[Newspoetry] Paradox of Election Returns

[DL Emerick]

The States are busy squabbling.

 

Who gets to be first in the presidential primary business?

 

The National Parties, if there were such things, could regulate the messy
market that such competition creates.

 

But, the reality is, for better or worse, there is - at most - only one
National Party.

 

That Party is the GoP, for they have long been both centrally organized and
blindly obedient to the call of Party.

 

It is considered a rare thing for a GoP officeholder to oppose his party, or
its rank and file.

 

When a GoP guy does it, the Press rants on and on, about the guy's Courage
and Statesmanship, about his visionary leadership.

 

One could cite examples, easily enough, of Senators Hagel and Warner.

 

By contrast, the Democrats are always divided among themselves; they never
present us with a monolithic self.

 

The reason for this divide between the parties, between the
multiple-personality syndrome of the Democrats, of fractured egos, and the
integrated, unified person of the GoP, lies, perhaps, in the differential
appeal that the two parties make to the electorate.

 

Everyone who wants to feel the sameness of normalcy votes for the GoP.  This
normalcy is a false unity of consciousness, of course, because the reality
of the nation has its token in the saying "E pluribus unum".  America is a
nation whose greatest riches are those of diversity.  Indeed, diversity of
being is the happiest fact of freedom - for only slaves would all dress
alike, think alike, talk and act alike.  Slaves, robots and dead-men are
never persons, independent and free.

 

The fact of a Democratic Party reflects this fact, of difference.  The
styles of putative leaders of the Democratic Party reflect this fact, of
what it means to be one among many, before there is ever properly one over
many.  Hence, you find Democrats talking of tolerance, compromise and
negotiation, for those of the peaceful ways of resolving, by democratic
processes of mutual adjustments and sundry accommodations.

 

Republicans like Giuliani or Bush or Cheney would rather be dictators than
leaders, fierce warriors than princes of peace.  The Corporate Form of
Governance is precisely a re-invention (perpetuation) of fiefdoms and
kingships, for the CEO can do no wrong.  If you believe otherwise and work
for a corporation, just try to say "NO" quite bluntly to your bosses.
You'll find the authoritarian solution is a simple one: you're dead to us,
you're fired - your job performance truly was a sham issue and that really
mattered was that you said "Yes" when we told you what to do and then that
you did it, "exceeding expectations".  The divine right of the CEO is
founded in such authoritarian absolutisms as these, with each manager and
sub-manager secure only when the value of loyalty is oriented upward, and
any infirmity in the pyramid of power is eliminated.

 

The top down governance style of Republicans regularly confronts the diverse
bottoms up styles of the Democrats, in national politics.

 

The Republicans draw their political strength from those voters who do not
wish to acknowledge the differences of people.  All such wishes to identify
strongly with a single identity, of course, rest upon the unspoken premise
that a person's true personal preference can be or is accepted as a norm of
the alleged normalcy.  Hence, we see such glaring contrasts in style between
Colin Powell and Jesse Jackson.  Although knowing that racism is ever a
factor in at least some of the minds of those with whom he works, Powell
pretends that racism does not exist and that none would dare act very
overtly and obviously (in this day and age) when racism might seem to be the
sole basis for their words or actions.  Powell exploits a dare: "You
wouldn't dare to show your racism, at least not toward me, in matters of
advancing mutual interests, where most merit benefits that mutuality and
where bias harms it."

 

The reverse-exploitation of race is most starkly evident, too, in the
ill-tempered racial jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas - for Thomas is ever
struggling to prove that he got to where he is solely by virtue of merits,
and that all his detractors are simply racists.  Witnesses to this are his
own self-indictments, in his recent partial auto-biography.  The simpler
truth of the matter is that the judicial opinions of Thomas are often quite
mediocre, a fact that was eminently predictable from the sheer mediocrity of
his career achievements before appointment to the Court.  But, mendacity has
its eternal rewards.  (I am reminded of the bitter Maureen Dowd op-ed: "The
Office of Strategic Mendacity",
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE4DC173EF933A15751C0A9649
C8B63.  Sigh.)

 

By contrast, Jesse (you see how his first name is a comfortable handle,
where one would never think to refer to Powell as "Colin") represents the
diversity of his people.  That is, Jesse knows that their diversity is
two-fold, from each other, most of all, and from "whites" as a secondary
matter.  In matters of race's bearing on politics, Jesse is an up-start,
whereas Powell down-plays it.

 

Bias is a matter of prevalent tendencies, of gut-instincts, of acting
without thinking about how one is acting.  Bush and Cheney and Giuliani, for
instance, are biased.  In fact, they are strongly biased, for they consult
their gut-instincts and then refuse to consider any other opinion, other
than their own.  Hence, they delight in depicting the other guy as
"indecisive" when, in fact, all that the other guy might be suggesting is
that there are many ways to skin a cat.  They may even be saying that
skinning any cat has to have a reason, a use or a benefit.

