Originally posted by Simon Darkshade
He has gone from funny to completely irrelevant and petty to plainy insulting.
you hit the nail on the head. Moore used to be funny to some. He used to actually represent the views of a large group of Americans, mainly unionized workers. At the point when he first came onto the national scene, his views were in line with much of working class America. After his initial success however, he morphed into one of the "intellectual" leftists, changing his views from a more populist worldview to one that, at least for him, is more intellectualy "honest". The man is now a lunatic.
As far as the American election goes, I think there are a lot of factors that many foreigners, and probably more Americans don't consider when analyzing the results. Bush, in a recount conducted by countless news organizations, won the recount under the process that the southern florida counties were using at the time the Florida Supreme Court stopped them. They all concluded that Bush would have one the state unless the more stringent ballot counting method advocated by his own team were used.
All of the major news networks called Florida, and therefore the election, before voting was closed in a good section of western florida. Much of the Florida panhandle is in the central time zone as opposed to the eastern zone in which most of the state resides. That section of Florida happens to be overwhelmingly Republican (very white, very fundamentalist christian). Many of those people may not have gone to the polls because by the time they would have voted, the state had already been called, and they thus felt their votes didn't count. The fact is, because the television networks messed up calling the state too early, we can never know what effect that had on those voters who had not yet cast their vote.
The electoral college. It is an incredibly flawed system because it encourages lower voter turnout nationwide. For example, in a state like Texas, which supported Bush by a 75/25 margin or thereabouts, or a state like California, which overwhelmingly supported Gore, the supporters of the candidate who are so far behind have little incentive to go out and vote. Because their votes only matter in the states they vote in and because those states were decided long before election day, the supporters of the trailing candidate often give up hope. Only the voters in closely contested states have much incentive to go out and vote. I know that's sad, everyone should excercise their right to vote, but fewer and fewer people are doing so these days.
Yes, the electoral college system is flawed, but that's the way we elect our president. Therefore, the popular vote does not really matter. That's because the popular vote in our system is a truly inaccurate measure of the intent of the voting public. In the week or two before the elections, Bush was polling anywhere between 1-3% points ahead of Gore in most polls. I feel that's a better measure of the opinion of the American public. What the people who supported Gore and think he actually won conveniently forget is that with a straight one person = one vote system, the popular voting numbers would certainly have been different than they were with our current electoral college system. I don't know who would have won the election in that circumstance, but it is far from a cut and dry case that it would have been Al Gore.
Voter apathy is an embarassment to our democracy (representative republic, whatever you want to call it) and I think that revoking the electoral college system could do a lot to reverse the trend we have seen in recent years.
When will people learn, Democracy Doesn't Work!!!" -Homer Simpson
