Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Department of Counterintuition

Yeah, but let me ask you this. Why would the person willing and able to pay the most for a US Senate seat necessarily be the most compromised? Consider this, me droogs: if the Illinois legislature impeaches the Governor, changes the law, and calls a special election, isn't the seat going to go to the person willing and able to pay the most for it?

Posted by IOZ at 11:24 AM | email »
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26 comments:

Jim Wetzel said...

Dear Ioz,

Yes.


--- Jim W.

11:42 AM
Kent Fossgreen said...

You and your sinister gift for clearly stating the obvious...

It seems, sir, that you don't believe that we actually live in a representative democracy. But it says it is, right there on the label! What are we to think? (Apply stress to different words in preceding sentence as needed.)

12:02 PM
"Kingfish" Slaney Black said...

Naw. It'll go to the person for whom other rich people are willing to pay the most.

Campaign finance regulations, like all sumptuary laws, are fundamentally oligarchic in intent.

If you break rank with the rest of the overclass they start calling you a demagogue and/or crook. Been going on since the toga days.

12:22 PM
la Rana said...

Patty Fit always gets his man. Though the shit he's spewing is clearly a violation of ethics rules regarding extrajudicial statements and publicity. Don't ya think, jus' mebbe, that "Lincoln would roll over in his grave" might prejudice the fair application of justice?

Dude should have his fucking license yanked....but the rules never seem to apply to prosecutors.

Oh, and your questions are not mutually exclusive.

12:34 PM
NutellaonToast said...

Why you said it is, so it is. By, God, you're right!

12:40 PM
paul from the clue-by-four said...

Why do you have this trilobite, if you don't want to ululate?

12:55 PM
fledermaus said...

Well this is a complicated case, a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous

1:06 PM
IOZ said...

Professional courtesy. Compeers, you know?

1:48 PM
Anonymous said...

"'The conduct would make Lincoln roll over in his grave," he added, referring to the 19th-century president and Illinois politician.'"

As opposed to the car. Or the log. Or the... memorial.

1:58 PM
Montag said...

hey. i made this same joke, and an A Clockwork Orange reference just last night. took me two posts to do it though. you're good, IOZ.

1:59 PM
Anonymous said...

isn't the seat going to the person willing and able to pay the most for it?

I think the clue that it's a New Dawn in American politics is the sun peeking over the horizon.

The sunshine-y rays of hope produced by thousands of internet contributions will surely burst through your cloud of cynicism.

2:37 PM
El Serracho! said...

obama for change!

4:42 PM
Anonymous said...

This scheme was as close as any other in modern times to what our luminous Founding Fathers originally had in mind when they crafted the Constitution in those hallowed halls over two centuries ago. Blago should be praised for his piety to the real intentions of our nation's founders, as well as for having such glowing skin and healthy hair for a 50something.

Connor

5:41 PM
Crusader AXE said...

Only if they spend their money on the appropriate games, circuses, bread and whiskey. Four words -- Mitt Romney; Steve Forbes. Last I looked, neither had been elected lately to dogcatcher, although being the R governor of Massachusetts ranks close...of course, he repudiated everything he did in Massachusetts. Forbes, bless his heart, stayed a bug-eyed weirdo throughout. Let us not forget Ross Perot...

6:25 PM
TGGP said...

I was actually glad to know that a Chicago politician was going to be President, precisely because they're all so blatantly corrupt 'round here. That Fitzgerald guy that used to hold Obama's seat got booted by his own party for trying to clean stuff up by bringing in that other Fitzgerald dude. We like good honest graft. And nepotism. Here's hoping for a revival of Tammany Hall and its smoke-filled back-rooms. Drive out the goo-goos!

8:51 PM
Anonymous said...

Yes, but without the patina of legitimacy.

11:18 PM
Leonard said...

[in] a special election, isn't the seat going to go to the person willing and able to pay the most for it

I have no love for democracy, in fact I rather despise it. But I won't let this leftist canard pass without challenge.

Money is useful in American politics, but it only influences the know-nothing middle, particularly the stupider ones. Many politicians have won with inferior spending.

Hell, W's popularity never dropped below 22%, and presumably about the same is true the other way -- 22% or so of the people are fanatical progressives who will never vote for any Republican, for any reason. So at most, you're talking about using money to buy up the ideologically-challenged 56% in the middle. And that's under the assumptions that (a) they have no ideology orthogonal to "left" and "right", and (b) that they are all totally subject to media influence. If we assume only the dumber half of them are, at most 28% of the vote is buyable...

