Point of View

I was glad to read another mea culpa in The Times the other day, the one about the Electoral College. The Times's other recent second-thoughts editorial, if you remember, had to do with the misbegotten war in Iraq.

Anyway, The Times now says the Electoral College is a ridiculous setup that accords the small states - already overrepresented, it says - more weight than the more populous ones when it comes to electing the president in the winner-take-all system.

Return with me now to yesteryear, to my column of Nov. 16, 2000, to be exact, in which I said that "a Chinese delegation that had come over to view with ex-President Carter the magic of democracy in action apparently left laughing up its collective sleeve."

". . . The quick emergence of the two-party system following the Constitutional Convention of 1787 put to rest any fears the Founding Fathers may have had as to state favorite sons preventing the formation of an electoral majority or of a demagogue swaying the masses."

Aside: Interesting that I mentioned demagoguery, which, of course, is what we seem to have right now. "Do they think people don't think?" I said to Mary. "How can they get away with it? We know Bush, whether by accident or design, has done the wrong things. He's a discredited president, elected by a minority of the voters. He did the wrong thing when it came to Iraq, he did the wrong thing when it came to dealing with the economy, he has not done enough to make us as secure as possible on the home front, and yet the speakers at the Republican Convention have the nerve to say America is safer and that the economy's doing fine."

"Repeat, repeat, repeat," she said, "and pretty soon people, who don't have the time to think about anything else because they're so busy trying to make ends meet, will believe you."

"Plus, they can't dance. Their lame gyrating is almost as bad as their cant."

If it happens that people are taken in again by this "compassionate conservatism" b.s. ("Bushit"), or if the election results in what is often wrongly described as a democracy are again skewed by the Electoral College, a vestigial appendage that ought to have been excised long before now, then, I suppose, we, the credulous people, will again get what we deserve.

Jack Graves