at high tide, not even contiguous. This artistic example of gerrymander evidently fell between the cracks in a year when more than half the states have asked judges to make independent decisions on redistricting, taking the issue out of — at least in Boehner’s case — smoke-filled back rooms of state legislatures.

But that may not be enough, given the proclivity of judges to display their political bias these days. For instance, due to lawsuits for inappropriate gerrymander, Texas has had to push its primary back until May and perhaps longer, waiting for a final map. A panel of judges redrew the one proposed by the legislature, but the Supreme Court has stepped in to send it all back to the drawing board. Clarence Thomas actually issued an opinion, so we shouldn’t hold our breath trying to guess whom the new instructions favor. Other countries who regularly redistrict hire independent agencies to redraw maps using strict criteria, but — you know — that’s not the American way.

Indeed, we’re faced with a subtle challenge to the claim that America is a union. There is every reason to suspect that Republicans are gerrymandering Southern districts in an attempt to resegregate. A recent article indicates that white Democratic leadership is scarce as hens’ teeth in the Southern states, and it’s estimated that these few will disappear after this year. Think of that! No caucasian liberal representation across a wide swath of the nation. For those of us who think redistricting is the luck of the draw, this should be the litmus test. In the South, gerrymander is splitting out the political competition to dispose of it, while reaffirming the racial and cultural bias we fought an epic and bloody war to defeat.

Elsewhere, states across the nation are scrambling to get their districts in order. Here in the Pea Patch, the block of similar counties that was our district has now been changed to look like an inverted t-square. Those far to the north are in farm country, and we’re a resort area. We don’t have similar needs and our old familiar representative is gone with the wind, replaced with a newbie we don’t know — more importantly, who does not know us. So much for representation in an election year. Holding both a primary and a caucus vote, this year our primary vote took place in one district, our caucus will take place in another, and those who say politics is too damned difficult to understand have every right to complain — but not to turn their backs. That’s how we got embroiled in this mess in the first place.

Who loses by the continued corruption of radical gerrymander? We all do. The democratic process does. The nation has lost Dennis Kucinich as its watch dog, the man who proposed we establish a Department of Peace and who has traditionally railed against each piece of war rhetoric that makes its way into the public arena. Iran is on the table. Dennis will go after it. Who will go after it when he’s gone?

Radical gerrymander must be retired, and a more functional process put into place. The whole concept of one person, one vote falls apart when the system is gamed like this. From Wall Street to Foggy Bottom and on into Afghanistan, it’s gamed on too many levels as it is. Students, old and poor folks, and those who don’t drive are being denied their right to vote by radical state governments, eager to eliminate the great unwashed from election rolls. Even with the obvious examples of election-theft in 2000 and 2004 in near memory, we still don’t think about the security issues with voting machines. The days of Diebold are not behind us. The Citizens United decision will find its way into the courts, but perhaps not soon enough to impact this election year, leaving big money to talk louder than anyone else in the room. These are only a couple of ways the system is tweaked to benefit one side over the other: political gamesmanship gone rabid, destructive and disproportionate.

Still, you know what I’m going to say next. When Dennis is gone, who will stand tall for the peace-lovers? You will. I will. It’s time now for us all to stand tall together, arms linked for what we believe in, allowing the remarkable energies of 2012 to magnify the power of our intent. A district is just a big neighborhood — it will change as we engage with our neighbors, seeking solutions to common problems. We can act locally, from the bottom up to impact our states and, eventually, our nation.

Yes, the game is rigged, but this is no time to sit it out; too many of us did that for too long as it is. This is the time to engage for what we want, to rally toward a future we can help co-create. If it has not been given, then let me give it now: blessed are the game-changers, for they will recreate the world!