Tag Archives: democrats

What Republicans could learn from Cameron’s Conservatives

cameronwins

Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders proudly claimed that American economic policy should look more like Scandinavia’s.United Kingdom Flag Icon

But for Republican presidential hopefuls, it might be more fruitful to turn their gaze slightly to the south of Scandinavia — to the United Kingdom, where Conservative prime minister David Cameron won an unexpectedly robust victory in last Thursday’s general election. Not only did Cameron stave off predictions of defeat by the center-left Labour Party, his Tories won an absolute (if small) majority in the House of Commons, increasing his caucus by 24 MPs. This, in turn, will allow Cameron to govern for the next five years without a coalition partner. That’s all well and good considering that the Liberal Democrats lost 48 of their 56 seats in Parliament.

It’s rare, in a parliamentary system, for a government to win reelection with even greater support, let alone after five years of budget cuts and economic contraction that transformed into GDP growth only in the last two years. Margaret Thatcher was the last prime minister to do so in 1983, and that followed her stupendous victory against Argentina in the Falklands War of 1982.

For U.S. conservatives, Cameron’s victory in winning the first Tory majority since 1992 should provide a road map for the kinds of policies that can pave the way to a GOP victory in 2016. Republicans know that they’ve won a popular vote majority just once since 1988, and demographic changes are making the Republican presidential coalition more elderly, white and rural in an increasingly young, multiracial and urban society.

Cameron benefitted from smart political strategy that painted Labour, fairly or unfairly, as untrustworthy stewards of the British economy. He also appealed to the fears of English voters in warning that a Labour government, propped up by votes from the pro-independence Scottish National Party, would amount to a “coalition of chaos” in Westminster. Cameron also benefitted from doubts among British voters about Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband, who pulled Labour to the left of Tony Blair’s third-way “New Labour”centrism and who never seemed to fit the role of potential prime minister.

Nevertheless, there are at least three areas where Republicans could replicate Cameron’s agenda and, potentially, turn the tables on Democrats in 2016. Continue reading What Republicans could learn from Cameron’s Conservatives

What the world can teach the United States about DC voting rights

DSC00905

A view of DC from the top of Anacostia in East Washington.

If you walk through parts of Brasília, it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t modeled, at least architecturally, upon Washington, D.C. when it was built in the late 1950. But when it comes to the voting rights of its capital’s citizens, Brazil has looked beyond the American example.Washington_DC_IconUSflag

Last month, when Brazil held a general election, some 2.5 million voters in the Brazilian Distrito Federal voted for a new governor, eight members to the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Brazil’s National Congress, and one of its three members to the Senate, its upper house. In that regard, Brazil’s DF is not unlike any other state in the country. Remarkably, with one deputy per 310,000 residents, that’s a better ratio of representation than the residents of Brazil’s largest state, the far more populous São Paulo.

It’s a typical and unremarkable arrangement around the world, and it’s not unlike Mexico’s Federal District (Mexico City), India’s Delhi Capital Territory and even places with a much more limited history of democracy, including Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (Abuja) and Malaysia’s Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur.

But not in the District of Columbia.

The United States of America, otherwise a beacon of democratic rule for over two centuries, is essentially the North Korea of federal district voting rights, a clear outlier for democratic best practices across the world. As voters across the country elect members of the House of Representatives, District voters have nothing. Continue reading What the world can teach the United States about DC voting rights

Neves struggles to puncture the Dilma-Marina show

aecio

A month and a half ago, when Brazil’s investor class proclaimed its doubts about the reelection of president Dilma Rousseff, no one stood to gain more than Aécio Neves.minasgeraisbrazil

The grandson of a distinguished pro-democracy activist, Neves (pictured above) represents the next, post-lulista generation of Brazil’s center-right politics. Three decades younger than Brazil’s last conservative president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and more charismatic than former São Paulo governor and mayor José Serra, Neves brought to the race a strong pedigree and an accomplished record as an economic reformer as the two-term governor of the powerful, sprawling state of Minas Gerais.

