US Elections: Super Tuesday

Before 1972, thousands of delegates were chosen to go to the party conventions every leap year (plus 1900, which was an election year but not a leap year), but only the state party leaders had a vote, and they cast all the votes for their state for whomever they chose. Once upon a time, they usually voted for a 'favourite son,' on the first vote, i.e., someone from their state who was more-or-less running for president, and after that, they got serious and haggled in smoke-filled rooms. But in '68, the Democrats chose the vice-president (the usual choice when the president was not running for re-election) AFTER the president had resigned since his presidency was NOT going well, and his doctors had diagnosed a fatal illness. The 'usual choice' proved a disaster for the Democrats. So in '72, they actually let the voters choose using the British algorithm, where the person supported by a plurality of the Democratic voters got all of the states' votes. Just 25% of Democrats managed to nominate a candidate who was not supported by many Democrats and almost no Republicans, and he lost almost every state.

This year, the Democrats pick more than 4,000 delegates who get to go to the party called the Democratic Convention, and the Republicans pick more than 2,000 delegates to go to their party's party. As before, the heads of the state party cast all the votes, but (on the first round) they must cast votes for the candidates to which their delegates have been pledged.

And today, 661 Republican delegates will be allocated, and 865 delegates for Democrats. Maybe. Different sites have different numbers. Another site counting delegates at stake today says that 632 Republican delegates … will be awarded…[and] 1,007 … Democratic delegates… are at stake. So it appears that no one is sure how to count the delegates at stake today.

But in any case, today the largest number of delegates will be pledged of any single day during the 2016 nomination process. Of course, the Democratic candidate needs more than 2,000 delegates to win, and the Republican needs more than 1,000, and the process is supposed to be proportional, but, with 30% of the vote, Trump has 64% of the delegates from the first four nomination contests. 

The Democrats are more proportional (to avoid another disaster like '72). After Obama pulled ahead (having counsellors who knew where the smallest amount of money and effort would produce the most delegates), even when Senator Clinton won a state, she only won a few more delegates than Obama, and could not close the gap.

So today, Secretary Clinton will get most of those 865 - 1,007 delegates, and Trump will get at least the plurality of those 632 - 661 delegates, if not the majority. Neither will have enough delegates to win, but Secretary Clinton will be far ahead of Senator Sanders.

Trump is harder to predict. If, after today, all but one anti-Trump Republican drop out, and that sole survivor runs against Trump, he'll probably win. But all four anti-Trump Republicans show no sign of quitting before the bitter end. And a recent poll says Trump's share of Republican voters has risen from a plurality of 30% to a majority.

Of course, that's only one poll, and it's an outlier.

Today's contest is much broader than any we've seen so far, and sometimes actual votes don't tally very well with polls at the state level. The Democratic contest is fairly easy to predict: Secretary Clinton should win almost everything except for Vermont. There will be no surprises.

The Republican contest is much harder to predict. Trump is almost certain to get a plurality of delegates, but is not so certain to get a majority, and he needs a majority to win. So the Republican contest could be very interesting today. If Trump gets more than 60% of the delegates today, he'll be very hard to stop. If he gets only a plurality that's not a majority, it means he will not be the nominee.

23 Feb: Half-way though Nevada and South Carolina

There was always a good chance that Senator Sanders would win New Hampshire (national coverage0 and Vermont (mostly ignored), and the press were hoping for a New Hampshire win, since a race where Secretary Clinton is the obvious, foregone conclusion won't sell many newspapers pageviews. And so he did.

Next came Nevada, and Secretary Clinton won.

Bill (and the Secretary) have most of the African-American vote, and most of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote (not many of either one in New Hampshire or Vermont). Also most of the working-class Democratic vote. So Secretary Clinton is sure to win South Carolina. And most of Super Tuesday on 1 March. By the end of March, Secretary Clinton may have enough delegates to guarantee herself the nomination. Or Senator Sanders will see that it's hopeless and drop out.

The Republicans have dropped from 17 to 6 candidates. Normally, in a race without a president running for re-election, or a vice-president hoping to 'continue the good work', most of the candidates have almost zero name recognition as the campaign starts. Reagan had 100% name recognition from his film and TV career, and so was a sui generis. Reagan was also very popular with Republicans and many Democrats and quickly secured the nomination and then the election.

Trump is a very different sui generis. Again, 100% name recognition, but only 1/3 of Republicans like him, the other 2/3rds hate him, but the 2/3 were splitting their vote 16 then 12 and now 4 ways.

Trump has gotten less than 1/3 of the votes, but the weird way the Republicans assign electable delegates, he has 62.5% of them. (Of course, there are a LOT of Super Delegates who are appointed, not elected, and few of them support Trump.)

