But in American politics, as in other team sports, the numbers only tell part of the story. And in the 2006 Vote Bowl the rest of the story offers little comfort for fans of the D-team – and even less for the neutrals.

[1] Too little, too late. The R-team’s basic approach to the management of affairs of state had hardly changed between ’04 and ’06. Why the needless delay in accountability? Any D-team fan’s pleasure with the apparently massive victory must be tempered by the knowledge that the last 2 years cost hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of thousands of lives [Iraqis count too, no?], large portions of the US Constitution, and the city of New Orleans.

[2] Big, ugly picture. Given the historic incompetence and mendacity of the current R-administration, the narrowness of the D-team’s majority is baffling. Sure, they took 6 of 7 ‘competitive’ Senate races – but, wait a minute, only 7 races were competitive? That’s 7% of the total and only 20% of the races that were being run this cycle. The D-team gained 30 seats in the House, which is 7-8% of the whole and 14% of the R-team’s previous share. A pro-D national ground-swell? Hardly.

[3] Electoral accountability? Ha! They say the ’06 election was a referendum on the Pres, but the R-teamers who suffered at the polls were precisely those least ideologically friendly to Bush. Rep John Sullivan from Tulsa is an R-teamer a la Barbara Stanwyck in ‘Double Indemnity’ [‘straight down the line’]: a real Bush rubber-stamp. He won 2 to 1 in a town whose tourist board bills it [far from absurdly, let me assure the coastal reader] as ‘Comfortably Cosmopolitan’. Other Bush Republicans won handily around the country, esp in the South. Meanwhile, the lost seats came at the expense of moderate Republicans in the Midwest and Northeast. One of them, Lincoln Chaffee, admitted he didn’t even vote for his team’s candidate at the last election. The electorate didn’t punish the R’s for bad ideas or tyrannical rule; they punished candidates whom they couldn’t tell from their rivals except that they were dumb enough to wear the currently unfashionable color.

In short, even the most sanguine D-die-hards must be worried by the available answers to 3 nagging questions: Why did we win 2 years late? Why does 40% of the electorate staunchly support the ‘worst Pres in history’? Why are we ecstatic over marginal gains in races between indistinguishable moderates wearing differently colored jerseys?

But, hey, the D’s are still a fat and happy minority compared to the neutral masses. And that’s the whole point of the politics game, isn’t it, D’s?

For the neutrals, the answers to the above questions must be genuinely disturbing. They all boil down to this: American politics is an end in itself, not a means for dealing with reality; an amusing round of tailgating, scoreboard-watching, and bragging rights bearing little relation to popular control over collective destinies.

VOTE FRAUD has been a permanent fixture of mass elections and if anything will only become easier to perpetrate and harder to detect in the era of so-called ‘e-voting’. As long as the party fixers and the computer programmers can keep their pacts of silence, the fraudulent vote-counts by which our politics lives and breathes should be impossible to find and fix. The beauty of the 2-part Rovian approach to electoral politics – let’s call them OTG [‘on-the-ground’] and BTS [‘behind-the-scenes’] – is that they are for evidentiary purposes indistiguishable: the illegitimate BTS stuff can be masked by the legitimate OTG stuff. Thus tomorrow’s ‘surprising’ R-team victories will be attributed entirely to OTG, and whoever mentions the possibility of BTS will be roundly ridiculed. For what it’s worth, I’m sure the D-team fixers are trying their best to do the same – with what success remains to be seen. Indeed many of the D-giants of the last century, especially JFK and LBJ, got their power from fraudulent elections. This may be disturbing but it’s certainly not new. Don’t worry, fellow citizens, mass elections are still what they were designed to be and have always been: a spectator sport which utilizes our highest civic virtues, i.e. booing and cheering, and pushes aside those obsolete qualities that used to be known by quaint names like ‘self-government’ and ‘popular control’.

MODERATE REPUBLICANS will soon be placed on the Endangered Species list, if the pundits are to be believed. I doubt as many of them will in fact lose their seats as is supposed [see above], but I must say there is no force in American politics which has done more in recent years to both effect and deserve its own extinction. A long and honorable tradition in American political culture has been reduced to a gooey pre-vertebral status in the soup of our current partisan-duopolitan corruption. We’re not only talking about the likes of Tom Reynolds, Mark Foley’s pal in upstate New York who may lose his House seat. More to the point are the likes of Sen McCain. I thought it was pretty bad when the moderate Republicans held their noses and pretended [so I thought] to be good team-players in 2004 in the face of pretty obvious evidence of incompetence and usurpation. Now that this has gone from pretty obvious to in-your-face bloody obvious, McCain and his ilk have responded in the only partisan-logical fashion: they’ve gone from holding their noses to breathing in the stench and belching it back out even fouler. Moderate Republicanism can no longer offer anything in terms of political principle: it’s just another version of pandering to public opinion while making disgraceful compromises [e.g. the recent torture bill], all in order to get and keep power. In fact there is no better demonstration of the corruptive power of the American party duopoly than Sen McCain, who briefly struggled against but now grovels before the nexus of campaign cash and public-relations expertise which the 21st-century political party has made the basis of its power.