Thus, winning an election (fair, w/ only two candidates) guarantees that the winner has at least a minimal level of minimally informed approval from at least 40% or so of the votes. As versus straightforward auctioning of the seat, which would guarantee nothing at all about the degree that the winner was approved by the public. (It would be a better system than elections.) And of course, a covert, criminal auction of the seat guarantees its occupant is a crook.

12:25 AM
Neil said...

As they say this week in Houston, soon to be third largest city in the country at the rate Chicago goes, "If you take all the stupid people out of the legislature, then you don't have a representative democracy."
(noted by houstonstrategies.blogspot.com)

3:43 AM
Dunc said...

And that's under the assumptions that (a) they have no ideology orthogonal to "left" and "right", and (b) that they are all totally subject to media influence. If we assume only the dumber half of them are, at most 28% of the vote is buyable...

Assumptions (a) and (b) have some merit. The third, unlabelled assumption ("only the dumber half of them are [subject to media influence]") is clearly bullshit. Advertising works - that's why people spend so much money on it.

6:23 AM
IOZ said...

Leonard, you're reaching to prove that a common-sense observation is a, uh, a leftist canard. The two most accurate and reliable predictors of victory in American elections are incumbency and campaign spending. "Many politicians have won with inferior spending." Yeah, well, "many" homosexuals live in America, but you'd hardly use that to claim it's a gay, gay country.

9:18 AM
TGGP said...

IOZ, they discuss this in Freakonomics (and I believe Lott's Freedomnomics as well, which was stupidly positioned as an attack on the former). People don't bother to give money to unpopular candidates that wouldn't receive many votes. So if X is popularity, Y is votes and Z is campaign donations the causality goes X -> Y & X -> Z, not Z -> Y. Even if the candidate was unwilling to pay, they'd still be likely to win. This can be demonstrated by looking at unpopular figures that happened to have a lot of money (McGovern's campaign was due to just a few large donors, Ron Paul is a more recent example).

10:53 AM
Leonard said...

IOZ, money causes victory in roughly the same way that pregnancy causes sex. But I am unfair. Perhaps a better analog would be sex causing love. There's traffic both ways; it's a feedback loop. People give money to policitians in part because they expect them to win. So money measures popularity far more than it causes it. Ron Paul's legion of lovable losers aside, most people do not give money to lost causes.

1:11 PM
IOZ said...

I don't buy the Freakonomics argument. Donations come mostly from monied interests that play the spread and from partisans. In competitive races, the candidate who raises the most from these sources most effectively sways "the know-nothing middle" and usually wins.

As for money measuring "popularity," I would rephrase that as money measures recognition, which is why even unpopular incumbents generally raise more money than upstart challengers.

1:50 PM
paul from the clue-by-four said...

You know what would be interesting? If someone were to study the history of elections going back a couple centuries or so, and track the correlation of the largest amount of money collected with the eventual winners in each contest.

Oh.

10:14 PM
Neil said...

My understanding of it may or may not be more straightforward (although that sentence does nudge in one direction). It's a confidence game. The weekly coverage of daily swings surrounding candidates trying the same things every hour on a slightly shifting backdrop of events - it's the Biblical "to him who has, more will be added, but to him who lacks, even what he has will be taken from him": the best way for a candidate to get more public confidence is to look like someone who has public confidence, and to make opponents look like losing bets for further confidence because they don't have enough public confidence to be worth confiding policy hopes in. Any race "on the issues" transmogrifies each one into a confidence issue by proxy, and seeks the shortest path to do so. The early states in the primaries have a bizarre effect of cementing claims to viability before candidates reach any states with real policy problems, and the opinions of each candidate in major states follow docilely along unless it's already down to just a couple of contenders. Up to that point, it appears untrue that money measures rather than causes popularity, as Leonard claims. If some candidate had been a native Iowan, focused all of his campaigning on New Hampshire, and gotten a plurality in two primaries at the outset of the race, broadbased "confidence" would have wagged along his trail. If the Texas primary had come first, Paul would not have been a dead ringer for unpopular, to use your example. The world accepts greenbacks not because of Fort Knox but because their value comes from others' confidence in their value. Clearly this can unwind in a horrific way once the feedback reverses, but in the meantime their confidence doesn't directly follow the relative performance of the U.S.A. economic engine, just the perception of other people's interest in dollars.

1:32 PM
Neil said...

In other words, the popular perception that money measures, rather than causes, popularity is *itself* what causes money to cause popularity, Leonard. Horserace away.

1:36 PM

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