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lightreadsThis book, which does exactly what the title says, managed to alienate, outrage, and offend me while expressing opinions about our electoral system and current president that I entirely agree with. It started out with a bang, with this little gem in the introduction:
And aside from being a terribly written sentence, excuse me? Of all the – I don’t even – sexist fuckwit! Yeah, that was clearly all her fault. God!
So yeah, my teeth were sharpened for the rest of this book, which details the scope of election fraud in this country, from the Boss Tweed machine to the organized and often violent voter disenfranchisement in the south to Chicago to 2000. And it’s a good history, as history goes, rather lacking in personality but stunning in scope even to those of us who already know these things. However.
However. You do not get to call your book “nonpartisan,” as Gumbel does in his introduction, and then turn around and deliver frothing screed after screed against the Republicans and Bush. It just makes you look like more of a jackass than you already do. Granted, the history did include both Republican and Democratic fraud, but that’s not being nonpartisan, that’s reporting, and he should really know the difference, considering his job.
But here’s the real problem. This is a book about how the American electoral system is broken, about the hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income and minority people who do not get to meaningfully participate in government for very deliberate and specific systemic reasons. And the book is written to a college educated audience of liberals (I guarantee even many moderates would put it down after the introduction), presupposing a very deep and specific knowledge of political history (I looked a few things up, and I have a fucking degree in this stuff). And in the small handwave to reform he gives in the conclusion, he’s all about how change has to come from the bottom. Uh, yeah, and by “the grassroots” you mean college-educated, left of left liberal men? You know, it’s really a particular kind of disgusting when an author sneers at the elitist machine, and then turns around and pulls crap like this.
Lastly, and I really am almost done here, Gumbel just isn’t very good at, you know, making an argument. He spends three hundred pages knocking down the widespread American assumption that our elections are fair and honest (they aren’t and never have been), and simultaneously keeps pounding at the fact that the popular right to elect the President is not actually a constitutional right. (No, it’s really not – the first mention of it is in the fifteenth amendment, and strict constructionists still can and do argue that the right does not rest at all with the people.) And a better writer could have pulled this off into the presumptive argument that we do all in fact deserve votes, and things need to change. Gumbel, however, makes a few vague hand wavy motions on the subject, assumes again and correctly that everyone reading will be a political science professor or a journalist or someone else who has already reached that conclusion, and forgets the whole thing.
Graaah.
The Republican sweep of the House of Representatives in 1994 marked one high-water mark of this new radicalism as Newt Gingrich notoriously described President Clinton as “the enemy of normal Americans” and the neoconservative stalwart Kenneth Starr went sniffing through the dirty laundry of a White House intern who didn’t know when to keep her mouth shut.
And aside from being a terribly written sentence, excuse me? Of all the – I don’t even – sexist fuckwit! Yeah, that was clearly all her fault. God!
So yeah, my teeth were sharpened for the rest of this book, which details the scope of election fraud in this country, from the Boss Tweed machine to the organized and often violent voter disenfranchisement in the south to Chicago to 2000. And it’s a good history, as history goes, rather lacking in personality but stunning in scope even to those of us who already know these things. However.
However. You do not get to call your book “nonpartisan,” as Gumbel does in his introduction, and then turn around and deliver frothing screed after screed against the Republicans and Bush. It just makes you look like more of a jackass than you already do. Granted, the history did include both Republican and Democratic fraud, but that’s not being nonpartisan, that’s reporting, and he should really know the difference, considering his job.
But here’s the real problem. This is a book about how the American electoral system is broken, about the hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income and minority people who do not get to meaningfully participate in government for very deliberate and specific systemic reasons. And the book is written to a college educated audience of liberals (I guarantee even many moderates would put it down after the introduction), presupposing a very deep and specific knowledge of political history (I looked a few things up, and I have a fucking degree in this stuff). And in the small handwave to reform he gives in the conclusion, he’s all about how change has to come from the bottom. Uh, yeah, and by “the grassroots” you mean college-educated, left of left liberal men? You know, it’s really a particular kind of disgusting when an author sneers at the elitist machine, and then turns around and pulls crap like this.
Lastly, and I really am almost done here, Gumbel just isn’t very good at, you know, making an argument. He spends three hundred pages knocking down the widespread American assumption that our elections are fair and honest (they aren’t and never have been), and simultaneously keeps pounding at the fact that the popular right to elect the President is not actually a constitutional right. (No, it’s really not – the first mention of it is in the fifteenth amendment, and strict constructionists still can and do argue that the right does not rest at all with the people.) And a better writer could have pulled this off into the presumptive argument that we do all in fact deserve votes, and things need to change. Gumbel, however, makes a few vague hand wavy motions on the subject, assumes again and correctly that everyone reading will be a political science professor or a journalist or someone else who has already reached that conclusion, and forgets the whole thing.
Graaah.