Capers With Carroll

I continue to marvel at this, the most interesting election cycle in my half-century of personal memory. Turn-outs continue heavy in both parties. If Democracy’s most dangerous enemy is apathy, then our Democracy is healthier today than at anytime I can remember.

The earlier California primary, as part of Super Tuesday, no doubt helped increase turnout here. For at least the last five or six cycles, the candidates had already been crowned by the time California voted. I’ve always voted anyway, but it’s more tempting to be ornery with one’s vote when the contest has already been settled. I don’t think a national primary is the answer. Success for a candidate like Mike Huckabee (or on the other side, a Bill Richardson or Dennis Kucinich, if one of them had lit a fire) is only possible when the opening rounds of the cycle can be contested without the massive amounts of money that would be required for a national campaign. I like the first primaries to be in very small states—not necessarily Iowa and New Hampshire—but states where a lesser-known and poorly funded candidate can invest time and meet thousands of voters in less scripted environments.

Money will always be a factor in politics, as will media favoritism. Somehow, our system must include Iowa/New Hampshire style contests early in the cycle, where real voters can sit down and study the candidates up close. Perhaps this responsibility should be distributed by lottery to other small, compact states.

This year, more states have moved away from winner-take-all primaries and to proportional awarding of delegates. That improves the chances of the people’s preferences actually being heard.

If there’s another change I’d like to see, I’m not convinced that a caucus system serves as well as a secret ballot, and I know our current ballots don’t serve as well as an Australian-style ballot. Let’s say, for example, I’m a California Republican and of the original handful of candidates, the field has been narrowed to four (Huckabee, McCain, Romney, and Paul). On an Australian ballot, I can indicate that my 1st choice is Huckabee, 2nd is McCain, and 3rd I might even have put Sam Brownback, who had already dropped out, but who earned my support through long years of leading the campaign against legalized abortion. In counting those votes, in my congressional district, it would be recorded that 16.3 % of the voters made Huckabee their first choice. However, since that ranked him in third place, each of those ballots would then be retabulated according to the voters’ second choices. In my case, I had already guessed that Huckabee was not a contender in my district. Therefore, I voted for my 2nd choice as my only choice. In the end, my district was still one of only two that Romney took from McCain (36.1 % to 35.7 %, a mere 216 votes), but McCain did well enough elsewhere to become the presumptive candidate, and Huckabee did well enough to be the last challenger standing. (Ironically, having run a low budget campaign from the beginning, Huckabee was ready to carry on when the burn-rate got too expensive for the high-budget campaigns.)

So I’m feeling pretty good about our Democracy these days. At this time last year, the money and the media were telling us that Clinton and Giuliani would have it all sewed up by this time, unless Romney’s personal fortune gave him traction against Giuliani. However, the voters in each party have decided to take things into their own hands. I can understand the states with later primaries feeling resentful that the decisions may have been made before they get to vote (though the Clinton/Obama race looks like it will go to the wire). As a Californian, I’ve felt that way often. Perhaps we need a lottery system that apportions the fifty-some primaries at two-to-ten per week over a ten-week period of time.

I am also feeling very good about my choices for November. At this point, I would like to see a McCain/Huckabee ticket. It can even be in that order. Good men, both of them.

First a little humor:
This morning I stumbled upon a site which combines a Latino viewpoint with a little whimsical irreverence. For example European Non-Girly Man In Charge Of Huge, Basically Mexican Hacienda Sin Bandera State Expected To Endorse Panamanian For Casa Blanca That, of course, refers to our Austrian-born Governator who recently came out for McCain (born while his father was a U.S. navy officer stationed in Panama) over Romney (whose father was born in Mexico of Mormon missionary parents). Or this one in a similar vein: Cubans Choose Panamanian Over Mexican American to be Next President Outlived by Fidel Castro

Yesterday I saw my first yard poster (Romney). As far as I’ve been able to see, my Huckabee bumper sticker (that I mailed away for, Jan 18th) is the only bumper sticker in Tulare or Fresno Counties, for any candidate, in either party. I don’t watch television, so maybe that’s where all the action is.

