Winner Take All? |
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Copyright © 2008 Soy-n-Joy® Winner Take All? U.S. Democratic Party Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton made an April Fool's Day challenge to the other candidate Barack Obama, to a "Winner Take All" bowling contest. The challenge revealed not only Hillary's dissatisfaction of Obama's rejecting her request for Democratic Primary re-votes in of Florida and Michigan, but also her dissatisfaction of the Democratic Primary mechanism for allocating electoral votes, being not based on Winner Take All like in the general election, but on a proportional allocation mechanism. The U.S. Democratic Party justified the proportional allocation on the ground of fairness. Being positioned to represent the interests of the underprivileged, the party was lured into adopting the proportional mechanism which supposedly helped minority representation. And just in case of an impasse, a layer of "Super Delegates" was installed over and above the rank and file as a tie-breaking mechanism. These Super Delegates, supposedly wise elders of the party, would then exercise their collective wisdom and cast their deciding votes to determine who the ultimate Democratic Party presidential candidate would be. Unfortunately, what sounds great in hypothesis must still be subject to reality check. The current Democratic primary contest, between two equally strong candidates, has revealed why the mechanisms of proportional allocation of electoral votes and the tie-breaking by Super Delegates will not work when competition is so close. First, when the electoral vote counts are so close, both camps become so emotionally competitive that they have adopted almost a tribal-like mind-set that ignores the overall interests of the Party. The best reflection of such mind-set can be seen in the poll that counted 16% and 24% of each camp's supporters expressing refusal to vote in November should their camp's candidate lose the primary nomination. This is definitely not uniting the Party under one elected candidate, as the primary intends to do. Secondly, the Super Delegates are awkwardly out of place. If they truly exercise wisdom and pick the candidate most likely to beat the Republican nominee in November, they may be accused of violating the voters' wish by not acting in tandem with popular vote. But if they just act in line with the popular vote, then what value are they adding? The Super Delegates practically become superfluous and vote themselves out of a reason for being (Whether their existence is justified is questionable from the beginning, because their votes carry more impact than a regular electoral vote, making a two-tier reality with one aristocratic minority tier more privileged than the party rank-and-file majority in voting rights and impact. The spirit of democratic elections, however, is "One Person, One Vote.") Thirdly, should the Democrats lose in November, the loss will further tear the Democratic Party apart, when the camps finger-point one another like losing team members in Donald Trump's show, "The Apprentice." On the other hand, the Republican Party, which has chosen John McCain as its presumptive presidential nominee, has made its choice efficiently and effectively by Winner Take All, the same mechanism as the November presidential general election. Now while Clinton and Obama are burning cash in-fighting, McCain is compiling donations only for beating his Democratic opponent to the White House. As the Chinese proverb goes, "when the stork and the clam insist on battling each other, the fisherman will be happy to pick up both of them, effortlessly." The basis of democracy is majority rule. In real life, this is consistent with the concept of Winner Take All. For example, in the 1995 referendum for independence in the province of Quebec, Canadians hanged on to one integral Canada, and the federalists won by only a very narrow simple majority. Now let us look at the U.S. presidential election again. There can only be one winner of the presidency in any presidential election, when he or she wins the majority of electoral votes. The loser must concede defeat. In the 2000 U.S. presidential election, Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote. Because the rules were laid down well beforehand that the winning of the presidency was defined by the electorate vote and not the popular vote, Al Gore must accept the results as fair. There was a time in U.S. history that the system tried to install the most popular vote-getter as the president and the runner-up as the vice president. That happened when the Federalist John Adams was elected as the second U.S. president, and the Republican Thomas Jefferson was elected as the vice president. But that arrangement proved to be a failure when the two very gifted men did not work out as a team, because they represented very different values, beliefs, and assumptions. Now there is a call within the Democratic Party for the two candidates to agree that whoever wins the Democratic Party nomination, the two will still appear on the same Democratic ticket as candidates for the presidency and vice presidency in November. Although Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democratic National Convention, appeared