This started in the UF anniversary thread, but after typing my response I decided to put it here instead.

Mercutio said:
>(after I said:)
>> I mean, genetics
>>aside, I've lived in Red Maine for most of my life. How am I not a
>>racist redneck fuck too?)
>
>Are you guys really that red up there anymore?

Yes. Yes we are. Not always in terms of strict party affiliation—there are a lot of old-line Democratic families here—but a lot of them are what used to be called "blue dog" Democrats. Pre-Civil War Southern-style Democrats. Maine's Second Congressional District is, culturally speaking, a strangely positioned exclave of the shitkicker South in a lot of ways, which means even most of the Democrats around here tend to be quite conservative, both socially and fiscally.

>As near as I can tell, Millinocket itself, though it went Trump this
>year, went for Obama in both 2012 and 2008.

That has more to do with specific flaws in the opposition as viewed from the Katahdin Valley mindset, I suspect. McCain saddled himself with that featherweight hood ornament from Alaska, which ruled out any possibility that the old mill boys around here would vote for him, and Mittens was, well, Mittens. Former governor of Massatwoshits? Not in my house! Not with my daughter! On the other hand, paradoxically because this is one of the whitest parts of the country, Obama's color didn't really factor into the decision much. Hell, even the KKK chapter that used to operate in town back in the '30s—when it was one of the most prominent in the Northeast—I'm told) directed its efforts against the town's Italian Catholic residents (there being literally no blacks or Jews in town at the time).

>Precinct-level data is
>hard to come by for other years, but even if Millinocket itself
>didn't, Penobscot County, which doesn't look like what you'd call a
>cosmopolitan urban area to me, went for Obama twice, went for KERRY of
>all people who you'd think would be poison out there, and went for
>Clinton twice.

Keep in mind that Penobscot County is where the University of Maine is, so its aggregate figures are always going to be a bit skewed left vis-à-vis the surrounding area.

Anyway, Maine District 2 went red this time, and has elected a Republican to Congress the past couple of times (ever since Mike Michaud decided to run for governor and got himself mashed in the second election-fucking-up of Eliot Cutler). Which reminds me, I owe Congressman Poliquin a reply to his self-congratulatory little letter about how he's holding the line for me in Washington. It was thoughtful of him to take the time (and spend the public funds) to write and keep me up to date on his opposition to various matters I'm generally in favor of. The least I can do is take a minute and let him know that he has completely failed to represent me in any way. I'm sure he'll take it into account and try to do better.

>(How do you go for Kerry and not Gore? The mind
>boggles.)

I didn't live in the area at the time, but if I had to, I would guess that the Nader Effect was in play the first time, and the second time was largely a matter of recoiling from the war and Dubya's general air of useless toolery.

>And, well... no. Did the DNC have its thumb on the scale? Yeah, a bit.
>That was total bullshit, people got fired and they deserved it. Did it
>have its thumb on the scale to the tune of three million votes?
>It did not.

Mm. With respect to Senator Sanders, I suspect he and his camp also committed the sin of underestimating the duration of voters' grudges. If Hillary's backers convinced themselves that surely people out there didn't still hate her that much, Bernie's convinced themselves that surely by now no one would remember that he'd spend much of his long career sneering dismissively at both principal parties, including the one he had lately decided to try and climb astride of...

(Interestingly, both parties this time around found themselves confronting a candidate who wasn't really one of them, and had adopted the major-party label late in the game in a fairly transparent attempt to cosmetically mainstream himself to success. In one case it didn't work, but in the other, it totally and catastrophically did. There are probably papers in that, but fortunately they are not in disciplines where I am going to have to write them.)

>>Also also, the numbers suggest that she appealed to too many people
>>who, possibly because consumed by their postmodern ennui, didn't
>>bother voting for her.
>
>This, in my opinion, was the 'best worst case' scenario. That is, if
>we were going to lose, this is the least horrible way.

"This is like saying 'oh look! I've got syphilis! That's the best of the sexually transmitted diseases!'"
- Jeremy Clarkson

>Trump won the election with fewer votes than Romney got when he lost.
>That's super bad. You know what would have been worse? If Clinton had
>got, say, a couple million more votes than Obama did, and Trump had
>walloped her by an extra six or seven million on top of that.

It's true that that would unequivocally represent A Mandate, which would be very disturbing. On the other hand, I'm not sold on the idea that it's better in strictly practical terms that we got what we got, because a) what we got is still a maniac with both houses of Congress at his complete disposal and b) modern American politicians on both sides of the aisle have usually managed to do plenty of damage without one anyway.

>Okay. All those boring nerds ran against people who were also boring
>nerds. Has there been an election in which the boring nerd beat the
>charismatic demagogue?
>
>... holy shit, there hasn't been.

Indeed, one of your own examples serves to demonstrate the point, a little farther back in his timeline. Nixon could beat a nobody like Hubert Humphrey in 1968. He got taken to the cleaners in 1960... by JFK. (And let's not start with the thing about Kennedy's daddy buying Illinois for him. Illinois is always for sale to the highest bidder, it's a thing that just has to be factored into the normal business model. :)

>Is this where we're at as a country? Where in any contest between a
>showman and a person of substance, the showman automatically wins?

This is not too different from the way it's always worked, it's just that the medium has changed. One of the big keys used to be oratory. Now it's simply spectacle. It doesn't even need to be good spectacle, just so long as it's big and loud.

Western civilization is now the parody of itself that authors like Gibson and Stephenson have been drawing since the '80s.

And on that cheery note, I begin to wonder why this is even in the UF anniversary thread, where I'll stumble across it in some future time (assuming there are any) and be depressed by it. I should put it someplace where it'll be more obvious what it is.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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