That was before the airplane crash that killed former presidential candidate Eduardo Campos, which suddenly catapulted his running mate, the popular Marina Silva, into the presidential race.

Where Neves once had credible hopes of becoming Brazil’s next president, he now seems likelier to play a kingmaker role in what’s shaping up to be a fiercely contested runoff between Rousseff and Dilma.

* * * * *

RELATED: Why Marina Silva must now step up for the Brazilian left

* * * * *

Within days, Silva leapt to the lead in polls for the race to become Brazil’s next president. Though Rousseff has now recovered a first-round lead in many polls, Neves is still languishing in third place, far behind both Rousseff and Silva, a reverse from the summer, when Neves held a solid second-place position against the late Campos, who was leading a coalition anchored by the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB, Brazilian Socialist Party) that, until recently, supported the Rousseff government.

Polls show that the October 26 runoff will be incredibly tight between the two women, and many officials within Neves’s party, the center-right Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB, Brazilian Social Democracy Party), popularly known as the tucanos (‘toucans’) was already talking a month ago about how they’ll support Silva, a former environmental minister under Rousseff’s mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in the runoff. Armino Fraga, a former central bank president known for stabilizing the Brazilian real in the early 2000s, who returned to the fray to help elect Neves, is now being floated instead as a possible finance minister in a potential Silva administration. Fraga, for now, refuses to serve in any administration other than Neves’s.  Continue reading Neves struggles to puncture the Dilma-Marina show

Would ‘lottocracy’ be a better form of government than democracy?

444313c

Winston Churchill is attributed with the quote, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those others that have been tried.’

But it’s William F. Buckley who said, ‘I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.’

Alex Guerrero, assistant professor of philosophy, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania (and also a law school classmate of mine), thinks Buckley may have been on to something, and he makes the case for selecting representatives not by elections, but through a lottery system in Aeon today:

First, rather than having a single, generalist legislature such as the United States Congress, the legislative function would be fulfilled by many different single-issue legislatures (each one focusing on, for example, just agriculture or health care). There might be 20 or 25 of these single-issue legislatures, perhaps borrowing existing divisions in legislative committees or administrative agencies: agriculture, commerce and consumer protection, education, energy, health and human services, housing and urban development, immigration, labour, transportation, etc.

These single-issue legislatures would be chosen by lottery from the political jurisdiction, with each single-issue legislature consisting of 300 people. Each person chosen would serve for a three-year term. Terms would be staggered so that each year 100 new people begin, and 100 people finish. All adult citizens in the political jurisdiction would be eligible to be selected. People would not be required to serve if selected, but the financial incentive would be significant, efforts would be made to accommodate family and work schedules, and the civic culture might need to be developed so that serving is seen as a significant civic duty and honour.

At first read, it sounds like a nightmare out of an Arthur Miller play.  Three hundred random US citizens would congregate to tackle a discrete issue like climate change, health care reform, or immigration reform.

What’s so bad about democracy? 

Before you dismiss the idea outright, it’s important to bear in mind the long, long list of problems with elections, in their current form in the United States and in other mature democracies — and that’s saying nothing about the question of free and fair elections in countries where democratic institutions are less robust.  The business of policymaking of a typical 21st century government is typically too complex for direct democracy to thrive in most jurisdictions. The need to become informed about the nuances of even major policy decisions would quickly overwhelm all of us.  Experiments with direct democracy, through the proliferation of ballot initiatives to decide key issues, have worked better in some places (Switzerland) than in others (California).  The limitations of direct democracy have meant that, outside the classical era of Athenian democracy and a few referendum-driven jurisdictions, ‘democracy’ for most people today means representative democracy.  Voters elect legislators and executives on the basis of a plethora of policy positions.

Of course, by gaining efficiency, indirect democracies lose precision — voters will choose one candidate over another for many reasons, and no voter’s policy priorities may line up entirely with any candidate.

