Fall                                                                    Harvest Moon

The end of life as we know it.  If [blank] wins, I’m moving to Canada or Monaco depending on the political inclination.  At age 65 I’ve been going through these elections virtually since I was old enough to vote in 1968.  1968!  What a year.

Each presidential election for several cycles, except the first, I voted Gus Hall, a perennial Minnesota favorite son running on the Communist party ticket.  That first election I voted for Dick Gregory, whose Indiana campaign found me heavily involved.  In fact, I voted for Gus Hall until he died.  Basically, my vote said, other, please.

Since Dick and Gus passed from the political scene, I’ve voted Democrat, even in years when I didn’t want to.  Which was all of them except the last election.  When I say I didn’t want to vote for the Democrat, I don’t mean I thought the Republican was a worthy choice; rather, I voted Democrat to show a general tendency, a direction, a prod toward the future.

This year, too, I will vote for Obama.  It will be a much more luke warm vote than in 2008 since his mode of governance has shown little to me except for his health care legislation.  Which, as I reminded us a few weeks ago, had its origin in the Cato Institute, a Libertarian think tank.

Other than that, and even in that with an honest analysis, Obama has been a candidate of the Business Party, as Noam Chomsky refers to both Republicans and Democrats.  I say even in that in reference to health care for this reason.  Health insurance as a benefit has cost many industries a good deal of money and proved impossible for some small businesses.  If the tea party would take its cocked-hat off long enough to let blood circulate through the brain, they would notice that the more aid and stability the government can bring to health care, the better it is for business.

So, even if the unexpected happens and Mitt Romney wins, don’t expect to find my car left running on the freeway or our home empty with dinner in the stove.  We’ll be here.  I might even be hard at work plotting for 2016.

Fall                                                                             Autumn Moon

Politics is a blood sport.  At almost every level.  Even in classrooms.  I love it, too, but I’ve stepped away this year, maybe for good, maybe not.

(Elbridge Gerry, vice president in James Madison’s second term)

This comes up because of this fascinating article in the Atlantic: The League of Dangerous Mapmakers.  The dangerous mapmakers are the backroom boys (all the ones in this article were men) who help draw and redraw congregational districts after each census.  They’re seeking partisan advantage, safe seats for Republicans or Democrats, or failing that, turning a former safe seat into a swing seat.  They also try to break blocks of the other parties most likely supporters by shifting neighborhoods here and there.

This is all called gerrymandering and I learned, for the first time in this article. the source of the term.  James Madison, the country’s fourth president, had, in his second term, a vice-president named Elbridge Gerry.  He was the governor of Massachusetts in 1812 when partisans created a Boston district that looked like a salamander. (picture)  It was an obvious grab for power and ever since this black art has had a mixed name, one part politician and one part amphibian.

The author of this article makes a cogent argument that gerrymandering, kicked up  a notch and engaged ruthlessly, is behind the hyperpartisan nature of congress.

His reasoning is this:  The intention of gerrymandering is to create safe seats.  A safe seat means a Republic or a Democrat can expect to win every time short of some unusual political year.  In those circumstances elections are not won at the ballot box, but in party primaries.  Party primaries have a much smaller number of voters.   Those who do vote are most often people with a particular ideological knife they wish to sharpen with their district as grindstone.

The impact of this pushing of races out of general elections and into the primaries means that votes in congress are held to a more extreme test.  This is why there are so many tea party congresspeople now and why their votes and their caucuses have little interest in negotiating.

Negotiating is the heart of the political process and these gerrymandered districts, to the degree they are dominant, render negotiations impossible.  Thus, the fiscal cliff.  The constant drawing of lines in the sand.

What to do?  Uncertain.  But it’s something all voters should greet with suspicion.

Does it happen here in Minnesota?  Well, let’s look at the Minnesota 6th district.  My district.  Here’s the map.  I’ve put it on its side so you can compare it to the original, salamander district.  Pretty close, eh?

I don’t know the politics of the Boston district, but I’m willing to bet that, even in 1812, their demographic rationales were similar to those that form the  Minnesota 6th, 200 years later.  Those demographics are, more of our voters in these counties or cities than there are of yours.

The Minnesota 6th district was drawn to create a Republican safe seat by including metro suburban counties and attaching them, through a long neck, to Stearns county, filled with German Catholics.  German Catholics vote a straight ticket based on a single issue:  abortion and they are agin’ it.

Thus, not only does a Democrat have to be able to draw votes in heavily Republican metro suburban counties, but they also have to be pro-life, a rare to so-far non-existent breed of Democrat.

Does it all matter? Well, I’ve had the flakiest, most public, odd, big-haired congressional representative possible since 2007.  Her politics are about as far from mine as it is possible to be, yet she represents me in each vote before the House of Representatives.  It matters.