My vote, my choice: Your vote, your choice too.

[izzybeans]

I have used this forum as a source of amusement and I intermittently attempt to post serious threads. This is one of those serious threads. In it I want to explain my reasoning for choosing my favored candidate and justify why I am entitled to this reasoning.

This board has devolved into a hilarious simulacrum. That is, there is no civic discussion about our mutual interests. Instead, we have false attacks on the electability of either candidate; mostly parroting what some blowhard said on the t.v. or some blowharder said on a blog somewhere. The consequence has been a serious undermining of collective trust we should all feel as democrats. We don't need to agree and we dont' need to distrust each other to have argument and debate.

To start, I maintain that I am openly persuadable on whom I should be supporting. However, I do not suffer fools lightly. So, if you must attempt to persuade me you must at least approach a certain threshold of believability. There are certain types of information I trust, certain sources of information I value higher than others, and I do not believe that logical arguments are persuasive when they are made from anywhere else but from the standpoint of these two places. But beneath that there are basic ontological requirements that I have crafted for who I perceive to be a leader in our democratic republic. Meet them and I just might vote for you.

There are two parts to my explanation. First, there is my political ontological reasoning, this is the philosophical basis of my politics. Second, there is what I will call "My Personal Threshold of Believability"; this is my practical epistemology for my political decision making.



On My Personal Political Ontology

I'll paraphrase Max Weber's discussion of legitimating authority here (only to keep it simple). There are two types of authority that I find legitimate and I value one more highly than the other. First, there is legal-rational authority (and though this is not following Weber's original formulation to the letter, this will do for now). This is the most important type of authority in our supposed nation of laws. We the people are asking one person to represent us as a leader, grounded in law, through a system of elections. By represent us, I mean "this land was made for you and me". To decide what represents us we must know what represents...us. If not we can be lead through the trappings of Charisma and Tradition to a place we did not foresee. However, Charisma and (begrudgingly) Tradition can take us closer to where we want and need to be if we have our interests right. We, all on this board, understand our personal preferences and most of us understand our own economic best interests, and slightly fewer of us apply these interests to the phrase "this land was made for you and me" in a way that I feel is proper (i.e. in a non-faith based economics-free market sort of way). We can talk and debate this stuff out amongst ourselves. This is the beautiful realm of civic discourse and civil society; a place where we can "shuck and jive" the contents of our morality and come together to fight over and hopefully form a consensus about our best interests. All of this falls within the realm of this most legitimate form of authority; because it is backed up by an institutionalized framework of laws.

Beyond our own charge in this whole "self-governance" experiment, there is the actual electoral process. Underneath this canopy of citizen and executive authority I had crafted a hierarchy of candidates that I felt best represented me and my interests, but just as importantly, I ranked them on what I felt was best for others as well. Poor Dennis, my top choice. He and my second choice John Edwards were beaten through a legitimate democratic contest (they did not win legal-rational authority). So now I am on my third candidate, Mr. Obama. We in fact had an entire field of candidates worthy of my top tier. But then there are two other less legitimate forms of authority to consider.

The second form of authority is charismatic. I'm sorry Mr. Dodd, Mr. Biden. I hope you accept my apologies here. This is the realm of supposed good and evil. Charisma can lead large masses towards either one. You can only be sure whenever you have answered the question posed by the first form of authority and never relinquish your authority as a citizen to criticize even your most revered leaders. Who will best represent us; you, me...in this land of the so called free? Will they take us closer to King's dream, the promised land, your dream, my dream, that dude over there's dream? Before answering, please know we are never going to get there. Ideal types do not exist in reality, but we can approximate them as best we can. There are no perfect models, and so forth. Or will Charisma whip the masses into an angry fervor? Will they take us into dystopia? Look around. We haven't quite arrived there either, but we sure have approximated it. There are no perfect models, and so forth. I remain an Obama supporter not because of his Charisma, but because he is the person I believe best represents me, you, and that dude over there. But I do believe Hillary is also a worthy candidate in this sense. They both have the Charisma to carry and move the masses in a way that gets us out of this dystopian nightmare. But I did not vote for her in the primary. And here is why: There is a third, and least legitimate form of authority. We've heard this argument before.

