How Big Cities are Maligned by the Presidential Primary Schedule and the Electoral College
How Big Cities are Maligned by the Presidential Primary Schedule and the Electoral College
By
David Gottfried
There are certain issues that do not amount to a mere blip on the radar screens of the national news.
I am sorry that the image I tried to post on here isn’t being copied. Try to get over it. Try to realize that ideas are more important that cutesy or histrionic images. Try to remember that the two prongs of Western Civilization, the Hebraic and the Greek, both assert the primacy of ideas over images. Try to Put on Your Big Boy Pants and try to Read.
NewsFlash: I finally succeeded in posting the image:
The struggle to pay the rent. Rat infestation. Broken down subway trains. Fuggedaboutit. The last politician who gave a damn about urban America was Bobby Kennedy.
In New York City, one-bedroom, rat-infested apartments, in five floor walk-ups, rent for as much as $4,500.00 a month. San Francisco, which had once been one of the most progressive cities in the nation, is now only progressive in terms of the aspirations it pays lip service to. In other words, it talks the talk of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but in terms of housing it walks the walk of Atilla the Hun as thousands of teachers and other middle-class people are now homeless.
Not only poor tenants are suffering. Small businesses are dying like flies exterminated by DDT. In New York City, many a hardware store, modest luncheonette and barber shop have found, when their leases expire, that their rapacious, rotten landlords have the effrontery to demand a five-fold and ten-fold increase in rent, from 2,000 a month to 20,000 dollars a month. In a little while, New Yorkers will have to go to New Jersey to buy a screwdriver or get a haircut. Meanwhile, stores that sell 500 dollar sweaters are replicating with the savagery of cancer cells.
Of course, the national news media does talk about housing. Actually. it talks about housing very often. The old farts who give us “all the news that’s fit to print” voice the class bias of people who own property. Accordingly, that they think that high housing prices are grand and that low housing prices are the work of a socialist devil. I, and millions of persecuted people in Urban America, are here to tell you that we are praying for a veritable and cataclysmic depression in the housing market. Make Landlords suffer …
If I seem a bit too angry, it’s because the depredations inflicted by thieving landlords are only getting worse. For example, many urbanites are increasingly consigned to that abomination known as a studio apartment.
A studio apt. is a euphemism for a one-room apartment. I suppose that by giving one room apts. the pretentious appellation “studio,” the realtors succeeded in making foolish renters think of artists’ studios and more willing to put up with a suffocating scarcity of space. Studio apartments, considered candidly, are little more than glorified prison cells.
And it’s getting worse still: In the waning days of the reign of King Blumberg of New York City, his excellency, King Michael, hoping that realty prices would forever rise sky high, and that wages would be depressed for the foreseeable future pursuant to the gradual demolition of the New Deal, Fair Deal and New Frontier (They were the economic programs of FDR, Harry Truman and John F Kennedy, respectively), made a big push for apartments that were even smaller than studios.
Blumberg and company offered miserable tenants hot plates instead of ovens, tiny little fridges no larger than 2 cubic feet, murphy beds guaranteed to make you a spinal case before you turned 40, and showers sans baths. This was considered suitable living space for middle class people. I would vote for Stalin over Blumberg. (Yes, I know Stalin was brutal, but…)
America spits on its urban cores, in large measure, because two phenomena (And a few others, such as the damn Senate filibuster) have contrived to warp our democracy and suffocate people in big cities.
First, I am sure you are well-acquainted with the electoral college and how that disfigures and degrades democracy. Al Gore beat Bush by half a million votes, and Hillary beat Trump by three million votes, but it was all for naught because America sports the unenviable and medieval policy of using electors, from each state, to determine who will be president. (I say it is a medieval policy because it has its roots in the Holy Roman Empire, where the Emperor, starting in the 14th Century, was chosen by the electors of the Holy Roman Empire -- ah, but if you went to school in America, you were fed a lot of slop to the effect that everything in America is new and good and perfect)
Since urban states are solidly Democratic (California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, the District of Columbia and Illinois have gone Democratic in every presidential election since 1992), Democrats ignore these states, which of course would never vote Republican as the GOP is even more hostile to urban people and poor people.
If there were no electoral college, a Democratic candidate for President would talk about Housing because some strong Trumanesque rants about slums and high rents could bring out another 500,000 votes from New York City. But because of the electoral college, the nationwide popular vote does not matter and whether a democrat wins New York state by 100,000 votes or 5,000,000 votes is of no consequence.
