The House of Un-Representatives

Looking at the election results from Pennsylvania, I was glad to see that we had voted for Barack Obama and Bob Casey, but surprised that we elected only 5 Democrats from our 18 Congressional districts.  Was there that much vote splitting?

Then I learned that Pennsylvania wasn't alone.  As Ezra Klein points out, Democratic candidates for the House got 54,301,095 votes while Republicans got 53,822,442, but Democrats got many fewer House seats, only 193 to 233 for Republicans.  (Nine races are still undecided.)  So Democrats got half the votes but only 44% of the seats.

I looked up the Congressional election results for Pennsylvania, and with 99.61% of the precincts reporting, Democratic candidates for House seats got a total of 2,702,900 votes, Republicans got  2,617,031 votes, and other parties got 41,080 votes.  So Democrats got 50.4% of the votes, but won only 28% of the races.

How could that happen?  It happened because some Congressional districts were lopsided wins for Democrats, while most Republican wins were narrower, so the Democratic votes were concentrated in a few districts.  Specifically, 41.9% of all Democratic votes were cast in the 5 Congressional districts that the Democrats won.

And why did that vote concentration happen?

The easy answer is that the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature fixed the Congressional districts to favor Republicans, but that's only part of the answer.  The fact of the matter is that Democratic votes tend to be concentrated in urban areas, and in Pennsylvania that means Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  Once that many voters of one party are congregated together like that, it is fairly difficult to construct districts with proportionate numbers of voters of each party.  Republican-controlled legislatures might have made the problem worse, but the problem was going to be there regardless.  And it's only going to get worse as time goes on because there is a growing tendency for people to cluster together with other people with similar political views, as explained in Bill Bishop's book, The Big Sort.

The irony here is that the House of Representatives was supposed to be the branch of the government that would be most responsive to the will of the people, with direct elections every two years.

The Senate was only indirectly responsive to the people, with Senators elected by state legislatures.  Senators are now elected by popular vote, but the allocation of two Senators for each state gives less populous states--which tend to be Republican--a disproportionate amount of power, and the Senate is slow to change because Senators are elected only every six years.

The election of the President is even more indirect, and so the President was going to be the least responsive to the people, because the President is chosen by "electors" selected by each state "in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," which means that popular vote is not needed at all.  And we complain about the role of the "Electoral College" in Presidential elections every four years, but the results of the Electoral College usually match the results of the popular vote.

So we've now got a President who was elected with the support of a majority of the voters.  We've also got a Senate with 54 Democrats and 46 Republicans, which is roughly the same percentages as the popular vote for President and so roughly representative of the voters.  But we've also got a House that is distinctly not representative of the politics of a majority of Americans.

So the whole system has turned upside down, with the President becoming the most representative of the popular will and the House becoming the least representative, a House of Un-Representatives.

How Romney Failed as Manager-in-Chief

In 2008, I was really torn between voting for Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama in the primary.  I made up my mind when I read that the Clinton campaign was running out of money about half way through the primaries.  Apparently, they had planned for a short campaign, expecting to build up an overwhelming lead early, while the Obama had planned for the long haul.  That made up my mind for me because I figured that you can't be trusted to manage the US government if you can't manage your own election campaign.  (And management matters.  Compare, for example, the federal responses to hurricane Katrina and hurricane Sandy.)

Now, I know that the President doesn't really manage the government, and the candidate doesn't really run the campaign, either.  But the candidate picks the people who manage the campaign, and the President picks the people who pick the people who manage the government.  So the quality of the people who run the candidate's campaign is a good indication of the quality of people who will be running the country if that candidate is selected.

For that reason, not only was I worried about Mitt Romney's ideology and politics, but I was also worried about his ability to manage, because it was clear his campaign was being poorly run.  It wasn't just the frequency of his campaign wandering off-message, but also the inability of his staff to anticipate and be able to answer questions that were obviously going to be asked sooner or later.  (The most famous example was a telephone conference called for the purpose of talking about women's issues in which senior Romney staff were unable to say whether or not Romney supported the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.)

Now I read (in RedState.com of all places) that it was actually worse than I thought:  "Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job."

Gingrich's Appeal

Newt Gingrich appeals to many Republican voters because of Gingrich's obvious disdain for Democrats.

Unfortunately, voters soon realize that he as a great deal of disdain for Republicans also.

Which explains why his poll numbers keep going up down.

The Bain Identity

Mitt Romney has been criticized from both left and right as a "flip-flopper." Someone who will say whatever needs to be said in order to move ahead politically. He will say whatever he needs to say in order to get nominated, then say what he needs to say to get elected, and then say what he needs to say to govern. All without any real commitment or sincere belief.

When he ran for governor of Massachusetts, he ran as a moderate and he governed as a moderate, and now that he's running for president in a conservative Republican field he's running as a conservative. In the general election, running against Obama, he'll portray himself as a moderate, and who knows how he would govern?

What doesn't seem to have gotten much press is that Romney ran Bain Capital the same way.

According to this piece in the Washington Post, written by an investment banker who often dealt with Bain Capital while Romney was in charge, Bain Capital had a nasty habit of doing what might be called a "bait and switch." In a private offering, the firm that makes the highest initial bid gets favored position to negotiate the final deal. Bain would make the high bid, eliminate the competition, and then use its favored position to negotiate the price down below its original bid. Some renegotiation is normal when new conditions are discovered on "due diligence" (closer scrutiny), but Bain negotiated downward too often and too flagrantly.

In other words, Bain would say what it needed to say in order to get a favorable negotiating position, and then change its price once it had the position it wanted and the other side was at a disadvantage.

This is what some people would call "gaming the system," and what other people would call "dishonest."

If this description of Bain Capital is correct, then "flip-flopping" is not a fluke of Romney's political career. It is a fundamental character flaw of the man. He lacks integrity.