Source: CVDaily Feed
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“Don’t blame me. I voted for Kodos.”
—Homer Simpson
Two years ago, I ran for re-election as a governing trustee for a fraternal order. If performance mattered more than petty, childish personality conflicts, I would have been voted back into office decisively. In a single year, I had attended 95% of the meetings, was present for nearly every function held at the lodge and spearheaded a real estate deal for an adjacent parcel of land that provided enough funds to save the club from closing. My re-election should have been a simple matter of affirmation.
But I am Harry Caines…and many in Utah are easily intimidated by my domineering persona. Two people ran against me. I received nine votes. One of my opponents received nine votes. The third nominee got six votes. It was a tie.
The rules for breaking a tie as written in the by-laws were clear. We were to draw straws, or implement any random device that would act as a tiebreaker. A satchel with two slips of paper was presented to me. One slip had the word “elected” scrolled on it. The other, “not elected”. I drew the slip with two words.
I fully admit here that I was fuming mad at that moment. In retrospect, losing a tiebreaker on a draw was a great thing for me. In the short term, my vanity was wounded to the point that I was very much of the opinion that I would not serve had I drawn the other slip of paper. I would have resigned. Long term, after the rejection of 5/8th of my peers I eventually came to completely avoid going to that club. Of all of the mistakes and regrets I have yoked onto my brain about recent decisions I have made, this was one of the few in that interim that I am fully content with.
There is an old axiom that suggests that a person can win by losing. In this particular case, I ended up with a positive result because of a tie.
Ties suck. Ties are the lack of a resolution. Ties tell us that after a competition or an election that those involved cannot determine who has bested whom. Ties also tell us that maybe one entity should not be chosen over another. Ties are the embodiment of ongoing strife and confusion.
In the 1800 U.S Presidential Election, an Electoral College tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr put the U.S Constitution to the test. It was a widely held belief that a gentleman’s agreement beholden in the Constitution at the time would make Jefferson the president. The problem was that Aaron Burr was not a gentleman. It took 36 ballots in the United States House of Representatives to break the tie in favor of Jefferson.
The Korean War was a tie. For three years, the U.S., South Korea and their allies stayed on their side of the 38th Parallel whilst simultaneously North Korea, backed by China and the USSR, stayed on the other side. That line still exists. It is still heavily fortified and defended. Six decades later, this tie has produced nothing of substance.
In soccer, you break ties during elimination matches with penalty shots. No other solution is viable. In the record books, do you know how matches that are decided by penalty shots are scored? They are recorded as ties.
There is a board game called Cthulhu Wars that I play quite a bit. It is a very intricate strategy game with only one flaw. Games can end in ties. There is a great irony in a game based on Lovecraftian characters whose main purposes are world domination and to devour all humankind ending in a tie.
And that brings us to Iowa. Or, more specifically, Iowa Democrats. The Iowa Caucuses were held Monday. Both Republicans and Democrats throughout the Hawkeye State went to schools, recreation centers and living rooms to tell the rest of America who they believe should be the 45th President of the United States.
The parties caucus differently. The GOP, as seen on C-SPAN, were orderly. Each candidate had a representative speak on their behest for three minutes. Then, every caucus goer placed an X on a ballot next to their preference. A C-SPAN camera was at the table where the counters separated the votes and counted them twice. The results were announced and everyone went home.
The Democrats? Anarchy! The American satirist Will Rogers once said that he did not belong to an organized party, but that he was a Democrat. Rogers would have loved Iowa!
As seen on C-SPAN 2: Electric Boogaloo—actually, it’s just called C-SPAN 2—the Democrats were an entertaining circus. The caucus chair had attendees break off into four sections of a very small high school meeting room. One section each for Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and “uncommitted”.
Then, biased organizers from the campaigns counted raised hands one by one, not noting their reckoning on a pad, and reported the numbers to the Chair. When the O’Malley and uncommitted pledges both tallied under 15% of the attendees, a 15 minute interval was assigned for the Sanders and Clinton pledges to woo them to their side for a second count.
This was the point where C-SPAN turned into high drama. Their cameras were inches away from caucus goers desperately wooing the available attendees to their side. I watched the proceeding with my teenaged son, who is committed to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Utah primary this spring. We were glued to the television.
On this televised caucus, Clinton barely beat out Sanders. But, the fact that the method of tallying the votes was suspect to inaccuracies and corruption, any viewer watching could see how this was not an exact political science.
And then the all votes came in.
Fox News and CNN kept reporting a virtual tie. As Monday crept into Tuesday, the difference between the two major candidates for the Democratic nomination was less than a percentage point. And stories came out of smaller caucus sites that voting irregularities and a lack of staffing had put some of the Democrats’ numbers into question. And there were ties.
How did they break the ties at these smaller caucus sites? A coin flip. Iowa, which insists it is their right to go first in the process of choosing the most powerful person on the planet, chooses some of the delegates that will decide this important question by flipping a quarter in some unknown farmer’s living room.
And after all of this, what did Iowa Democrats hand us? A tie. A majority of the Republican caucus goers voted for Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Good, bad or in between, they made a choice. They had an organized process that sent a message.
If the Iowa GOP told us by their angry votes that “The End is Nigh!”, then the Democrats meekly proclaimed, “The End is Tie!”
Thanks, Iowa! Stay hot!
A tie? Democrats could not choose between a 74 year old socialist from Vermont and a 68 year old wife of a former president who the Democrats rejected eight years ago in favor a community activist? They really could not decide between these two underwhelming candidates with little to no shot to win in November?
I know what some of you are screaming at me right now. Hillary won! Yes, technically she did in fact win, 49.8% to 49.6% for Senator Sanders. Is that really a victory? Slightly over half the Democrats who showed up said nyet to Hillary. Iowa Democrats—remember folks, Iowa goes first because they claim they are better at this than the voting electorate in the other 49 states—could not decide between a candidate with misguided values (Sanders) and one with hardly any values at all (Clinton).
Iowa shows why the Democrats are in big trouble after seven years of Barack Obama, one of the most failed presidencies in American history. If Democrats are now the party of forced wealth redistribution, aggressive environmental regulation and a foreign policy of self-blame and appeasement, then they should all vote for Sanders. They will lose, but they will go down on sincere principals.
If the Democrats are trying to reinvigorate the 1990’s and continue the legacy of scandal, lust for power and destroying political opponents that made the word Clintonian an eponym in every legitimate dictionary, then they should vote for Hillary. They will lose, but at least they have a candidate that will blame Republicans for her self-inflicted problems.
The Democrats are in big trouble. The GOP is trying to throw them a lifeboat by elevating Trump and Cruz. But whether one of those nutjobs is the nominee, or the GOP regains some semblance of sanity by backing Marco Rubio, they will have a clear choice and be united behind him.
Iowans had the first shot to tell America who the Democrats are and what they stand for. What they gave us was nothing. And that is probably what they will get in return on November 8th.