As of now, Senator Rubio and Governor Kasich are the last two mainstream, establishment Republicans. Senator Cruz, Mr Trump, and Dr Carson are single-player 'teams'. The Bush, jr votes will all accrue to Senator Rubio and Governor Kasich, but that's still not enough to give either of them a plurality. It's not clear how long both Senator Rubio and Governor Kasich will stay in the race, but as long as both are in, neither will come close to a plurality. If one drops, the other will probably acquire a permanent plurality and the plurality of the delegates, if not a majority. But neither has shown an inclination to drop out anytime soon. And if both remain until the bitter end, they could give Trump the election (not likely, but possible). Or they could prevent any candidate from having a majority of the Republican delegates, and the winner will get decided in a smoke-filled room (but vape now instead of cigars).

The other three are all different anti-establishment candidates, and it's not clear where their votes will go if any of them drop out.

So, at this point, the odds are very much against Trump, but it is impossible to say who is the most likely winner of the nomination.

(Not that it matters, barring an unforeseen obstacle, Ma Clinton will be the First* Woman President of the United States, and Bill will, once again, have full access to the White House interns, a privilege the US voters agree he's earned and deserves.)

US Presidential Election 8 Feb 16 (the day before the New Hampshire Primary)

Senator Sanders might win New Hampshire. Every US news agency hopes so. To sell, news agencies need news, and if Secretary Clinton is sure to win, there's nothing worth writing about. So they want a contest. Most want Secretary Clinton to win, but all want a contest that will sell newspapers and ads on broadcast media (and web news sources).

Most African-Americans voted for Bill. If Bill had been able to run in '08, he would probably have lost. African-Americans like Bill. A lot. They liked Obama better. And so Hillary lost.

But there is no Obama in this race. The African-American turnout won't be a big as it was for Obama, who attracted African-American votes even more strongly than Bill, but it will be significant, enough to guarantee Secretary Clinton the nomination.

After which, both Trump and Bloomsberg have said they'll run as Perots to help Hillary win the election.

Senator Sanders is news, but I don't think he's a foil trying to make Hillary look better than she is. He's a pacifist who wants to really end 'enhanced interrogation' and US neo-imperialism.

Bush, jr bragged about what he was doing to the 'proven enemies of the US.' Proved because a) the US offered 100 years median income to anyone who would point out a terrorist; and b) those identified as terrorists all confessed under 'enhanced interrogation.'

Once upon a time, Americans were taught that confessions obtained under 'enhanced interrogation' were unAmerican and unreliable, that they belong to medieval times and the Inquisition. But that was then. Now, Americans are taught that Torquemada knew some of the most advanced forensic techniques, and used them to keep Spain safe from terrorists.

Obama said he ordered that all torture cease, and punished severely anyone who tried to reveal the current interrogation techniques used by the US against suspected terrorists. So we haven't heard much about 'enhanced interrogation' since Obama took office. Of course, most Americans agree that, when the US does it, it's not torture, it's legal 'enhanced interrogation' of heinous villains who would have otherwise set off thermonuclear devices in most American cities.

Secretary Clinton says Obama is a wimp, and she'll be much tougher. So Senator Sanders would be a MUCH better President of the US. Pity he doesn't have a chance.

US Presidential Election (pt 2)

The US press hates that Senator Sanders was close to Secretary Clinton in Iowa. They mostly want another 8 years of Clintons in the White House.

Actually, African-Americans love the Clintons. They liked Obama more, of course, and gave him the nomination in '08.

The Clintons wanted to avoid the Ma Ferguson effect. The Texas legislature voted that Pa Ferguson could never run again for governor of Texas. That only applied to Pa Ferguson. So Ma, his wife, ran on the platform, 'Two governors for the price of one.' She won, and she became the First* woman governor of Texas.

For the US, the Congress voted '47 not to let anyone serve more than two terms of office, and that was ratified in '51. Had Hillary run in 2000, she would have won, and would have been the First* woman president of the US, but the Clintons wanted her to be the First, not the First*. So she ran for Senator in 2000 and won, becoming the first First Lady to run in an election and win.

Then she ran for president in '08. African-American voters had almost all voted for Bill. But Hillary was running against Obama, and she lost the African-American bloc to Obama, and so she lost the nomination. Obama had a bunch of volunteers who understood the American election process. Hillary had a bunch of highly paid 'experts' who had no idea. So Obama spent his much smaller election fund very wisely, while Hillary squandered her huge election fund. This time, of course, she's paying the people who helped Obama win.

Now, almost all African-Americans will vote for Hillary in the primaries and caucuses and in the election. Iowa and New Hampshire have almost no African-Americans, so Senator Sanders came close in Iowa, and might win in New Hampshire. After which, he'll lose almost every other primary and caucus. The US pundits say Sanders could be another Obama. No, he can't. Hillary is a sure thing.

