In honor of my most recent
paper explaining why Einstein was, in fact, exactly as smart as we all think he was, I am going to over-claim my results and try to make an argument about politics.
First, the executive summary of the paper in question: General Relativity is still correct.
Relativity is about a lot of things, but it all boils down to: "the laws of physics shouldn't depend on where you are or how fast you are going (or if you're free-falling under gravity)." If I measure the speed of light in my bedroom in Brier or my office in Seoul, I should get the same answer. In physics speak, the result is "translationally invariant." If I translate myself to another point in space (changing my coordinate system so the point {x=0,y=0,z=0} means some other place), the answer doesn't change. (We actually already knew that. Einstein's real breakthrough was to point out that the result is also invariant under a Lorentz boost, since the result will be the same if I measure it on a spaceship traveling half the speed of light or on the Earth watching the spaceship go by me, but that's less useful for what is to follow.)
Lately (for the last year) a lot of noise has been made about "partisanship" in Washington, DC. Obama was supposed to be a "post-partisan" president. In reality, no Republicans have voted for any significant piece of legislation since January 20, 2009. As a unified block, the Congress people with (R)s next to their names have voted against the budget, the stimulus bill, and what would have been the health care bill. This experimental evidence has been used to support the claim that "partisan gridlock" in our nation's capital is worse than ever.
This is not a translationally invariant result.
If, instead of measuring partisanship based on some obscure club membership, we were to redefine our coordinate system and measure partisanship based on what people believed, I think we would find that most of the Democratic agenda has been remarkably bipartisan. Examining health care, we find a piece of legislation that peace-loving hippie goofs (Barnie Frank and Bernie Sanders), pro-life conservatives (Ben Nelson and Bart Stupak), and a guy who looks like Kermit the Frog and thinks that the Iraq War is the greatest thing America has done since the moon landing (Joe Lieberman) all were prepared to vote for (assuming we can trust the Frog...). It wasn't pretty getting to that point. Horses were traded. Backs were scratched. Harry Reid proposed and backed down from both a public option and a Medicare buy-in for 55 year-olds just to get one guy's vote (that damned Frog...) Isn't this the essence of bipartisan compromise? And yet, people think it was illegitimate because it didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Republican." It didn't involve anyone who calls him/herself a "Prohibitionist," either. It did involve two men who call themselves "Independents" (Sanders and the Frog). Where do you draw the line? Because that's really the question at hand.
During the 2008 Presidential Election I had a quite a few conversations with a friend of mine who was not an Obama supporter. She wasn't a McCain supporter. She's one of the most anti-war people I know. She didn't want either of them to be President. After I finished choking on my own saliva, I tried to explain to her that the choice she was trying to make didn't exist; that in the American system (she's not a citizen, begging the question, "why was it so important that I convince her?"; to understand that, you probably have to be me), you don't have to get a majority of the votes, you just have to get more votes than anyone else got (and not even that thanks to the electoral college). I don't think this changed her mind, but it definitely surprised her.
I've long suspected that America needs an instant run-off election: anyone who wants to runs, and if no one gets 51% of the vote, the top two face off again. You can vote for Nader/Paul the first time around to ease your conscience. Then, when he comes in third, you can vote for Gore/McCain to save us all from Bush/Obama. Everybody wins (except Nader, but I count that as a good). Really, though, we already have that. We have primaries. Granted, Ralph Nader has never run in a Democratic primary, but Dennis Kucinich has, and I can't believe that those two wouldn't get along famously, assuming they don't already. Similarly, Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan have run in recent Republican primaries. Why should third-partiers continue to cry foul just because it's called "the Democratic Primary" or "the Republican Primary" instead of "the Presidential Election"? If your gal/guy is actually the best choice (in a way that 150 million + 1 Americans can agree on), why should it matter?
Process is important. I would love to live in a world where I believed that our country had a perfect system for choosing its leaders and making its policies. I don't live in that world. I (we) live in the world we have and, in that world, outcomes are also important. It took the Democratic Party 8 months to agree with itself what the health care bill should look like. That is not the hallmark of an single-party regime steam-rolling all dissent. It is the sign of a deliberative process considering every idea minus two:
a) doing nothing
b) anything people who call themselves (R) don't vote for is a bad idea because, hey, they call themselves (R).
If bipartisanship actually means something, it should mean more than (b).