Moreover, we can see the other problems of representative democracy in modern US politics.  Marketing and advertising, since at least the onset of the television era, can now be more important than policy positions.  Accordingly, representatives spend more time today raising money from donors than tending to the business of lawmaking, undermining the one-person-one-vote principle that undergirds representative democracy.  As Alex notes, the current process is subject to all sorts of problems.  The influence of money and lobbyists can lead to agency and electoral capture.  Collective action problems are rife — interest groups who care deeply about an issue can skew policies to their favor, even at the expense of the widely dispersed gains that might otherwise accrue to the rest of the population.  Protectionism, tariffs and free trade is a classic example.

Gerrymandering, barriers to entry and the advantages of incumbency massively reduce competition within the political marketplace.  It’s left us with a system where, as Alex writes, ’44 per cent of US Congresspersons have a net worth of more than $1 million; 82 per cent are male; 86 per cent are white, and more than half are lawyers or bankers.’ It’s a system where Congressional reelection rates in the United States routinely exceed 90% — even in a massive ‘wave’ election like the 2010 midterms that saw a Republican wave, the reelection rate was still 85%.  Part of that you can blame on gerrymandering, but more so on the natural preferences and geopolitical distribution of urban and rural voters — and perhaps even more so on the US electoral system (i.e., single-member plurality districts instead of proportional representation).  

Tradition, financial and political infrastructure, a first-past-the-post electoral system and path dependence mean that, in the United States, two political parties reign supreme.  When those two parties agree on policy preferences, it means there’s effectively no competition within the political marketplace on many key issues — in the past three decades, this has included drug legislation, foreign policy, national security, military affairs, gun regulation, financial regulation, home ownership policy and other matters.  In many cases, the bipartisan consensus has turned out to be wrong.

Electoral competition, too, is rife with short-term thinking.  In a world where public servants are focused on reelection in two years (the US House of Representatives), four years (the US president) or six years (the US Senate), there will always be a temptation to focus on short-term benefits at the expense of long-term costs.  Say what you want about the People’s Republic of China, but the governing Chinese Communist Party has to contemplate long-term effects of its policies, because there’s no alternative party to blame.  In the US system, Democrats and Republicans can rotate in and out of office and blame each other for perpetuity.  Not so in China — the CCP has to own its policy decisions or face a massive popular revolt.

That all assumes, too, that voters make well-informed, rational decisions.  As Bryan Caplan argues in The Myth of the Rational Voter: How Democracies Choose Bad Policies, borrowing from the insights of economic theory, ‘democracy’ fails primarily due to irrational and ill-informed voters:

In the naive public-interest view, democracy works because it does what voters want.  In the view of most democracy skeptics, it fails because it does not do what voters want.  In my view, democracy fails because it does what voters want.  In economic jargon, democracy has a built-in externality.  An irrational voter does not hurt only himself.  He also hurts everyone who is, as a result of his irrationality, more likely to live under misguided policies.  Since most of the cost of voter irrationality is external — paid for by other people, why not indulge?  If enough voters think this way, socially injurious policies win by popular demand.

It’s also worth asking how truly ‘democratic’ elections have become.  Since the 20th century, government has become so complex that many policy decisions are two steps removed from the ballot box, with legislators ceding control to specialized regulators.  In the United States, the wide-ranging administrative and regulatory state nearly amounts to a fourth, unelected branch of government.  Critics of the European Union have long pointed to a ‘democratic deficit’ within the growing EU institutions.  Despite a growing role for the elected European Parliament and perhaps a more representative era in selecting the European Commission, the key decisions of European integration (including the creation of the single market and monetary union) were made more by treaty than at the ballot box. 

 

So should we, therefore, turn to policymaking-by-lottocracy?  Continue reading Would ‘lottocracy’ be a better form of government than democracy?

Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger?

