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Post-Election Blues

Posted on November 10, 2008
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History says, Don’t hope
on this side of the grave
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme. – Seamus Heaney

In the end, it was over sooner than I had expected, but just as I had hoped. Once Ohio was won and Pennsylvania hadn’t fallen into McCain’s hands, the battle was over. McCain conceded around 8:00 PM or so our time. He gave what is widely acknowledged as a gracious speech, a speech befitting the man who people knew before this election began, a man lost in the battle for the White House, a speech marred slighltly by his emphatic praise of Palin.  People who had firmly stated their opposition to Obama because he was black, ended up voting for him in the end. Bradley effect proved to be a non-factor.

NYT ran a story about such a group of people in a small town in Pennsylvania, looking to seek the reasons why they changed. One of them, a heating and air-conditioning technician said: “For a long time, I couldn’t ignore the fact that he was black, if you know what I mean. I’m not proud of that, but I was raised to think that there aren’t good black people out there.” He said that what turned his vote was McCain’s selection of Palin. I was touched that many Americans shared a similar view, that they didn’t see Palin as being good for the country. Another chief reason, according to a council official, was self-interest. She says, “They had to ask themselves if they wanted a really smart young black guy, or a stodgy old white guy from the same crowd who put us in this hole.”

This seems to run counter to psychological studies that have been published in the past that suggest that people vote more in line with their feelings about a candidate than factual information. So the studies predicted that people would vote for McCain because of the latent racism (and strongly triggered xenophobia by Palin) against Obama. But in the end, the economic disaster and Obama’s success in making McCain seem more like Bush helped push him to victory, it seems. A friend told me that had it not been for the economic disaster, the unpopularity of the Iraq war and his significantly larger funding, Obama would not have won. In the end, it was “Its the economy, stupid” all over again.

Obama’s victory has been greeted the world over with euphoria and hope. Many warmed up to America as they had in the past, saying that by electing a black to the highest post in the country, America was showing itself again to be a beacon of democracy. I heard a program on NPR, the public radio station, in which leaders and people from outside the US spoke with words and tone that were richly pregnant with hope at the possibility of a new dawn in the history of the US and the possibility of its beneficial impact on the world. “Can you imagine the burden Obama must be feeling at this outpouring of hope and goodwill ?” asked the host of the show. Even the Iranian president sent a letter congratulating Obama, the first since the revolution that deposed the Shah. Obama greeted it coolly, saying that reciprocating the good wishes of an enemy required some thought as to what was said and what was meant.

The honeymoon was over even before the shouting was. Markets tanked the day after the election. Obama decided to put a man widely considered to be partisan as his chief of staff. He’s considering Lawrence Summers for the post of Treasury Secretary, the same man who once said: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the world bank be  encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (less developed countries) ? … I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waster in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that…I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted…Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electricity generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.” More recently, he was forced to resign from Harvard University for commenting that the reason there were fewer women in science and math was because men was genetically better endowed to excel in those fields. Many of the potential candidates were part of the Clinton presidency. After an election based on the promise of change seemed to indicate only a change from Bush’s policies, not the dawn of a new, different America. Left-of-center opinion makers pointed out that Obama faced a tough choice in bringing forward a completely fresh team because of the enormity of the challenges that he faced. Right wing opinion makers blamed the post-election stock market decline on Obama.

But even before this, the victory was bitter-sweet. Proposition 8, the referendum to define marriage as only between heterosexuals, passed, striking a blow against gay marriage. I was shocked at its passage in California, one of the most liberal states in the country, especially after it looked like it was going to lose quite easily. LA Times and The Nation suggested that supporters of the proposition were successful in making the issue about being more than marriage, that if the proposition failed, churches would be forced to recognize and perform gay marriages and that schools would be forced to teach about gay marriage. Another trump card, specifically targeting black voters, was a video of Obama saying that he wasn’t in favor of gay marriage, though the truth was that he was emphatically against Prop 8. Curiously, Obama didn’t do as well as his predecessor Democrat for President, John Kerry, only among people older than 65 and homosexuals.