 

Hence, when any calculus of reason applies and is applied, diversity of
possibility appears - its ex ante possibilism remains, even when ex post
rules seem to exclude it.
http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/ex_ante.htm
<http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/ex_ante.htm%20and%20also%
20.../ex_post.htm>  and also .../ex_post.htm.  Ex-post rules say that all
the uncertainty vanishes into the definitized products of a decision.  By
contrast, ex ante rules are ever looking forward, to the next decisional
nexus.  My resolution of this theoretic paradox is simple: uncertainty does
not vanish, it retreats future-ward and then regroups.  As Variance can not
be eliminated by any Fiat, good Strategies necessarily aim at being
continuous and consistent ways of restraining Uncertainties within
predictable Bounds.  (This policy proposal resembles that of TQM hypothesis
regarding Quality, as being first and always a matter of maintaining
consistency, before elevating the mean ("goodness" itself).)

 

(The empirically minded are pointed toward this aggregate linear
expectation.  E{A2n(60,x0)} ^qv&r{y-E(y\x0)}. (3-3)  Equation (3-3) shows
that in prediction with q parameters the average squared prediction error is
bounded, and this bound increases in relative magnitude by r/q when r
additional nuisance parameters are added.
http://wiki.stat.ucla.edu/socr/uploads/b/b8/PowerTransformFamily_Biometrica6
09.pdf  To all this I say, by the way, it's always and only a matter of the
scale of time, as to what is normal or not, in a population, for the normal
expresses only the mean of a moment in a distribution's life, the variance
being due to factors beyond those tending to cause the conformal modality
that appears as a mean.)

 

Ah, we were once so simply talking, about the Variance among the Democrats,
and the Mean among the Republicans, weren't we?

 

How does any of this matter, anyway?  Well, I was pointing to the question
of nominations.  For Republicans, it is a distinct structural advantage for
them to have early primaries, so that the faithfulness of their followers
can soon become blind to the possibility of defections, so that the
attending psychological urgencies of the follower to follow are first
satisfied and then coaxed into vehement expressions of partisanship.

 

As the non-partisan Party, Democrats never benefit from any early resolution
of their internal diversity struggle.  The fact is, Democrats like to argue
and to debate - and the longer that they disagree among themselves, the
happier they are with the Party's final choice, for it will then appear best
in the best of all possible worlds.  It's as if Democrats benefit most when
the differences among them are legitimated (or validated) by honest and
on-going debates about the alternate wisdoms of various proposed courses of
actions.

 

If I am right, Democrats would do well to postpone all caucuses and
primaries, straw polls and so on until the latest possible moments before
their Party Convention.  Instead, in a structurally suicidal gesture, they
have blindly followed the Republican desire to nominate a candidate at the
earliest possible date - robbing the Party of Diversity of the vitality of
its own Variance.

 

Now, the Democrats could adopt a "special" rule about election return
coverage, currently strangely applicable only to general elections.  Major
Media could be told that they may not publicize the results of elections
until all the polls have closed.  In this case, of staggered primaries, that
rule, suitably articulated, would mean that the primary results of New
Hampshire, for instance, could not be published until the very last State
had held its own primary (or caucus).  That way, as per the Rule for General
Elections, "late voters would not be [unduly] influenced by knowing what
early voters have done."

 

In short, Strategic Voting is a curse for Democrats, trying to guess which
diverse element of the Party's diverse coalition might fare better in the
general election.  Second guessing yourself hurts Democratic voters, because
there is no good estimator for that question.  Why?  Whatever strength a
Democratic candidate brings to the election, it comes from diversity and
uncertainty.  Reducing diversity and uncertainty, by selecting a Democratic
candidate too soon, simply enables the GoP to whip up the hates and the
fears that they need to mobilize in the mob-like qualities of their most
intense followers.  ("You've got to be taught, before it's too late, to hate
all the people your Relatives hate." or, that is, the Republicans, the
relativists of the particularistic (so-called) family-values party, hate.)

 

Early section of a Democratic nominee allows even Democrats to be seduced
and persuaded, falsely, that somehow, Bush is more like me, than say Kerry,
or that Reagan is more believable than Mondale.  The fact of the matter is,
even if the process of public life in elections sometimes produces honest
men, it also produces, equally often, substantially dishonest ones, such as
Bush.  If any man in politics is honest, it would be because he comes from a
subculture where honesty is prized - such as Minnesota or Massachusetts --
but places like the Golden-Dreamland, California, or the
Home-of-the-Whopper, Texas, do not valorize "honesty" above all other
matters.

 

Image politics requires time; idols do not catch on over-night.  Truth is
lost when images have time to cover over it.  Bias appears most strong over
the long run,.  Hence, any longer run between nomination and general
election best ensures the triumph of the Party of idolatry, the Republicans
- for the truth is that the People are many, and that their desire for One
God should be subordinate to a proper desire to find the true One God,
first.  Of this fact, we can be sure, for when Moses went to free the slaves
Israel had become, Pharaoh said, "If the standard is magic, our Magicians
are as good as yours - show me some true sign if you wish me to consent from
my belief to your belief."  What is true is a sign that always begins as
something more than a sign, for a sign is only what remains of the excess of
the real.  Signs can be manufactured and manipulated, but the truth is what
only happens to be the case and neither more nor less.

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