DSC09740

I spent an impromptu weekend in Ottawa and Montréal, which marked my first visit to Canada’s capital city — and its fourth-most populous (after Toronto, Montréal and Calgary).USflagCanada Flag Icon

Though Ottawa is a bilingual city that sits on the Ontario-Québec borders, there’s no doubting that this was a city founded by English Canadians (and, in fact, New Englanders founded the first colonial-era settlement) — which may explain why it’s impossible to find a decent meal other than poutine on a Sunday night after 10 p.m.).  But the trip gave me good reason to read the new book from National Post columnist Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country. 

OK, so let that sink in for a moment.  Merging the United States and Canada into one mega-country.  Impossible, right?  A national political space with room for both Jacques Parizeau and Haley Barbour? Come on.

But it’s not an unhinged read — it’s a page-turner, and Francis has a command of the data that motivates her argument.  It also meets the ‘learn something on every page’ test.  Did you know that Canada’s First Nations residents also have US citizenship?  Or that the US defense department, if it were a nation, would have an economy the size of Turkey’s?

The political hurdles are immense 

Let’s start with the obvious — in a world where the US Congress can’t even agree for three weeks on whether to fund the government, the appetite for a merger with Canada is probably less than zero, and Francis certainly knows this.  The politics of a US-Canada merger are impossibly difficult, and the weakest part of the book is that Francis glides over the political hurdles — the Québec question and the issue of Southern intransigence in the United States are dealt with in just over three pages.  I like to think that’s because Francis knows the political obstacles are insurmountable and prefers to spend more time making her very able case for the economic synergies that a merger would bring.

harperobama

It’s tempting to believe that Canada’s relatively more statist and socially and economically liberal population would give the US Democratic Party an almost immediate lock on elections for the foreseeable future (and Francis hints as much), but that’s not necessarily the case.  It’s Canada that has a three-term Conservative prime minister in Stephen Harper and the United States that has a two-term Democratic president in Barack Obama (pictured above with Harper).  As John Ibbiston and Darrell Bricker argue in their own big-think volume from last year, The Big Shift: The Seismic Change In Canadian Politics, Business, And Culture And What It Means For Our Future, there’s a growing majoritarian coalition of immigrants, Westerners and Ontario suburbanites that could make Harper’s Tories the natural party of government in Canada in the 21st century — just as much as the Liberal Party of Wilfrid Laurier, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien dominated the 20th.

It’s hard to imagine that Québec premier Pauline Marois and Texas governor Rick Perry would have much in common.  Still, there are common trends in the politics of the left and right on both sides of the border, and Toronto mayor Rob Ford proves that Canada has as many colorful characters in politics as the United States.

On the right, the rise of the ‘tea party’ movement on the US political right matches the rise of a new fiscal and social conservatism captured by the rise of Alberta’s new Wildrose Party (as an alternative to the long-dominant Progressive Conservative Party).  Harper’s own rise, and the merger of the western-based Canadian Alliance with the dwindling eastern-based Progressive Conservatives, is the story of the rise of a more anti-government, pro-Christian, social and economic conservatism in Canada.  That mirrors the rightward shift of US conservatism under the influence of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and others.

On the left, the late Jack Layton led the New Democratic Party to a historic breakthrough in the 2011 federal election in a way that mirrors the new progressive coalition of minorities, moderates and young voters that powered Obama in 2008 — first to win the Democratic Party nomination over Hillary Clinton, then to win the presidency.  The difference between the pragmatic, business-friendly Liberals and the social democratic NDP in Canada is the difference between, say, US senator Chuck Schumer of New York and US senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Nonetheless, with all due respect to Paul Cellucci, the former US ambassador to Canada, the difference between Québec and Alberta is not the same as the difference between Massachusetts and Mississippi (despite the heritage of French Americans from Maine to Louisiana).  The cultural gulf between the United States and Canada is the gulf between revolution and evolution, fixed in place by 200 years of path dependence.