The exit polls showed that African-Americans overwhelmingly voted in favor of the proposition. The bigotry upset me. One of the blacks who was interviewed said that it had been a difficult decision for him. He said that he had “a deep and personal reverence for civil rights”, but being a Pentecostal Christian trumped eventually. That religion had been used to condone slavery seems to have been forgotten by most blacks. There is a poignant, intelligent and mature movie, Far From Heaven, that deals with this sort of bigotry. Set in the 50s, when homosexuality was considered a disease and civil rights was still a decade or more away, it tells the story of a married couple, considered the model American family in a small town community, but the husband is gay and she, lonely, seeks comfort in the company of her black gardener, a well read, intelligent man. But she cannot condone her husband’s gayness while he finds her friendship with a black man, appalling. The bigotry so movingly depicted in the movie has stuck with me for a long time.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
to scare myself with my own desert places. – Robert Frost

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Will We Make History Today ?

Posted on November 4, 2008
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The day is finally here. As early as 3 PM my local time today, we’ll get the first inkling of what is to follow. Indiana, a battleground state, will be among the first to close polls today and we’ll start getting results of exit polls pretty soon after that. In 2004, Kerry lost Indiana by a worse than expected 20 points. Indiana has voted Republican since 1964, but Obama looks like he could take it this year. If he does, some predict that it’ll be a landslide in his favor while if he loses by more than 4 points, it could be a long night.

I woke up today and as has been my wont for the past couple of weeks, checked the poll aggregators, pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com. Pollster had already removed Ohio from strongly leaning towards Obama to a battleground state, Obama was down from 311 to 294. Even though 294 seats is enough to win him the White House, I heart stopped for an instant. Even before the race has begun, we’re losing seats, I thought to myself. A Reuters headline said that Obama was leading McCain in five of the eight battleground states. I took some comfort in that. NYT is running a page which asks you to describe how you feel in a single word, you can come up with one of your own or select from one already chosen by some of the others. I picked jittery, though anxious and apprehensive would probably have been more precise.

US is one of the few countries in the world which has some form of direct democracy, allowing the voter to vote on locally relevant issues rather than just for one or more representatives. Some examples of the kinds of issues placed on the ballot include a statute to reduce the suffering of farm animals, a referendum to declare marriage as only between opposite sexes and putting an upper bound on the year-over-year property tax increases to prevent making it unaffordable for very old residents. An issue is packaged as an initiative, a referendum or a recall. Recalls are typically issued to recall a publicly elected official before his/her term is over. For example, in 2003, California recalled then Governor Gray Davis on grounds of mismanagement and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger in his place. In the US, the modern form of initiative and referendum first originated in the state of South Dakota from where it spread to Oregon whose format is now the one practiced in much of the remaining states. Initiatives and referendums are issues initiated by the citizenry and when larger than a specified number of registered voters petition to have the issue placed on the year’s ballot. The initiative may force an amendment to the State constitution or merely require the executive and legislative bodies to seriously consider the results of the initiative in creating a new law. One recently famous example of an initiative passed in Oregon is the one allowing doctor assisted suicides. In California this year, probably the most important referendum is  Proposition 8, a yes vote for which forces a state constitutional amendment to explicitly define marriage as between people of opposite sexes only. Overwhelmingly opposed by the valley companies such as Google and Apple, the measure looked like it was heading for a sound defeat, but has since picked up much momentum and now it appears to be a very close race.

