Scott Martelle

May 17, 2012 9:39 AM EDT

Hi Scott... Congrats on Detroit...I was just meandering down your blog and noticed this post. While its fair to not that electorate can be blamed for choosing members of congress, we have to wonder what congress might look like if not for the way the electorate was royally screwed by the electoral college system in 2000, when Gore won a plurality by more than 540,000 votes over W. We Americans have always preached that a government should reflect the will of its people--and in 2000 we inadvertently proved the wisdom of that view, because W wasn't the people's choice. Gore would have had his own problems but the voters shouldn't be blamed for the first four years of W (and if there had been no first four, there wouldn't have been a second four.) Forgetting about 2000 and the EC are pet peeves

- Scott Harris

May 18, 2012 7:54 AM EDT

Thanks, Scott .... this is apples and oranges though. Congressional districts are set by the states, and that;s where the gerrymandering comes in, which lets the fringes have excessive influence on candidate selection. The 2000 presidential results were an abomination, but not Congressional. That more directly reflects this divide I'm talking about.

- Scott Martelle

May 19, 2012 8:51 PM EDT

When you say "gerrymandering has helped lock in the power of the extremists in both parties," you're falling victim to the same false equivalency that Mann and Ornstein decry in their brave article.

When you speak of Democratic extremism, you imply the Democrats have lurched to the left. But that simply isn't true. Where are the Congressional Democrats who show socialist, Marxist or anarchist tendencies? Hell, with a few exceptions, where are the Democrats with liberal tendencies?

There is a well-represented extremist contingent in the Democratic Party, but it's a corporatist/reactionary tendency, not a leftist one. Let's look at the party's leader, shall we?

*Barack Obama has not only asserted the right to murder American citizens, but, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, acted on it (he snuffed al-Awlaki's teenage son as well: take THAT, junior!).

* He signed the National Defense Authorization Act, with its astonishing provision that the military can indefinitely imprison American citizens with no judicial process.

* He has pronounced courageous whistleblower Bradley Manning guilty before his kangaroo court-martial has even gotten underway.

* As a senator, he voted for the law that gave the telephone companies retroactive immunity for helping the NSA illegally monitor all Americans' phone calls, e-mails and web searches (something which is still going on, by the way).

And yet you imply the Democrats are a bunch of flaming lefties? Get real. I speak as a former Democrat who has been betrayed by them too many times. They have better table manners than the Republicans, but every Republican outrage of the past generation has always had just enough Democratic support to be enacted.

p.s.: Saw you at the blogging panel at the BIO conference today; thought you did a good job.

- Jon Krampner

May 20, 2012 5:00 AM EDT

Hi, Jon:

I agree the Dems have not been affected as much by the far left as the Republicans have been by the far right, and I should have been clearer above. (Though I wouldn't go so far as to agree I am guilty of false equivalency). It's the structure of the gerrymandering I was focusing on that accents the power of factions, while simultaneously making it harder for people outside the broader folds of the Dems and Reps to have any significant effect (I'm thinking of unaligned voters here, who have, in most cases, no say about who their general election options will be) ). I also agree with your points about Obama, and would add a bullet point about the secretiveness of his administration in targeting whistle-blowers and journalists.

I also agree that the Dems have been dominated by the center-right, the old Clinton "third way" model, though it seems to be less of a faction than the mainstream approach by Democrats. The leftists have, well, left, and those that remain are too disorganized to have much influence within the Democratic Party, particularly at the local committee level. The far right, though, has been very effective at that (as have the Ron Paul folks, too, though to lesser extent).

Thanks for the kind words about the Bio panel, and I hope you enjoyed the other panels, as well.

- Scott Martelle

Apr 20, 2012 8:09 AM EDT

I always want to celebrate the Flint sit-down war. Not only a brilliant tactical campaign, involving feints and misleading the spies and women smashing windows to fight tear gas and...and...and. And, of course, it was a victory. Unlike most of the other labor red-letter days.

- John

Apr 21, 2012 9:01 PM EDT

Thank you for keeping the memory of Ludlow alive. Few people are aware of what happened there and what the workers and their families sacrificed in the stuggle for basic rights. My grandfather's brother, Charles Costa, his wife Cedi, and their two children were killed at Ludlow. I grew up hearing family stories about what happened there, but never heard a word about Ludlow in any history class.

- Linda