If I were Canadian, I would worry that the best aspects of Canadian culture and politics would be totally subsumed by US culture and politics — it was Trudeau, after all, who said that having the United States for a neighbor was like being a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.  For all the valid criticisms of the US military-industrial complex, it’s hard to believe that the Canadian influence would slow the militarism of US policy (though, frankly, deploying US troops to patrol the Arctic north or to fortify and develop new northern settlements seems a more productive endeavor than invading Iraq).  

As the United States has increasingly retreated behind a wall of homeland security in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Canada has increasingly opened its borders to immigrants.  One out of every two residents of Toronto, Canada’s largest city, is foreign-born, and nearly seven million of Canada’s 35 million people are foreign-born.  In the 21st century, Canada is becoming the melting-pot society that the United States once was in the 20th century.  That would be endangered if Canada became merely the northern-most region within a greater North American superstate.

Francis also betrays a protectionist edge that view Chinese, Russian and Arab malevolence at every turn.  If I were Canadian, I’d be happy to know that China, Russia and other countries are willing to compete with US and Canadian investors to most efficiently develop the resources of Canada’s far north.  It seems to me that the kind of knee-jerk nationalism that led to the 2006 Dubai Ports World kerfuffle in the United States is something that’s more dangerous to democratic and economic institutions in North America than an investment here or there by China.

But when you get to the heart of Francis’s argument about the reasons for and benefits from a US-Canadian merger, it’s as thoughtful, radical and brilliant as you’ll find in any of the top books published last year.

Even the most outlandish ideas should win points for creative thinking.  A payout of $492,529 to each Canadian citizen at a total cost of around $17 trillion to the US treasury?  A bifurcated health care system that would include greater rights and freedoms for Canadians?  The concept that the US deep south, which chose segregation over industrialization and economic modernization for nearly a century, would sign up to a merger because it might mean more Canadians would migrate to the Sun Belt?  That Quebeckers would willingly give up what amounts to a veto on national policymaking for  irrelevance in a super-country whose First Amendment freedoms would make most of the province’s language regulations unconstitutional on Day One?  That the staid Bay Street approach to banking regulation would easily graft itself onto the creatively destructive mentality of Wall Street? None of these are politically feasible.

How to capture the benefits of greater cooperation

The good news is that the United States and Canada don’t actually have to become one nation-state in order to effect a lot of the benefits that Francis outlines, which is where her book really shines.  That’s especially true in a globalized world where national borders are conceivably less important than at any time in the post-Westphalia era.  A handful of efforts could bring much of Francis’s dream to reality without a supranational acquis communautaire or admitting Canada’s provinces and territories as the next 13 American states:

Continue reading Could the United States and Canada effect a national merger?

Ten reasons why the Iran sanctions Senate bill is policy malpractice

Iran nuclear talks: Kerry and Zarif meet at the UN

Iran is quickly moving to the front of the ever-shifting foreign policy agenda in Washington at the end of this week, with 59 members of the US Senate, including 15 Democratic senators and the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, supporting the Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013.Iran Flag IconUSflag

The bill would impose additional sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran in the event that the current round of talks fail between Iran and the ‘P5+1,’ the permanent five members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia), plus Germany.  US president Barack Obama met with the entire Democratic caucus in the US Senate Wednesday night to implore his party’s senators not to support the bill.  Senate majority leader Harry Reid opposes the bill, and he hasn’t scheduled a vote for the new Iran sanctions — and even some of its supporters may be backing off as the temporary six-month deal proceeds.

But with 59 co-sponsors, the bill is just one vote shy of passing the Senate, and it would almost certainly pass in the US House of Representatives, where the Republican Party holds a majority.  In the event that the Congress passes a bill, Obama could veto it, but the Senate is already precariously close to the two-thirds majority it would need to override Obama’s veto.

