[Air-l] Re: howard dean, social movements and clay shirky

[Art McGee]

Hum,

I'm sorry, I'm just having trouble understanding why you
can't see through the most important problem with electoral
analysis: the assumption that distribution of support for a
candidate will be equal across all states, and therefore, if
you lose these initial states, that means you're out of the
race.

More importantly, the manipulations of electoral politics by
Capitalist media seem to me to be something that make the
entire process fraudulent. Have you ever seen a literal
horse race in which people were able to bet after the race
started? No? Then why do we allow that in our elections?
The very nature of the reporting about the race and the
speculation about possibilities of winning for particular
candidates is a blatant manipulation of the process itself.

In effect, U.S. Presidential elections are invalid by
default, but maybe I'm not grasping the sociological
underpinnings of why we run them this way.


Art