receptive to the idea, yet given the tribal feud that has been going on in the two camps, that scenario is unlikely to materialize. The two candidates need to demonstrate the kind of statesmanship, like the Chinese saying goes, "The prime minister's abdomen must be big enough to accommodate a row boat," in order for that to happen. That, from the way things are going, seems more like a dream than a strategy. Fortunately for Al Gore, he lost the presidency but leveraged his passion, belief, and reputation and chose to become a climate-change champion instead, and won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar as well-deserved honors. Sometimes, you may feel that Winner Take All is not always true in life. But if you take a closer look, and broaden the concept to "Winners Take All," then it is almost invariably reflecting reality. In any type of competition, whether in sports, academics, social life, business, or politics, winners have the most to gain, usually with overwhelming impacts, both qualitatively and quantitatively. In a basketball game, for example, the winner may have won only by a point, but it still counts as a win, no less than a victory by twenty points in terms of impact on the team's standing in the league. In the election of the class monitor, the student who wins the show of hands by one or more lands the honor. When a university can accept no more than 1,000 freshmen, the applicant ranked 1,001 can only make the waiting list. When a maid of age is courted by several suitors, she can choose only one to marry. In any business sector in a market economy, a relatively stable competitive structure exists when no more than two or three major players dominate the market, with the biggest-share player invariably reaping the lion's share of profits. If there are more than a handful of players, a potential shakeout is most likely in the making, eventually towards a stable equilibrium. In the beverage sector, for example, it has always been Coca-Cola and Pepsico, at best also including Cadbury-Schweppes. In the U.S. ice cream industry, there used to be a multitude of regional players, but the field is consolidating into the hands of two powerful players, Nestlé and Unilever. In political competition in the U.S., it has almost always been Democrats versus Republicans, and Winner Take All in presidential electoral votes in all the states. Similarly, in the UK, it is mostly Labour versus Tories, and the winning party's leader will become the next prime minister. In contrast, in Italy, there are tens of parties competing in parliamentary elections, and seats are allocated to parties according to percentage of votes by proportional representation. On the surface, it looks fair to small, weak parties. But as a result, governments in Italy are usually coalition governments that can be easily toppled by a vote of no confidence. The outgoing government, for example, is a coalition of nine parties. Governments based on shaky coalitions have a hard time pushing through legislation to exercise policies, and seldom last long. The result is inefficient and ineffective governance. Right now, approaching election time, prices are going up but income is stagnant. No wonder there is apathy among voters in Italy, as to who wins the election. In reality, that is a very bad sign indeed, because voters don't even seem to care. The worst kind of sadness, as the Chinese saying goes, is apathy at heart, meaning a hopeless case, here with a bad system. Winner Take All is a concept which is easy to understand and simple to implement. It is no different from the majority rule that everyone learns in kindergarten for the sake of establishing law and order amongst unruly kids learning to live with each other in a social environment. In legislatures, most legislation is passed by simple majority, although very important pieces of legislation may require a majority of two-thirds to pass. Because the rule is direct, clear, and simple, and its application ubiquitous, the belief in majority rule has been internalized as commonsense by most people in the process of growing up in a civilized society. Winner Take All is also the state-by-state electoral voting system whereby U.S. presidents are picked in general elections. By not adopting the Winner Take All mechanism in Democratic Party primaries, and opting instead for proportional electoral votes, the Democratic Party is violating commonsense, is not using the primary to full advantage to test the waters prior to general election, and is disadvantaged in its competition against the Republican Party in presidential nominee and war-chest generation. It is an established fact, in a Winner Take All environment, that a party's presidential candidate must be able to carry the major states in a general election in order to get to the White House. Winning the minor states may be desirable, but is not necessarily important. In a close contest of more than one strong candidates, going by proportional electoral votes, with dysfunctional, anti-democratic Super Delegates, is a differentiated but irrelevant approach that can get the Democratic Party into trouble, like what they are getting into now with an embarrassing, divisive, expensive, and potentially lose-lose, impasse on the horizon. After the 