Many ballot measures are requests to issue bonds to finance various projects. This year, in California, there are about 12 ballot proposals of which six are bond measures for proposals such as a high speed rail system between LA and San Francisco and money for children’s hospitals to money for encouraging alternative fuels. On top of this, we also have local county (similar to a district) measures such as a bond for extending a commuter rail line from East Bay to South Bay. So, as a voter I got two booklets totaling about 160 pages which included the entire text of each proposal, arguments for and against the proposal and some assessment of the impact of the proposal. Understanding all of this to vote in a sensible, educated manner is quite a lot of work. The list of proposals are presented in limerick form each time by some of the local educational groups, though they’re not entirely without bias. For example, here is the limerick for Proposition 8, the measure to ban gay marriage:

A San Francisco Mayor created some bedlam
When he stood before gay couples to wed ‘em
Although fundees scream “unclean!”
“Gay marriage is obscene!”
It’s the state’s job to register couples, not judge ‘em

And here is the one on the high speed rail bond:

In the mythical land of Califairia
The people evinced an unusual hysteria
They voted for prodigious debt
In a lunatic bet
That they could somehow live beyond their salaria

Sometimes the issues are so obscure that it is hard to understand the rationale behind the proposal. I picked a few that I thought that I understood and had a position on. The rest I voted based on the axiom of always reject bonds and copying the suggestions from a suggestion list that I got in the mail that matched my ideas on the ones that I cared about.

A body called IDEA (Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance) provides a lot of information about all the different issues and methods that underlie a democracy. For example, they have a detailed breakdown by country of where compulsory voting is practiced and the specific practices of compulsory voting in the country, they cover the very important issue of gender and democracy, the study voter turnout in different parts of the world and report their findings (there is no link between literacy and voter turnout, for example). They state that direct democracy is becoming popular the world over. A site worth checking out for a wealth of information.

I was checking some of the sites to see if any early results were available and found that pollster.com and fivethirtyeight.com had a message saying that early results would not be forthcoming and also put up a FAQ on why exit polls are bad predictors of the eventual outcome. Sigh. Guess I have to continue my teeth gnashing for a little longer.

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Three More Days

Posted on November 2, 2008
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Three more days to November 4th, to what is one of the historic elections in the history of the US. If polls turn out to be true, and there is no Bradley effect, this country could see the first non-white President in its chequered, almost two hundred fifty year old history. Not just Americans, but I suspect, a large part of the world awaits with some interest the outcome of these elections. Many people point out to me, independent of the outcome, the glory days of the US as a superpower are over.

The country seems to be in the grip of an election anxiety. The Montreal Gazette says: “..they [Americans] lie in bed till 4 a.m. in panic, mentally calculating the latest hourly polls, divided by the projected ethnic voter turn-out.” AP reports: “Voters around the country, whether they support McCain or Barack Obama, say they are experiencing nail-biting, ulcer-inducing anxiety ahead of next week’s election and all that’s riding on it”. Huffinton Post has letters from various readers around the country on their feelings of election anxiety.

I check the polls every morning, my pulse racing a little if I see the race tightening, ignoring the statistical fine print. I read articles that ask whether the polls are accurate predictors of the outcome. I learn about the 1948 mishap when polls stopped polling a week earlier because the Republican Thomas Dewey was well ahead of Democrat Harry Truman and missed the late surge by Truman to win the election. I read that in 1980, Ronald Reagan similarly came from behind to defeat Jimmy Carter largely on the strength of his performance in the last debate. And then there is the more recent misfire in New Hampshire when Hilary Clinton trumped Obama in the primaries despite Obama being ahead in the polls. The variation between the results between different pollsters adds to the anxiety. Ramussen reports the difference to be as small as three percent around the same time that Pew Research Center reports that difference to be 15%. The only thing that all polls agree is that the larger number is currently pegged on Obama’s name.

I found Pollster.com and FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the number of electors in the elector college) to be good aggregators of all the different polls and providing some perspective and independent commentary on the numbers. For example, today’s article in pollster.com said: “Not surprisingly, yesterday was another heavy day of new poll releases: 37 new statewide surveys and 10 national releases, yet these surveys indicate no clear trends and leave our bottom line electoral vote count unchanged.” FiveThirtyEight lists the chances of Obama winning at 96.22 percent and the chances of McCain winning at 3.78%; there is a 0.15% chance of a tie.