On January 19th, I signed up as the 8th member of the Tulare County for Mike Huckabee Meetup. I am still the newest member. No meetings are scheduled. On the Huckabee national website, the pre-Super Tuesday action all seems to be in Georgia, with maybe some spillover into Tennessee or Alabama. In news stories, the spin seems to be that by staying in the race, Huckabee is stealing away the conservative votes that rightfully belong to Romney.

Well, no. I was grateful to the voters of Florida for eliminating Giuliani, who had been my worst case scenario for most of last year, but that pops up Romney as next on my list. I’m not one of these people who hammer a politician for changing an occasional position (for example, slamming McCain because he now supports keeping a tax cut that he voted against six years ago). Goodness, do we want a leader who’s not allowed to rethink anything? On the other hand, Romney wants us to believe he rethought everything—that the only thing he retains from the first 25 years of his adulthood is his ability to handle money. On everything else, he’s done 180º.

I could still change, but if Huckabee isn’t contesting California, this social conservative is voting for McCain.

I am still thinking through the proposal—recently endorsed by Gov. Huckabee—to require (within 120 days)all (say, 12 to 16 million) illegal aliens to return to their country of origin and go to the back of the line to await immigration and green cards. (Total disclosure: one Brazilian son-in-law and one Chinese soon-to-be daughter-in-law could eventually be waiting in those same lines.) Unfortunately, it throws into doubt my whole opinion of Huckabee, and has me taking a more careful look at John McCain.

Yesterday I mentioned the havoc we could expect in our already-depressed housing and banking sectors if all those people were forced to default on their mortgages or leases, or move out of their rentals. Added to that, I’m trying to decide whether all those (and by definition, if we use the term illegal, we are already calling them outlaws) with auto loans would politely park their cars back at the dealerships, or use their cars to drive back across the border. I am reminded of an answer Mao Tse-tung gave when asked how China would respond to an invasion from the Soviet Union. “On the first day,” said Mao, “We would surrender 100,000,000 people. On the second day, we would surrender 200,000,000 people. On the third day we would surrender 300,000,000 people. On the fourth day, Russia would give up.” Is Sears ready to repossess even 100,000 refrigerators and washing machines?

Anyone calling for the 120-day removal of 12 to 16 million members of our economy is thinking in terms of faceless numbers, and not people. When I think of individual people whom I have known and yet who fall within that statistic, one that comes to mind is Araceli, a junior high student I had in the early 80’s. For class, she wrote me an essay about being smuggled back into the U.S. after a Christmas trip to visit her grandparents in Mexico. Her parents owned (I’m sure in cooperation with a bank) a home. She had been in U.S. schools since kindergarten. After high school, she earned a license to work in elder-care, and the last time I saw her (18 years ago), she was working in a large assisted-living facility. She would now be forty-something, a productive member of our society, and (on 120 day’s notice!) sent back to live in a country she has only visited for Christmas. Who will replace her at the elder-care facility? Will adding her house to the over-supply of unsold houses help our economy? Which country will benefit most from using the skills we paid to educate her with? Multiply that 12 or 16 million times and we are talking about a self-inflicted Katrina.

So let’s examine the scarlet lettered A-word: Amnesty. When are amnesties appropriate? And when do they fail? Between 1862 and 1872, the United States under Presidents Lincoln, Johnson, and Grant offered ten separate amnesties, the first targeted to tempt active rebel soldiers back to the Union, and the last to return full citizenship to even the most high ranking former Confederates. Today, almost everyone would accept the wisdom of those amnesties, even where men had actually taken up military arms against the federal government. We’ll call that a success.

For nine years, I lived in Colombia, South America. While there, I taught Colombian history, a history marked by nearly continuous armed rebellions for almost the entire past 200 years. Amnesty is simply a part of their cycle. As generations of middle aged rebels become tired of the life of war, they accept an amnesty and a plot of government land, and a new generation of rebels takes up the warfare. We’ll call that a failure.

The difference is that the successful amnesty did not encourage a new infusion of individuals into an activity the government hoped to curtail. For an immigration amnesty to work, the United States has to have a solid fence. But once we have that fence, we ought to make every effort to make citizens of the people who are actually here.