Walking down a Bernal Heights street, I heard a guy shouting from behind me to a woman in a garish, oversized white t-shirt with somebody’s name on it. “Hey, you guys are doing well — I see posters for Tom everywhere!”. The woman shouted back, “Thanks! Who are you walking for?” “Eric!” “Cool!”. Later, a bunch of bicyclists fly by in convoy, playing an upbeat latino tune on speakers, and waving flags for another candidate.
It’s election time in San Francisco. As well as the presidential election, there’s the usual Bible-sized selection of other plebiscites to be plebbicized, including the election of the supervisor for my local neighbourhood. You can decide whether you should vote for Eric or Tom or Eva or David or Vern or Mark or the other Eric by thumbing through the 268 page local voter guide here. I believe that’s on top of the 166 page State guide.
I was going to witter here a little about the vibrancy of American elections, and then I remembered where else I’ve lived where elections were this vivid and fun. When I was eight, I remember the cars driving around with loudspeakers balanced on top, and posters, and speechifying and lots of local excitement to a British election. I grew up in Basildon, a marginal constituency (Ohio-on-the-Thames, if you will), and ground zero for those wanting to extrapolate results from their glib little parodies of voting patterns. You had to admit though, both sides fought like prize-fighters for every voter there.
San Francisco is about as far away from a swing state as you can imagine (unless you mean between Cindy Sheehan supporters and Nancy Pelosi fans), but the internal city politics are gloriously internecine and bloody. Supervisors have a surprising amount of power: en mass they are a counterbalance to the major. One of them just pleaded guilty to take $84,000 in bribes. I admire the huge encyclopedia of political explanations that turn up on everybody’s doorsteps every election, as well as the miles of columnage in the local papers analysing the minutiae of the city’s internal politics. Even the alternative free papers here often have front covers with titles like “REVEALED: JUST WHAT THE HELL DOES DEPUTY VICE ALDERMAN DIFRAMBRIZI THINK HE IS DOING WITH THE MANHOLE COVER FINANCIAL ALLOCATION FOR FINANCIAL PERIOD 2007/2008?”. To give a less made-up example, I have just read a (genuinely fascinating, actually) three page piece expose on the fines builders have to pay for having their cones in the wrong place. It is all connected with police graft, of course.
I honestly wonder who reads all of this, and yet I love that it’s there. I was reading Linus Torvalds slightly agape bemusement at how uncivilized American elections are, and wonder: is it better that politics be such a loud carnival? Or would all this corruption go even more unnoticed if no-one was watching?
October 12th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
You’ve watched ‘Our Friends In The North’, I hope? (I was going to say: rent it, but it’s not available in Region 1, as far as I can tell.) For most of my childhood, I was in a somewhat marginal constituency, made less marginal by the outward thrust of the suburbs, but the town centre would elect a dog in a red rosette and that led to entrenched blocs, rumours of graft, and bitter inter-party fights that made Jacobean revenge tragedies look like Dora the Explorer. (Reeves and Mortimer’s Cox and Evans are very clearly modelled on two local councillors from back home.)
See, I think Linus misses the point a little, but that you’re also talking past him. SF politics covers a fragment of the national spectrum, and it’s within those constraints that the distinctions are paradoxically most profound. (Tangentially, it’s also the area that’s most open to electoral experimentation.) That’s to say, you’ll find SF politics in pretty much every one-party municipality regardless of the country. Once you hit congressional-district or statewide politics, though, the amount of money required to campaign in any serious fashion combines with broadcast media to warp the political discourse. It ceases to be politics on a human scale. I’ve made one serious political donation in my life, and that was to Martin Bell in 1997. Now that was money well spent, even accounting for its role in creating the monster that is Oliver Kamm. Money is speech only to the extent that REPLIES ON THE INTERNETS IN ALL CAPS ARE SPEECH. They’re in a register that doesn’t fit.
In the meantime, I’ll be glad to watch the Canadian returns come in on Tuesday night.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:47 am
CindyS is missing a left chevron above, and ‘whitter’ looks like a neologism, which (b) I expect you knew, but it took rather a while to research (even checked Finnegans Wake).
October 13th, 2008 at 2:52 am
@jornB Fixed: I meant witter, and am flattered by your search!
@nick, I think that Linus is mulling over the carnivalisation and polarisation of all US politics, compared to proportional representation systems. My point is that if there is polarisation, it adds to the spectacle, and perhaps the spectacle adds to our closer observation of what goes on. This is I think the Anglo-Saxon complaint that all other political systems short of outright civil war are in some way too boring for tears. (You can tell when I think I am playing to my own horrible prejudices when I end on a rhetorical question.) I wonder what the %age of joke candidates is in PR votes?
October 13th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I wonder what the %age of joke candidates is in PR votes?
I’ll be waggish and say– in parts of Italy, probably all of them.