The Obama administration argues that the bill is nothing short of warmongering, while the bill’s supporters argue that the sanctions will reinforce the Obama administration’s hand in negotiations.  Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister (pictured above with US secretary of state John Kerry), has warned that the bill would destroy any chances of reaching a permanent deal, and it’s hard to blame him.  Under the current deal, reached in November, the P5+1 agreed to lift up to $8 billion in economic sanctions in exchange for Iran’s decision to freeze its nuclear program for six months while the parties work through a longer-term deal.  The deal further provides that Iran will dilute its 20% enriched uranium down to just 5% enriched uranium, and the P5+1 have agreed to release a portion of Iran’s frozen assets abroad and partially unblock Iran’s oil exports.

So what should you make of the decision of 59 US senators to hold up a negotiation process that not only the Obama administration supports, but counts the support of its British, German and French allies?

Not much.

And here are ten reasons why the bill represents nothing short of policy malpractice.   Continue reading Ten reasons why the Iran sanctions Senate bill is policy malpractice

Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left

Many have led Italy’s long-fractuous center-left over the past two decades, but none have succeeded in building a durable coalition that can win an election and govern for a whole parliament.

Achille Occhetto, the leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano, Italy’s then-Communist Party, failed miserably in the 1994 elections against Silvio Berlusconi.  Francesco Rutelli, the former mayor of Rome throughout much of the 1990s, led the center-left L’Ulivo ‘Olive Tree’ coalition to defeat in 2001, and his successor, Walter Veltroni led the newly-formed Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) to defeat in 2008.  The only successful leftist has been the plodding Romano Prodi, who barely won the 1996 and 2006 elections, only to watch his coalitions, after both elections, crumble within a year or two.  And that’s not even counting the pretenders, such as Massimo D’Alema, who succeeded Prodi as prime minister from 1998 to 2000 and who served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2008.

With Berlusconi now (mostly) in the sidelines as the upcoming general election approaches, the Italian left is hoping to change that, and the first step will be November 25’s primary election to determine who will lead Italy’s broad left into the general elections, which will be held on or before April 13.  In addition to the PD, the more radical left Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of Puglia’s regional president Nicchi Vendola, the minor Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI, Italian Socialist Party), the centrist Alleanza per l’Italia (ApI, Alliance for Italy) launched by Rutelli in 2009 and the perennial anti-corruption party Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) led by former prosecutor Antonio di Pietro.

The current PD leader, Pier Luigi Bersani (pictured above, top), follows in the long line of steady, if boring and uninspired center-left politicians in Italy.  He served as the regional president of the traditional leftist stronghold of Emilia-Romagna in central Italy from 1993 to 1996, as a minister in the Prodi and D’Alema cabinets in the late 1990s and most recently, as the minister of economic development in Prodi’s second government from 2006 to 2008.  As economic development minister, he worked to bring about reforms to liberalize Italy’s labor market and its economy.  But at age 61, Bersani nearly personifies the staid tradition of the Italian left, and he would likely be a prime minister in the Prodi tradition — solidly leftist, but more of the social democratic variety than the socialist.  He has the support of most of the center-left establishment, including that of D’Alema.

His main rival, however, is hoping to end that trend — Matteo Renzi (pictured above, bottom) is the 37-year old mayor of Florence, the largest city in the central region of Tuscany.  Renzi, who served as president of the province of Florence from 2004 to 2009 before his election as mayor, has called on all of the current politicians on the left and the right to step aside to make way for a new generation of leadership — presumably his.

Despite Renzi’s considerably more populist approach to the primaries and to Italian politics, evocative of times of the ‘third-way’ style of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, both Bersani and Renzi would posture more to the center in the general election.

In addition to Bersani and Renzi, Vendola, who was served as Puglia’s leftist — and openly gay — regional president since 2005, is also running, to the strident left of both Bersani and Renzi.  Bruno Tabacci of the ApI, a former regional president of Lombardy, and Laura Puppato of the PD, a regional councillor in Veneto, are also running.