Traditional Authority has been limited to bloodline transmission of positions of power throughout history. In modern times, we might liken this type of authority to the supposed "power elite" where we suffer the "Iron Law of Oligarchy". I can not support Hillary (in the primary) for this reason. I say so with a heavy heart. She is part of the "power elite", a direct kin of royalty. Her campaign is unfortunately tainted by this oligarchy, staffed with the elite campaign brokers and PR establishment. The same staff currently dumping her once promising campaign in the tank. She was disqualified for me from the start because of a more objective form of authority, not because of my personal distaste for the political consultant free-riding class. I rank her one of the highest in terms of being able to represent us (which is why I would vote for her in the general), but she was my last candidate because traditional authority is the least legitimate form of power transfer in a democracy. But again this is my vote, my choice. I do not want to recreate the iron clad oligarchy. But I suppose I'll live with it so long as it is no longer controlled by republicans.




On My Personal Threshold of Believability


Let's take polling as an example. Polls are fine and dandy when, as we all know, their sampling procedures justify their representativeness. You can draw a representative sample in multiple ways. The preferred method is simple random sampling; however, this method is nearly impossible when dealing with complex populations. Epidemiologists often use a mixture of cluster and stratified sampling to produce authoritative prevalence estimates of physical disease and mental disorder. They sample random clusters of geographical units (region, city, census track, block, household, randomly selected person in household) and stratify their sample demographics so that they collect demographic proportions that are roughly equal to the populations or so that they over-sample demographic groups that are very small in number (in order to increase their statistical power, or usability). If a political poll does not approach a similar threshold of believability for me I toss it. But that is the simple part. Even trustworthy polls are used to deceive; especially the supposed political tracking polls. Some polling organizations utilize multiple panels. It does not make sense for them to ask the same panel the same question day-in-day out. Most here and around the rest of this simulacrum we know as the internet confuse these tracking polls as movements in support for our candidates, when really they are minor variations between multiple sets of samples. This is why I never believe a move in polling unless it is larger than the margin-of-error and can be seen for a given period of time (a week is probably too short, though my excitement or disappointment increases at this time). So, don't try to convince me that my candidate or yours is (un)electable based on these tracking polls unless you bring timelines, the margin-of-error for each poll, and a thick description of the sampling procedure.

Another fine example of my threshold stems from the source of information. Who is telling me what to believe? This is a huge question to consider. The "free-press" is at stake. What happens when you can not trust any source of information? You have to have sources of information to trust. You also need to be able to stand in the middle of this shit storm and spy good information flying by. Let's keep it simple to start. Libraries are a key trustworthy knowledge broker for me. They give me access to peer reviewed professional material. I like to cull information from political and social science journals; particularly discussions of our candidates, their histories, their voting records, etc. Not everyone has access to peer reviewed professional literatures, and that is a shame. But there are some good organizations out there that compile this information and tell you how to "vote smart" and inform you on who to trust based on your own support (e.g., NARAL ratings, etc.). Why do I like these sources? Most professional associations have much higher standards of trustworthy information than the so called "free press". The hard sciences are the most obvious example. In these social science journals the standards are no less rigid; however, they rely much more on an open discourse of critique. So, you will often see dissent within the ranks, especially when it comes to professional support for a particular government policy (i.e. the American Sociological Association's vote to speak out against the Iraq War). If I see a discussion of Obama's voting record in the Illinois Senate in Journal of Black Studies and how it relates to his ability to lead, I will be inclined to believe it over some campaign operative. Sorry, but that is just me. I trust the editors of the Journal of Black Studies more than I do Mark Penn. When I see a debate over the Clinton Administration's response to Rwanda in AJPS, I'm more inclined to listen than to a White House Press Secretary.


Phew, this is enough for now. I've got to get out of town.

Tis mere words after all, but I'd like to see explanations for why we all support who we do.


P.S. That was "partially" my reasoning for who I support in a stream-of-consciousness, meandering nutshell.