Some folks (including me) are wary of the Bradley effect, named after the African-American contender for the governor of California who polls showed to be winning in a landslide, but who lost, because people lied to the pollsters to avoid being called racist i.e. they said that they’d vote for Bradley but voted for his opponent because Bradley was black. I’ve read reports that quote people who say that they’re afraid of a country run by a black. Two skinheads were arrested for plotting to assassinate Obama. But many are fairly confident that the Bradley effect is not a factor this time.

Some others speak of the bandwagon effect, the cognitive bias that makes people do things because that’s what they think a large majority of people would do, in this case switch votes because the odds favor a candidate overwhelmingly over the other. 7 in 10 Americans polled by Gallup thought that Obama would win. So, the proponents of the bandwagon effect claim, Obama may win by an even bigger margin because of the bandwagon effect.

While most non-US powers and people believe that it is sunset time for might of the US, a Gallup poll found that people the world over prefer Obama to McCain by a 3-1 ratio. People in 73 countries were polled with the questions of whether who won the US elections would affect their country and who they would like to see win. Indians largely claimed that they didn’t know if the elections would affect them. Even in Pakistan, only 10% claimed that it mattered who won the elections (and Obama and McCain were evenly split as their favorite) while 72% claimed that they didn’t know or refused to answer.

Some of my friends and family, who were new to this country and are seeing the spectacle that is the US elections for the first time, are appalled. They had hoped to find the elections much more erudite, the speeches more about issues and the people more knowledgable. “This doesn’t seem very different from India”, one of them commented to me, “Religion seems to play a huge role in who people vote for”.

A colleague at the Internet standards body that I go to said to me over a difference of opinion that we had: “Oh, I don’t want conceding the point to you in return for the election going right. If it doesn’t go right, I maybe forced to move to Canada”. A neighbor echoed the same sentiment today and we discussed the benefits and disadvantages of Toronto vs Vancouver. Another colleague asked me why I was so upset with the Palin nomination (he’s so radically left and un-nunaced that everybody looks right to him and so he doesn’t care if Obama or McCain wins, it’s all the same, he says) and I told him that I’d seriously consider moving back to India if McCain won because that’d be a step in the worst possible direction for this country.

Psychologists like Daniel Gilbert, the author of last year’s immensely popular Stumbling on Happiness, has written extensively about how bad we’re at predicting our behavior after certain outcomes. In 2004, a year when a lot of us held our breath hoping Kerry wouldn’t be swift-boated to defeat, many people spoke openly of moving to Canada if Bush won. Gilbert wrote after the elections, in January 2005: “By now, most of the people I know should be Canadians. At least that’s what they said they’d be if President Bush won re-election. And yet, my unofficial tally suggests that the number of disgruntled Democrats who actually emigrated northward is roughly zero, plus or minus none. November saw more than its share of cursing, wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters, but by the middle of December the weeping had largely subsided and most of the people I know were busy buying gifts. With the exception of the junior senator from Massachusetts and a few hundred others whose lives and livelihoods hinged on the election’s outcome, most Democrats had a good cry, kicked something until it broke, then slipped quietly back into their daily routines of family, work and television.”