Continue reading Bersani and Renzi offer two distinct personalities for Italy’s center-left

Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election

The state of the race

Of course, tomorrow’s election, in what’s still arguably the world’s most powerful country, will have huge implications for world politics — U.S. foreign policy obviously runs from the occupant of the Oval Office (more so than domestic policy), and with U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton stepping down in either case, the election result will determine the next top U.S. diplomat.  So it seemed natural to pull together some brief thoughts for Suffragio on election eve.

Nate Silver’s final post at FiveThirtyEight before tomorrow’s U.S. general election gives incumbent Barack Obama (pictured above, below with vice president Joe Biden at left) a 92.2% chance of winning.  I’m not so sure, but InTrade has Obama with 67.2% odds of winning.  National polls are essentially tied, with some giving either Obama a narrow edge or his challenger, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (pictured below), a slight edge.  State polls in swing states give Obama slight edges — the winner must win 270 out of 528 electoral votes (i.e., the presidential election is essentially 50 separate state contests — each state has a number of electoral votes ranging from three (the smallest states) to 55 (California).

Most notably of all, go read Foreign Policy‘s compendium of its best 2012 U.S. presidential election coverage, which is stellar as usual.

In terms of coverage, I’ll list favorite / obligatory pundits below:

  • Follow Slate‘s Dave Weigel here.
  • Follow Time‘s Mark Halperin here.
  • Follow National Review‘s The Corner here.
  • Follow Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish blog here.
  • Follow Matt Drudge here.
  • Follow Chris Cillizza’s Washington Post blog here.
  • Follow Ezra Klein’s policy blog at the Washington Post here.
Polls close between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. ET in Ohio, Virginia, Florida and other key states in the Electoral College, so we should have a relatively good idea of who’s won the presidency Tuesday night — unless the contest comes down to one state, likely Ohio, and that state is as close as Florida was in 2000, when we might not know the winner for a month or longer!

Don’t forget Puerto Rico elections

Although it’s a U.S. commonwealth, Puerto Rico will also go to the polls to select a governor, where incumbent Luis Fortuño (a Republican supporter) of the pro-statehood Partido Nuevo Progresista de Puerto Rico (the PNP, New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico) narrowly leads Alejandro García Padilla of the pro-commonwealth/status quo Partido Popular Democrático de Puerto Rico (the PPD, Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico).  Fortuño has cut Puerto Rico’s budget since taking office in 2009 and has nearly brought the island from deficit to surplus.  Nonetheless, economic growth has been elusive and while the unemployment rate has fallen, it’s still around 15%.  If Fortuño loses his race, but Romney wins, there’s a strong chance that Fortuño could be asked to take a position — or even a Cabinet-level post — in a Romney administration.

Puerto Rico will also hold yet another referendum on statehood in two parts: whether they are satisfied with Puerto Rico’s current status as a ‘commonwealth,’ and if not, whether they would prefer U.S. statehood, full independence or a confusing ‘sovereign associated state’ status.

With four million people, if Puerto Rico were independent, it would be the fourth-most populous country in the Caribbean, after Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Predictions

So now on to my own prediction.

We know the outcome of most states. Obama will almost certainly win California, New York (29 electoral votes), Illinois (20 electoral votes), New Jersey (14 electoral votes), Washington (12 electoral votes) and Romney’s Massachusetts (11 electoral votes), among others, and he is leading in Pennsylvania (20 electoral votes) and Michigan (16 electoral votes), both of which voted for Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, despite their loss in the wider Electoral College.

Romney will almost certainly win Texas (38 electoral votes), Georgia (16 electoral votes), and a swath of smaller states in the Old Confederacy South, the Great Plains states, and much of the Mountain West states.

The actual popular vote tally of all 50 states doesn’t matter, so I will whiff and say it’s too close to call — Hurricane Sandy may well depress voter turnout in Delaware, New Jersey and New York, but those states are solidly in favor of Obama.

