Even the most socially-isolated, reclusive hermit has probably worked out by now that there's an election going on here in the Land of the Free-to-Buy-Whatever-You-Want. It's even managed to knock Jimmy Saville off the headlines on the BBC news, which I guess is a welcome relief. I thought that by being in Washington around election time, I would gain some understanding of US politics and it wouldn't seem as crazy and weird. That hasn't happened. Politics here actually get more outlandish as you delve deeper.
First, it should be pointed out that even the US Democratic party is so far to the right of UK politics that Obama makes Cameron & Osbourne look positively Marxist. Well, almost. And the Republican party is actually completely insane. Especially the Tea Party folk, who manage to make the UKIP party seem like a bunch of reasonable, well-meaning folks. To an outsider, it seems that the Republican party hates women.
Republicans in some states are busily repelling equal pay legislation, because obviously all these modern ideas of equality are unnecessary.
And, believe it or not, some (Republican) states have actually tried to pass laws where women who want an abortion first have to endure a transvaginal ultrasound in case seeing the sonogram makes them change their mind. Even in cases of rape, because being violated once obviously wasn't enough. They've tried to do this in Virginia, and in Pennyslvania, Mississippi, Nebraska and Kansas. I'm not sure if any have actually passed the laws yet because I've only recently started taking an interest in US politics.
Of course, these are all state legislatures, so have no bearing on the election, yeah? The Republican Vice-Presidential Nominee has also expressed extreme anti-abortion views, although they've been keeping him quieter of late. A bunch of Republican candidates for congress have recently said some pretty insane things about rape, such as saying that women's bodies have ways of avoiding pregnancy in cases of "legitimate rape" or that any pregnancies resulting from rape are God's will. Seriously. You couldn't make this stuff up.
So, back to the election. As I recently learned from Wikipedia, the president is actually elected by something called the Electoral College, a group of people who get together to elect the President and Vice-President. Voters in each state actually elect representatives to the electoral college, who have pledged to vote for whichever party they represent. There are 568 members of the electoral college, allocated to states on a population basis. Most states have a winner-takes-all rule so that whichever party wins the state gets all of the electoral college from that state. This New York Times Blog has really helped me make sense of it all.
Most states are either true-blue Democrat or deep red Republican (opposite colours from the UK, which I still find confusing) so the outcome from those are pretty certain. That means that almost all campaigning occurs only in those few swing states (10 this year) and the vote of those who live in other states effectively means nothing. This year, Ohio and the 18 electoral college votes it has are seen as critical to both sides winning the campaign, so the poor folks are battered by more than 300 political ads a day. The Daily Show did a fantastically amusing piece on it a couple of days ago, hopefully this link well let you folk back in Europe watch it. If it doesn't, type "Daily Show swing state hell" into Youtube, it's worth watching.
The electoral college system seems weird, especially as someone can win the popular vote and still not be President (think George Bush losing by more than 500,000 votes in 2000 and still being inflicted on the US and the rest of the world). But the weirdest thing about US politics is that candidates can actually lie during a campaign, both about their policies and each other. The most recent (striking) example was Romney running a series of ads saying in Ohio saying that Chrysler is moving production of Jeeps to China, all because of Obama's policies. This was such a whopper that the CEO of Chrysler came out and said, translated into Weegie, "haul, big man, that's pure shite, by the way". Compare this with the UK system where ex-Labour minister Phil Woolas was booted out of parliament for knowingly making false statements about his Lib Dem opponent during the last election campaign. They could do with a dose of that here.
Another insane thing about US politics is the money. Each candidate has nearly $1 billion during this campaign. Which is quite a lot of money. Just think how many packets of chocolate Hob Nobs I could buy with that. The combinted total money rasied by both parties combined so far is $1.85 billion (source), which is approximately 352,305,901 packets of Hob Nobs at today's exchange rate. And that doesn't include all the spending by independent Super PACs and such like.
While the candidates can say pretty much anything they want about each other, Federal Employees are allowed to say precisely nothing that can be seen as supporting one candidate or the other during working hours, or on Federal property, all thanks to the Hatch Act, and cannot solicit funds for elections at any time. Even clicking "like" on a Facebook page of a candidate from your personal mobile phone is a violation of the Act, if you do it on Government property. Similarly, even re-tweeting a partisan statement from a government-issued computer whilst working at home is a violation. Which is why I'm writing this on my old desktop computer. Incidentally, I should probably state that all views expressed in this blog post are entirely my own and in no way reflect those of my employer, whoever that may happen to be.
The funny thing is that, while it's clear that one party in this country is actually insane, many people here in the US are just as flabbergasted as me and are all preparing to move to Canada in the unthinkable happens on Tuesday and Romney actually wins. I'm sure that won't happen though. One good thing about the election is that I've started reading US newspapers, instead of relying on the BBC all my information. Of course, I'm only reading the Washington Post and New York Times as they are openly pro-Obama and right now, I need as much confirmation bias as I can muster to sleep well at night.
Fingers crossed that I won't have to join the exodus to Canada on Wednesday as I'm just starting to enjoy myself here.
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