Palin and McCain meanwhile continued their ignoramus, unscientific posturing. In the latest gaffe, Sarah Palin mocked the research on fruit flies. She is reported to have said: “Sometimes these dollars, they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” Attacking science, demonstrating xenophobia and being folksy, all in one. The blogs took up the war with the lefties howling in the aisles over Palin’s comments while the right attempted to show that the left didn’t know that Palin meant the agricultural pests and not its famous cousin, the fruit fly used as the the basic research tool in genetics. The Science magazine carried what I thought was the more neutral report. It concludes the remarks by an entomologist who understood what the research was about and why it mattered to people. He said: “This kind of stuff always drives me nuts. It’s a total lack of understanding of the importance of research.” Do Palin and her supporters really think that the US got to be where it was without the investment in science and research ? And do they really forget that one of the proudest moments in their history, the first man to land on the moon, was largely a government project ? They point to certain bureaucracies as reflective of the inefficiencies of a government while forgetting that there are a lot of inefficient companies propped up artificially by these very same people. They ridicule Obama of being a socialist while voting for the nationalization of investment banks. They deride the role of the government while supporting a ban on abortion and declaring homosexuality illegal. They take pride that their country came up with innovations like the Internet while deriding basic research. They applaud free markets while continuing to support farm subsidies. Attitudes that scare me. I worry about the future of this country, no the future of Maya in a country that elects such people to power.

I cast my vote for Obama already, glad for having cast my very first vote in my entire life, in such a historic election.
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Post-Debate Musings

Posted on October 16, 2008
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So, after my mid-life crisis around the issue of presidential debates, I pulled myself together and watched all the debates, including the VP one (honestly, I watched that one more for entertainment). The final debate concluded today with many undecided voters still thinking Obama won by a wide margin.

But for any serious person interested in real solutions, the debates proved largely to be empty, save for one issue. I thought that on the issue of abortion, Obama made a lucid argument including one of reaching for common ground between the two camps. He put the issue where it lies, on the choice of a woman. McCain seemed to attack Obama than make a lucid argument on why he opposed abortion. I also appreciated Obama for not digging into McCain’s record of supporting abortion before he realized that he needed to court the Christian Right. If anything, McCain’s negativity was in sharp relief today. And ugly it was.

But on issue after issue, the debates have largely been shallow, even on issues that seem hardly worth debating. For example, Obama is now in favor of offshore drilling after rejecting it initially. Analysts largely agree that offshore drilling would barely impact gas prices. Both candidates appear to be more certain than any intelligent man could be under similar circumstances. People know that this is theater, that questions will be asked, well rehearsed answers will be given, answers that never touch the core of the problem. They don’t even begin to question the questions. It sometimes seems that we’re all party to this charade, that no one can stand up and call this emperor naked. I can only hope that Obama will not indulge in some of these plans.

McCain continued his shocking irresponsibility when asked about Sarah Palin. He called her a “role model to women and reformers all over America”. I was initially shocked that the Republican base was so enthralled with her. Even after an official report found her guilty of abusing power, she announced that the report vindicated her. Was there no person in the Republican camp with a sense of shame, I wondered ? Had partisanship reached such heights that we could not even look at someone like Sarah Palin and be afraid of her possible presidency ? Happily, I found that a few are denouncing her candidacy. Christopher Buckley, the son of the famous, erudite conservative, William Buckley, in an article titled “Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama” writes: “And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?”. He also writes about an op-ed piece by a conservative colleague of his at National Review Online, Kathleen Parker, who said that “Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that”. David Brooks, the conservative columnist for NY Times called her a “fatal cancer to the Republican Party”. Christopher Hitchens, a liberal turned war hawk/conservative and a columnist at the progressive weekly, The Nation, known for his scathing and well-argued pieces, wrote:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

I’m glad to see that there is still some semblance of sense amongst the conservative base, that all is not lost.

In many places where communists have come to power, they have chosen to wipe out the educated class in the name of the proletariat. I’m aware of this happening at least in China and in Cambodia. This has also happened under the right wing governments in South America, I believe. The Republican Party, personified in the form of Sarah Palin, has rejected the educated, the erudite in increasingly loud voices. This seems a dangerous trend to me, a rejection of those people who are most capable of making this country as great as the Republicans claim it to be. David Brooks writes about the same trend in a column in NYT. He writes:

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

…

The political effects of this trend have been obvious. Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone.