For the electoral vote, my final prediction is Obama 276, Romney 262: Continue reading Final thoughts (and predictions) for the U.S. presidential election

Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics?

Silvio Berlusconi this week all but conceded that he would not run as the main center-right candidate for prime minister in Italy’s upcoming elections, due to be held before April 2013 — and he even hinted he could support a moderate coalition in favor of continuing the economic reforms of current technocratic prime minister Mario Monti (pictured above).

I’m not convinced this is the last we’ve heard from Il Cavaliere, though, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t his last word on whether he’ll run in 2013.

Berlusconi has been the central figure of Italian politics since 1994, so if he changes his mind tomorrow, or next month, or next year, he has sufficient money and control over Italian media to play a huge role in the upcoming election.  Current polls indicate, however, that most Italians are ready to turn the page on Berlusconi.

Many political scientists and Italians alike consider the period from 1945 to around 1993 Italy’s ‘first republic’ — a period where Italy’s Christian Democratic party (and various allies) essentially controlled the government continuously, through less-than-stable coalitions that often split and re-formed in various permutations of the center-right and center-left.  Despite consistently strong opposition from Italy’s Communists, the Communists never had enough strength — or were permitted to gather enough strength — to enter government.

After the Tangentopoli (‘Bribesville’) scandal that implicated essentially every major politician in Italian public life in the 1990s, Italy entered its ‘second republic’ — an era that’s been dominated by Berlusconi and has featured somewhat more stability — Italian politics since the 1994 general election can be seen as a struggle between a largely rightist coalition and another largely leftist coalition (despite Italy’s reputation for pizza topping politics).  Governments have been more stable, but media freedom has in some ways regressed, in large part due to Berlusconi’s overweening control of private (and sometimes public) media in Italy.

If Berlusconi indeed remains on the sidelines in the upcoming election, however, we could see a tectonic shift in Italian politics that represents yet another era — a new ‘third republic’ — one where Italy continues to develop even more engrained democratic norms and stronger liberal freedoms.  Even if that somewhat overstates the case, 2013 is set to become as much a transformative year in Italian politics as 1994.  What’s striking is that, no more than six months before the next general election, what we know about the future of Italian politics is massively outweighed by what we don’t.

The latest poll, as of October 9 from Ipsos, currently shows Berlusconi’s center-right Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL, the People of Freedom) winning just 18.0% of the vote, to 28.5% for Italy’s main center-left party, the Partito Democratico (PD, Democratic Party) and the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S, the Five-Star Movement), a populist protest vehicle of popular comedian and blogger Beppe Grillo, with 17.4%. Those numbers, however, are very likely to change between now and the election.

At the risk of dumping a laundry list of minor parties at my readers, it’s important to note the other actors in Italian politics and where they stand:

  • the rump of Italy’s once-dominant Christian Democrats, led by the highly respected Pier Ferdinando Casini, the Unione di Centro (UdC, Union of the Centre) wins 6.4%;
  • the centrist, anti-corruption Italia dei Valori (IdV, Italy of Values) of former Tangentopoli prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro wins 6.0%;
  • the socialist Sinistra Ecologia Libertà (SEL, Left Ecology Freedom) of the popular — and openly gay — president of Puglia, Nichi Vendola, wins 5.6%;
  • the separatist Lega Nord (LN, Northern League), under the new leadership of Roberto Maroni following a corruption scandal involving former longtime leader Umberto Bossi, wins just 4.9%;
  • no other party wins more than 3% of the vote — the most notable of the smaller parties is the newly-formed free-market liberal Futuro e Libertà (FLI, Future and Freedom) of former foreign minister Gianfranco Fini, a former Berlusconi ally who once headed the neofascist National Alliance party (although he worked to move it from the fringes to the center).

With all of that in mind, consider exactly everything we don’t know about an election ostensibly just six months away: Continue reading Is Italy headed into a post-Berlusconi ‘third republic’ era of national politics?