Post-election commentary

The Sunday church bells are echoing each other across Bergamo and it’s raining.  Before I turn to my Italian homework, I’m reading and appreciating more of Arun Kapil’s roundup of post-election commentary.

I was struck by his brief thoughts about the reasons for the drop off in voting this time, a reduction, it seems, of about 10 million votes.  One reason, he speculates, may be a perverse effect of the electoral college.  If the election is only being contested in the ten or eleven swing states, then voters on the others, where the outcome is virtually certain, have less reason to go vote.  It’s a version of why I wasn’t too concerned when the District of Columbia didn’t send my absentee ballot to Italy as they’d promised.  After all, what’s another Democratic vote in the District?  If this is, in fact, what’s happening, and if the number of swing states drops further, the effect, as he says, is to make “the presidential election effectively irrelevant for may voters in most of the country.”  Sobering.

I was also especially grateful for his link to a Frank Rich piece in New York Magazine.  It reminds me of how much I enjoyed him in the Times and how much I miss him.  For example:

“Given that Romney had about as much of a human touch with voters as an ATM, it sometimes seemed as if a hologram were running for president. Yet some 57 million Americans took him seriously enough to drag themselves to the polls and vote for a duplicitous cipher.”

And his last paragraph:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan might be surprised to learn that he is now remembered most for his oft-repeated maxim that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.” Yet today most Americans do see themselves as entitled to their own facts, with one of our two major political parties setting a powerful example. For all the hand-wringing about Washington’s chronic dysfunction and lack of bipartisanship, it may be the wholesale denial of reality by the opposition and its fellow travelers that is the biggest obstacle to our country moving forward under a much-empowered Barack Obama in his second term. If truth can’t command a mandate, no one can.

This, or some version of it, should be kept in mind any time a political commentator moans about how the two parties can’t work together.  One of them isn't interested.