vagyakartha

I wrote this in November 2004. Somehow, it doesn't seem to have aged much. This time however, I feel pretty confident that the Blue candidate will win.

Pundits without Purple Patches

Events that others handle with elegant ease often leave me confused and befuddled. What they see with crystalline clarity, is as clear as mud to me. It must be due to some combination of chronic intellectual myopia and accelerating visual presbyopia. This irritating condition is rendered more so by elections.

I had been left totally muddled by Indian elections over the past couple of years, despite perspicacious punditry. I consoled myself saying that this is India and befuddlement is the norm, except among pundits. Now, it’s America’s turn. During the months leading up to the elections, the pundits said that the key issues were jobs, the economy, Iraq, America’s standing in the world, terrorism, healthcare, Social Security, incompetence, inconsistency, etc. Poll projections did their yo-yo swings – hardly conducive to clarity. But, one thing was clear, it looked like 2000 all over again.

The pundits came up with a tidy device to aid people like me, a map with each state brightly coloured red or blue depending on the candidate who was going to capture its electoral votes. I was duly impressed by their prescience and ingenuity, Madame Montessori would have approved. Understandably, they could not colour all the states, some were “just too close to call”. Nevertheless, major steps had been taken toward clarity.

I was up with the roosters that Wednesday to watch the results and be elucidated by pundits on why the electorate voted the way it did and what the results would portend for the nation and the world. The Red-Blue map, with a few intervening white blocks, appeared on TV along with the pundits and all was well. The numbers flowed in viscously and the pundits were pleased to reconfirm their earlier colouring.

Chadless Florida punched Red, Pennsylvania went Blue, leaving Ohio to settle matters. Ohio wouldn’t oblige, but Kerry wisely did. The colouring could now be completed, though corny Iowa had to wait. The pundits were alarmed. There were contiguous patches of blue along the entire West Coast, the northeastern coast (the pundits’ East Coast starts at Washington D.C.!) and around the Great Lakes. The rest of America had gone homogeneously Red. The nation had been irreparably “cleaved”. I was lost.

The pundits weren’t. They said that “moral values” had been the deciding issue that cleaved these formerly united states into a gigantic red blob of bible thumping bubba states in the middle and a blue rim of enlightened liberal states. I didn’t get it. “Moral values” hadn’t been mentioned as a major election issue up to that moment. Do people get “values” while they are standing in line to vote? What about all the other issues? What did I miss and when?

I attacked my laptop in search of answers. All the data that I gathered just left me more befuddled. What the pundits viewed with chromatographic clarity, I saw as dichromatic diffusion. Except for the District of Columbia, which had cast over 90% of its votes for Mr. Blue, all the states looked decidedly purple to me. As I see it, very minor swings would have dramatically changed that Montessori map.

Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington – are constituents of “the rim”. If a total of just 283,000 voters in these states – representing less than 1.8% of the votes cast there and 0.25% of nationwide votes – had voted Red instead of Blue, “the cleavage” would have shriveled. Mr. Red would have won 349 electoral votes to Mr. Blue’s 189 and the pundits would have declared a Red landslide, with negligible change in the total popular vote.

Did the Reds really find Mr. Blue’s values abhorrent? More voters in blood-red Texas voted for him than in all of New England. Conversely, Mr. Red received about as many votes in presumably libertine California as he did in the red blob stretching south from Montana and North Dakota to Nevada in the west and Kansas in the Midwest. These nine states gave Mr. Red 46 electoral votes, California gave him none. So, is California all Blue? Is Texas all Red? Both look purple to me, much like the rest of the nation.

To me, Mr. Kerry seems nowhere near as unpopular as the pundits imply he is. In fact, millions more voted for him than sent Mr. Clinton to his first term as President. Further, the Reds elected 85 Democrats as senators, congressman and governors. If I were truly concerned about America being split into “Two Nations Under God”, I would point out to Mr. Bush that 48.5% of voters, residing nationwide, preferred the Blue views and values. I would caution him not to be sanguine about a mandate from a sanguine blob of a country. But then, I am just a befuddled bystander. What do I know?

# posted by Vagyakartha : 9:55 AM