Therefore, all the attention is riveted on smaller states and the margins in question are much, much smaller. Iowa is often a “battleground” state (with the caveat that in the last two elections it went heavily for Trump) and both the GOP and the Dems fight for Iowa like Saladin facing off against a European monarch in a fight for Jerusalem. The state may be lost or won by only a few thousand votes and so candidates will fight harder for a few thousand farmers in Iowa than the 8 and one-half million people crammed into New York City.
Likewise, the Democratic Primary Schedule banishes the bedrock of the Democratic Party from participating in the selection of its presidential nominee. Not a single urban state votes early in the primary schedule. Hence, few of our candidates stress high rents or dilapidated mass transit.
The state that first weighs in during a Presidential election year is Iowa as it holds its caucuses shortly after New Year’s Day in a Presidential election year. Iowa might be a very fine state. And I am sure it is an important state as in the Fourth Grade we New York City school children had three consecutive days of tests known as the “Iowa” tests. When I was in elementary school, I was led to believe that the state of Iowa led the nation in geniuses and progress, and I therefore struggled to search for the wit and insights of such countrified Television crap as the situation comedy “Green Acres.” (The theme song from that sit com is indelibly etched in my consciousness. If you wish, I can also give you rousing renditions of the theme song for “The Beverly Hillbillies” replete with a New York version of a Kentucky drawl.)
But the lion’s share of the Democratic Party is not represented by Iowans. After Iowa, all the attention shifts to New Hampshire. Although I will always love New Hampshire for doing wonderful things for the anti Vietnam War movement in 1968 and 1972, I have finally admitted to myself that those primary years were exceptions to the rule. New Hampshire really is as far away from the urban zest and garlicky spiciness of New York as a country manor in England.
Nevada, which follows New Hampshire, is actually a state that I rarely get mad at, and I was quite thankful when in 2020 it went overwhelmingly for Bernie Sanders, but once again, it does not represent Urban America – to some extent it does as it contains Las Vegas.
To try to counter my position, some people will say that urban America is not as prominent as suburban America and that states such as New York and New Jersey possess a steadily shrinking share of the nation’s populace.
However, New York State, in presidential elections, has been voting about 70 percent Democratic. Accordingly, even if New York no longer possesses about one tenth of the nation’s population, as it did during the Zenith of 20th century liberalism, it still possesses well over 7 percent of the nation’s population, and, because it is so overwhelmingly Democratic, more than 10 percent of Biden’s votes came from New York. Add onto that California, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, DC., and
Rhode Island, and you have the urban states that are the alpha and omega of the Democratic Party. And not one of the aforementioned states votes early in the Presidential Primary Schedule. Hence, urban issues are flatly ignored.
How Big Cities are Maligned by the Presidential Primary Schedule and the Electoral College
politics is the ass-end of life. everything imaginable goes on and then here comes the old cow. the best politicians merely have the lowest delay and might, on one or two occasions, make people believe they aren't reactionaries.
or call it the last step in bringing us full circle. they can never present us with a solution or provide a fuller picture. their duty is to ferry along the communal bowl without taking a swig for themself. and the hot topic debates will not see their end until a spiritual movement defeats the illusions and does something real like freeing slaves or cashing checks.
so the cities, our most wondrous cities. where human beings are stacked high as sky-scrappers stand. sadly there's not much to fix for as long as they subscribe to being made to live like machinery runs. they'll continue to be shuffled into smaller spaces with darker lighting for as long as they choose not to live somewhere else. the market speaks and it says; you and 100 other people want this square footage, who's the highest bidder?
if you're born into it I can't blame you for wanting to stay but then you would also agree some people are born into being politicians and can you blame them? say the privilege of being a new yorker is that you live in new york and the privilege of iowa is that you get courted by people way out of your league. i don't expect our system to ever change just like I don't expect americans to ever sell off their firearms. show me a spiritual cause that can bring tears from millions of people. all i see is dry. a tic-tac has more interest to me at this point.
a spiritual cause. not an emotional cause. those are different things. consider that our system is at a low-point right now, high in chaos and pain, because we've still not adapted to the big-tech paradigm that's rearranging our guts as we speak. we're in a transition and thereby we're more focused on staying alive than on improving the quality of life because in transitions the weak are culled. but this is a subtle thing--we're mostly okay, just discomforted. eventually...and if not eventually something's irreversibly broke...we'll come out the other side and sing of a most holy unity. as of now the politicians try to lead us in song but the audience isn't down. the lyrics are shit.
popular elections make me gag. you're a part of many orders of things. why strike down the truth? you haven't owned your life and neither have i. we're just pieces. by default. by command. by desire. by it all. there has to be a system and this is the system and there is no better or worse because that's politics and i refuse to hurt. i can't even think of anything to write anymore. i'm all out of ideas because none of it matters.