Dear Senator Reid and Rep. Pelosi
Tue Sep 26, 2006 at 01:08:28 PM PDT
You are currently making the single most significant political mistake of the 2006 electoral cycle. Never mind the moral dimension -- my own conscience is the only one I have the energy to worry about nowadays. I'm talking strictly about electoral politics.
And I sincerely apologize for the presumptuousness of telling you your own business, and in crude terms at that, but I honestly don't see any way to simply trust you on this. I've been doing the "political calculus" on the back of a laptop and it's pretty grim.
Politics is, utimately, about getting (and keeping) more votes than your opponent. Votes come from supportive citizens, and the support of each citizen has a baseline vote value of exactly ±1 vote per electoral cycle. But each citizen's support also has an
actual vote value that's determined by other factors and which varies over time: likelihood that they will actually vote for you in this election, likelihood that they'll continue to vote for you in future elections, their level of influence/credibility with other voters, their ability to fund campaigns, their level of visibility or celebrity, their activism quotient, etc, etc.
These minima and maxima are obviously impossible to measure in absolute terms but they can certainly be estimated in relative terms, especially as you aproach the baseline. Every political position involves tradeoffs in support. There are almost no 100% winning positions, because for each action you gain the support of some voters and lose the support of others. Each unit of support corresponds to some number of votes. So with each position you have to decide -- whose support are you targeting, and is this a net gain or a net loss in terms of votes?
In order to gain the support of people whose support means less than one vote each you are alienating other people whose support means one or more votes each. On balance, you are in the process of losing a lot of votes.
An extraordinary claim, I know. I got about 800 words (1/3 of the way) into a long, dry essay on the numbers and mechanisms that I believe are in play here before I figured that noone else would ever want to read it. In the interest of keeping this short and readable I'm just going to resort to a military metaphor, and point out that you are violating a fundamental rule of tactics.
You are fortifying a position which you cannot use, nor ultimately defend.
Consider the citizens whose support you will gain by standing by and allowing the Great Writ to be overturned. How valuable is their support, in terms of votes? Now consider the citizens whom, over the next six weeks, you are asking to bust ass, take time off from work, walk precincts, write letters, make phone calls, post blog entries, etc. How valuable is their support, in terms of votes? Now add in the number of people who are simply looking for "a little daylight" between Republicans and Democrats. In exchange for the support of the first group, you are alienating the latter two groups. And very deeply so.
It's reasonable to think that the number of citizens in the first category is larger than the second, and perhaps even the third (though I doubt that). The question is how much larger? In any event, the number of citizens doesn't matter. The number of votes is what matters. Do you think that all the citizens whose support you are courting by allowing the legalization of torture will vote for you? Will it be enough to counteract the losses you will face in the other two categories?
Meanwhile, by your silence, you offer assent that yes, we have no choice but to sacrifice our principles in order to secure our safety as a nation. You fortify your enemy's position. Unfortunately this is not just your enemy, else I'd leave you to your fate. You also fortify my enemy and the enemy of the Constitution so many of us have sworn to defend.
Best wishes
radish
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