Bill and Trump spoke just before Trump declared. They figured the Republican leadership would block Trump from running, he'd go third party, and it would be like '92, when Bill won because of Perot. Google the '92 election, and the top 10 results are, 'Experts all wrong. Perot did not help Clinton win election.' The 'experts' do not show up anywhere in the first 10 results. But the people who voted for Perot were almost all white men, who usually vote Republican. And Perot got half as many votes in '96 as in '92, but Clinton didn't get any more votes. So the single exit poll that said voters who'd voted for Perot said their second choice was Clinton does not seem very reliable.

In any case, the Republicans weren't that stupid. They let Trump run, and he has held the plurality in the polls ever since he announced. But he still lost the Iowa caucuses. He might win in New Hampshire, but, as the field of Republican contenders gets winnowed, very few of those votes will accrue to Trump, so, by the end of March, he'll be far behind.

Of course, Trump said he really won in Iowa, and only lost because someone cheated. So he might still run as a third party to guarantee that Hillary wins. And Bloomberg is also threatening to run as a third party (and will get mostly Republican votes) to ensure a victory for Hillary.

So President Hillary looks like a certainty at this point.

Foreign Correspondents

Most of us get our information about the world outside the places where we go and can see for ourselves from the news industry. For remote, foreign climes, we get all our information from foreign correspondents.

There are two sources everyone should read about foreign correspondents: Scoop by Waugh, and The Quiet American by Greene (do NOT watch the Audie Murphy movie).

Waugh and Greene were not well paid for their novels, and both worked at day jobs as foreign correspondents and later wrote novels where the main protagonist was, guess what, a foreign correspondent.

Waugh is best known for his depressing WWII novel about Brideshead. But most of his early work was comic novels like Scoop.

Scoop is a farce. It begins when the owner of a major newspaper gets confused and orders the writer of the gardening column sent to cover a war in Ismaelia, a fictional African country. The gardening columnist has no idea how to be a war correspondent, and so observes the pros dashing off after the latest red herring, while he doesn't even know that a major, breaking (but false) story requires everyone to run off to the site of all the action.

The Quiet American is a novel about an old, seasoned pro of a foreign correspondent, covering a war in French Indochina. The protagonist says that he cannot report any of what he sees. First (to get paid) he has to file stories. All stories, before the local telegrapher will send them, must be approved by the French censor, who removes anything that might reveal what is really happening. The wire, when received back in the UK, must be approved by the UK censors. Finally, the editors at the newspaper will only print a version of the story that fits their editorial policy, a policy that refuses to print any of the things that are actually happening.

The old Guardian.uk wrote that no one knew how most of the Syrian victims had died, and no one knew who had used poison gas to kill thousands, and the US and UK should not eliminate the Syrian government until they knew whodunit. The UK constabulary shut down that unpatriotic Guardian.uk. The new and much improved Guardian.com (approved by the governments of the UK and US) note that it has been irrefutably proven that every one of the 300,000 dead, unarmed, peaceful protesters was killed by the evil regime using illegal WMD, and the West has a duty to remove that evil regime and replace it with a good, legitimate Wahhabi government (which will result in well-earned profits for the hardest working and most patriotic members of the US, and EU).

Of course, there are still unpatriotic liars who, instead of telling what the governments of the US and EU have proclaimed is the TRVTH, tell what they've seen with their own eyes. Which is obviously a terrible thing to do, so I hope no one reads the evil reporter who says what terrible things like 'proof' and 'evidence' show are true, that unpatriotic Seymore Hersh:

It's hard to see how anyone can say the US and EU governments are big liars based on nothing but 'proof' and 'evidence' that contradict all their stories. Since the US and EU governments are all Democracies, they CANNOT lie, only dictatorships like Syria, Iran, Russia and China can and do lie about everything. So, if all the facts, proof, and evidence says that the US and EU governments are lying, we must reject every one of those facts, proofs, and evidence.

Fortunately, the next president of the US will almost certainly be Secretary Clinton. She has to show she is much tougher than the wimp Obama (and the Bushes and Bill). Obama did the right thing in Libya, bringing the country peace and prosperity, but then chickened out and allowed the evil regimes in Syria, Iran, Russia and China to continue to destroy democracy (and profits for the biggest donors in those democracies).

Secretary Clinton has promised, as soon as she's elected, to overthrow the evil Syrian regime, then the evil Iranian regime (easier since Obama convinced them to neutralise all their WMD), then Russia and China. After which the world will be VERY peaceful

US Presidential Election

The US election matters to the entire world, and this one has been more newsworthy than most, but that's about to end.

Before 1972, a dozen or so old, white, Republican men, and a dozen or so old, white, Democratic men chose the Republican and Democratic nominee for president in late summer of the election year. The campaign started after the nominees were announced, and lasted about three months.