The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

It is the glorification of this attitude, culminating in the ascent of Sarah Palin as a VP nominee, that makes me worried. The coming years are not going to be easy, with global warming, vanishing topsoil, diminishing water supplies and other major resource constraints. When that time comes, xenophobia will increase as will a desire for homogenity. And the very attitudes being cultivated by the Republican Party are a step in that direction.

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Why I Won’t Be Voting For McCain

Posted on October 7, 2008
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I came across a passage about an American POW who was tortured for five years by the Vietcong. Imprisoned in a small, narrow bamboo cage, he was immersed every day in a rat-infested water upto his waist from dawn till dusk. The man survived a breakdown by building a five-star hotel in his mind, brick by brick, with complete details such as the quality of the sheets, the color of the walls, the cabling and other intricate details that go into the real life construction of such a building. John McCain was a POW and was allegedly tortured and kept in horrific conditions. He carries the physical reminders of the injuries that he sustained during that time, his inability to raise his arms above his head.

When McCain fought George Bush for the presidential nomination in 2000, an anonymous smear campaign (how can they be anonymous, I wonder) caused him much grief. According to the NYT: “A smear campaign during the primary in February 2000 here had many in South Carolina falsely believing that Mr. McCain’s wife, Cindy, was a drug addict and that the couple’s adopted daughter, Bridget, was the product of an illicit union. Mr. McCain’s patriotism, mental well-being and sexuality were also viciously called into question”. Bush won in South Carolina. McCain would say of the rumor spreaders, “I believe that there is a special place in hell for people like those.” According to one report, the South Carolina experience left him in a “very dark place.” When McCain campaigned in South Carolina in 2008, many people reportedly came upto him and his wife and apologized for the behavior in 2000.

I expect a president to learn and to empathize. To remember how bad it felt when he was at the receiving end, and make sure that he uses his power to spare those who followed, what he suffered. To never put another human being in that horrific condition called “war”, especially an unjust and unnecessary war. What did McCain do when Bush and his cohorts decided to attack Iraq ? Said “You’re doing one heckuva job, George” and supported him whole heartedly, differing only in wanting a greater number of US troops sent to Iraq. What is he doing now that the polls indicate that he’s largely trailing Obama ? Turn on negative ads. His VP nominee, Sarah Palin, is quoted in papers as saying: “There is a time when it’s necessary to take the gloves off and that time is right now”. Even before this, he endorsed several negative ads and his campaign has already been attributed as being abysmal in its usage of negative, false advertisements.

The nadir, for me, came when he selected Sarah Palin as his VP nominee, hoping to win the support of Hilary Clinton’s supporters. In the short span since that time, Sarah Palin has demonstrated that not only is she inexperienced and ignorant, but willing to go after personalities when she lacks the ideas to debate issues. She seeks to activate primal fears with fear, uncertainty and doubt instead of cogently discussing issues. For example, in Florida, she is quoted as having said:”I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way you and I see America”. The subtext of race raised in a Southern state is abhorring. In the much anticipated VP debate, it looked she was running for American Idol, not the vice presidency of the United States. Instead of lambasting her performance and her attitude, the right wing sopped it up, demanding more. Further, she combats her ignorance with a fierce determinism and certainty, driven in large part by her Christian faith. A very dangerous combination given the past eight years, especially in a world where the rules are changing so fast. For a man who professes his love for his country, to put a person like her the next in line is feckless. And it is not a very unlikely scenario, her becoming the president, since McCain is “older than dirt”, as he likes to think of himself.

I came across a quote from Thomas Pynchon’s acclaimed novel, Gravity’s Rainbow: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” By forcing race into the issue, by forcing personality into the discussion, by questioning his judgement, his name, his religion, his very being, McCain and Palin are trying to force the voters into not thinking about the issues, issues they answer with increasingly unrealistic ideologies.

A colleague at work hangs a sign at his desk: “Great minds discuss ideas, mediocre minds discuss events and small minds discuss people”. I’m fearful that this country will bring to power these incredibly small minds, based largely on race and fear. I will not be voting for such small minds.

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