2008 election, the Democratic Party will have a lot of re-thinking to do, for example, to see how they can retool the primary process to avoid the same kind of debacle they are heading into with a dysfunctional system. Of course, the practical reality of majority rule or Winner Take All must be balanced by checks and balances to make sure that the Winner or majority does not abuse its power, particularly towards the dominated loser or minority. In a country, minority interests are protected by the Constitution and its implementation via the division of constitutional power among the branches of the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judiciary. Of course, the civil guardian of individual interests against potential abuses of authority is a free press, whose freedom of speech, for example, is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. In a company, the interests of minority shareholders are addressed by its "constitution" made up of its Memorandum and Articles of Association, are addressed further in a public company by Security Exchange Commission's oversight, and in a private company by a shareholders' agreement detailing how the minority interests should be cared for. The "constitutional" approach does not guarantee that in reality all minority interests will be at par with majority interests, but at least there are checks and balances against abuses and there are venues for redress. And because such checks and balances exist, the Winner or majority will tend to make things less one-sided, and they will try to make things win-win if there is genuine desire for continuing good relationship, even if they still turn out to be the bigger winner of the two sides. In a family, where parental values, beliefs, and assumptions dominate the culture, issues are usually settled by negotiation or persuasion in a civilized approach, or by authority in a less civilized environment. When summer vacation comes, father wants to go fishing, mother wants to fly away from cooking and housework, son wants to play tennis, and daughter just wants to read books and watch DVDs, the ultimate decision perhaps is flying the family away to a resort club where members can all pursue activities of their interests, still spend quality bonding time together on a family vacation, and make everybody win. That is probably what will happen when the parents have everyone's interests at heart and, inefficiently, take the time and energy to negotiate and persuade, and succeed, effectively, in making the results acceptable to all and in the interests of the whole. Sometimes, of course, the authority may just choose to dominate with efficient but ineffective decisions, when everybody goes fishing, actively or passively, and not everyone is happy. Fair competition, after all, means competing from the same starting line, but does not guarantee the end results. The distribution of winning stakes may vary: some countries may have more aggressive progressive tax rates, and some may be more inclined toward compassionate social welfare programs. The policies may vary according to cultural values, competitive forces, and environmental changes, just like companies having to adjust their strategies in different markets and competitive environments. For example, even for a sport as old as basketball and all the rules appear to be set in stone, the National Basketball Association (NBA) still changed their rules quite a few times and is contemplating more. The most notable was the 1979-1980 introduction of the three-point shot outside the three-point arc of 23 feet and nine inches to counter the dominance of big men in the paint, to permit more diversified play-setting strategies, to generate more scoring excitement, and to allow teams that are down the chance to come back quickly if they happen to have sharp-shooters. And the NBA is thinking of increasing the drafting age from nineteen to twenty so that rookie players become more mature, disciplined, and coachable under a college coach before being drafted into the professional league and aspiring to become qualified role models for kids. Although not everyone is happy with the changes, they are at least fair and transparent, and every team in the NBA is affected equally, from day one the changes taking effect. Just like the rule changes in the NBA have failed to please everyone, the modes, means, policies, and rules governing the generation and distribution of wealth in a market economy will never satisfy every stakeholder in that economy. Likewise, democratic election, with a Winner Take All mechanism, has its fair share of flaws, and will never satisfy every participant in that process. But a fair, open, simple, and functional system, both in perception and reality, is still a very acceptable system that overshadows its flaws, until a better system can emerge. If everyone understands and follows the rules, is not privileged by systematic bias, and competes for an opportunity on equal footing from the same starting line, Winner Take All is a mechanism as fair, open, simple, and functional as it can be. Why make a simple thing more complicated than necessary when it is already "fair" enough? First posted 04-04-08 If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail us at contactus@soynjoy.net. |