In 1968, a slender majority of Democrats wanted the US to leave Vietnam. So a large minority of Democrats, plus a large majority of Republicans, thought leaving would be worse than Chamberlain at Munich, more like if he'd been PM in '17 and decided the Allies should surrender and turn all of Europe over to the tyrannical Kaiser. (The UK's official position was that the First World War was absolutely necessary and the British senior generals were brilliant in finally managing to single-handed defeat the evil Kaiser's armed forces. And after losing WWII unconditionally, German historians have been forced to write that Germany was the sole aggressor in WWI,  that the Kaiser was evil, and that Germany was very lucky that the Allies liberated them from the Kaiser).

So, in '68,  the Democratic leadership chose Humphrey, who said the US could never win the war, since China and the USSR were supporting the North Vietnamese, but neither could it withdraw, since that would lead to a Communist take-over of the entire world. Young Democrats rioted after the party leadership chose Humphrey (who lost by a narrow margin when many Democrats stayed home for the '68 election), and the Democratic leadership said, beginning in '72, the voters could choose the nominee.

The slender majority of Democrats against the war chose McGovern in '72, who lost to a massive majority for Nixon. But the '72 system is the one we've got. And the campaign for the nomination starts before the mid-term elections.

We've only had 11 elections with the new rules, and so we got a Trump for the first time.

Normally, most candidates are senators or governors, known only to voters in their own state. So the national vote is spread many ways, and the holder of the plurality changes weekly until the voting starts, after which many run out of money, one gains first the plurality and then the majority and then is nominated at the Convention.

Trump was a TV figure, and so had much better name recognition among the voters than any other candidate. And 1/3 of Republican voters really like him and keep telling pollsters they'll vote for him, and so he's kept his plurality for more than 6 months, which has never before happened in any US Presidential nomination campaign.

The first vote is on 1 February. There are only four small states voting all during February, but some of the throng of Republican candidates for the nomination should finally realise that their run is hopeless, donors will realise it and cut them off, and the field should be winnowed. Once that happens, Trump disappears.

Meanwhile, some try to mould the Democratic nomination campaign to fit the Republican one. Which it ain't. Secretary Clinton has a massive majority of those who will vote in the Democratic primaries and caucuses (except maybe the first two). Most African-Americans will vote for the Secretary, as will most Hispanics. The white, male liberal Democrats prefer Sanders, but they are a tiny majority of Democrats (except in the first two states).

So, by the end of February, it should be down to Secretary Clinton against some Republican who is NOT Donald Trump.

After which, it looks like Secretary Clinton will coast to an easy victory.

Peter and John

In school, we were told that, when we started to work, there would be a lot to learn. When we'd gotten to be the best in our group, we'd be promoted to head of the group, so we could teach the others how to be the best. When we'd gotten to be the best foreman of all the groups, we'd be promoted to supervisor, to teach the other foremen. When we'd gotten to be the best supervisor, we'd be promoted to manager, then director, then junior executive, then senior executive.

Of course, everyone learns at a different rate, and some would only get to foreman, or supervisor, or manager. The best and brightest and hardest workers would rise to executive. Or so we were taught.

Then came Peter and his principle. When you promote your best worker to foreman, you lose your best worker and gain a mediocre foreman, since the skills for worker and foreman are not at all the same. Likewise if you promote the best from any level to the next level, you lose your best at the lower level and gain someone who is probably not very good at the next level. No. Never promote. If you need a new foreman, raid your competitors by offering a rise in pay to their best foreman. Likewise for supervisors, managers, directors, and executives.

So I was the best programmer at a firm, and they said they were making me 'acting supervisor,' and I'd be a real supervisor if I proved I could do it. I was given John as my sole subordinate. I gave John an assignment to design and program half of what the two of us had to do. At the end of the day, I asked to see his progress. 'I don't want to show you until I've finished.'

'I have to see how far you've gotten. NOW!' John showed me he had done absolutely nothing. 'I didn't understand what you were asking.' So I wrote the design that night and gave it to John in the morning, saying, 'Code this.'

End of the day, same story. 'I don't want to show you until it's finished.'

'Show me what you've done. NOW!' Nothing. So I wrote the code and asked John to type it. Same thing. Nothing. So I typed the code, ran it, and asked John to pick up the output. Same. He disappeared all day and came back without any output.

I went to the manager and complained.

'We gave you John because none of us has been able to get any work out of him. If you could have gotten him to work, we'd have made you supervisor. But you didn't, so you'll just remain our best software designer.'

But the VP had hired John, and no one could tell the VP that hiring John had been a mistake. Since John couldn't (or wouldn't) do any work, he was promoted to supervisor after one month. Then he sent his CV around, showing that he was a very fast-burner, rising from analyst to supervisor in just one month. Our competitor hired him as manager, and (last I heard) he was a senior VP less than five years out of university.

Talent always shows itself and rises to the top.

Not technical talent, which is worthless, but the great talent that John had, a talent in which I am completely lacking.