GEOGRAPHY LESSONS: Does any sane person who looks at the US House map come to the conclusion that Congressional districts are designed to ‘represent’ things that could fairly be described as ‘places’? My hometown of Austin TX is now, thanks to the Republican legislature of the state of Texas and the US Supreme Court, parcelled out among 4 different districts stretching as far as 200 miles away, some of them including chunks of other cities like Houston and San Antonio. District 10, which I [and every other Austin resident] used to vote in, has been redrawn so that Congressional Quarterly magazine now describes it as ‘east-central and eastern Austin, western Houston suburbs, Brenham’. As even someone with only rudimentary knowledge of Texas geography can tell, that is not a ‘place’. If we really don’t believe that places matter anymore, why don’t we just drop the whole charade and make all Congressional seats at-large – every single American voter votes for every single Representative? While we’re at it, we may as well reduce the number of Congressmen. Only one hitch: what can we do about this 1787 Constitution thing, which the Supreme Court relies on to ratify the basest absurdities?

After a plenty-long absence I’m here to tell you that APERTURA ’06 is poised for a rousing finish in its last 2 rounds. Parity has been the theme of this ‘temporada’ – unbelievably, no fewer than 13 [out of 18] teams are within mathematical reach [i.e. 6 pts] of the top of the table! Because of group-wise qualification for the Liguilla [play-offs; see more below], no single team has yet assured itself of a spot in the last 8. On the international stage it’s been a banner term for futbol mexicano, with 2 of the last 4 in the Copa Sudamericana [South American Cup]. Pachuca [Clausura ’06 champions] face Atletico Paranaense of Brazil while current ‘superlider’ [table-toppers] Toluca have drawn Colo Colo of Chile. These 2-legged semi-finals kick off in a couple weeks.

There’s not much point looking very closely at the current state of the ‘tabla general’ [full table], since it’s fit for sardines at the moment. But the group tables will determine who makes the Liguilla.

Grp 1              pts       Grp 2              pts       Grp 3              pts

1 Cruz Azul    26        1 Pachuca        24        1 Toluca          26

2 Chivas          23        2 Monterrey    23        2 America       25

3 Atlas            23        3 San Luis       22        3 Pumas          23

4 Jaguares       22        4 Atlante         21        4 Morelia        18

5 Queretaro     20        5 Veracruz      20        5 Tigres           11

6 Necaxa         18        6 Tecos           12        6 Santos          10

The top 2 finishers in each group qualify for the last 8, plus 2 wild cards. Santos, Tigres, and Tecos are completely out of the running and thus worrying only about picking up points against next term’s ‘descenso’ [relegation] fight. Morelia and Necaxa have only slender hopes of making the Liguilla, since their group rivals might easily finish above them even if they win their last 2 matches. For everyone else, it’s all to play for.

The prime object of interest, then, is the ‘horario’ [schedule]:

Jornada 16                             Jornada 17

SLU-PUM                               QUE-ATS

JAG-MON                              CRU-SAN

ATE-AME                              MON-TOL

VER-CHV                               PCH-ATE

MOR-TEC                              CHV-JAG

TIG-QUE                                NEC-VER

ATS-NEC                               PUM-TIG

TOL-CRU                               TEC-SLU

SAN-PCH                               AME-MOR

Among the top 4 gunning for ‘superlider’, the massive fixture is obviously this Sun’s matinee performace, #1 Toluca hosting #2 Cruz Azul [noon central time, Univision]. But in fact the other 2 can’t be counted out, for America and Pachuca have easier schedules, against teams in the bottom half of the table.

In short, every single match is massive – how many leagues around the world can say that about their final 2 weeks? Check out SoccerTV for broadcast schedules.

I’ll close with some comments on 2 teams I’ve followed particularly closely this year.

SANTOS: The Torreon side have been sentimental favorites with me on account of their neighborly ‘nortenyo’ [northern] location in Coahuila province, bordering my home state of Texas. [And, bizarrely, I used to date a girl who [1] was born in Coahuila and [2] bore the surname of Santos!] But the Guerreros have been well nigh the worst team in the league this temporada. They’ve been stuck to the bottom of the table all season and only got their 1st win last week, Jornada 15! They were on the road in Mexico City, playing Atlante, and held an improbable 2-0 lead until the 87th minute. Then the probable re-asserted itself: they gave away 2 goals in the space of 3 minutes. But substitute Peralta headed home a cross in stoppage time to grab all 3 desperately needed points – ‘que milagro’! Notwithstanding that miracle, Santos have shown a magical tendency to defend poorly on days they were attacking well, and to lose their cutting edge in attack on [rare] days they were defending well. Next term they will need to get the house in order to stave off descenso.

PUMAS: I’ve no particular feeling for this classic club from the capital, but bloody Univision [the only Spanish channel I can get at home] seems to show them in their single Sun noon slot every other bloody week. So I’m quite familiar with the side. They’re in the odd position of battling quite creditably for a Liguilla place this term while still being in danger next term of descenso, since relegation in Mexico is based not on points accumulated in a single season but rather on average points per match over the last 3 seasons. Pumas’ 3-year average is still low enough, despite their current good form, to put them only 1 place above Santos. They have quality, though, as shown in their key win at home to Morelia last weekend. Out of nowhere, Scocco played a brilliant 30-yard diagonal ball behind the defense which Oscar Gonzalez controlled and smashed into the corner with his left foot. Scocco is one of many very good Argentine players in Mexico, but at only 21 years old he has a chance to shine on bigger stages in future. He and his midfield companion Leandro, a slick left-footed Brazilian, give Pumas a creative edge in the final third, and this team could continue to rise if coach Ferretti can find some consistency on his forward line.

See y’all next week with a report on the match of the temporada: Toluca vs Cruz Azul.

Questions like these are always interesting, but even more interesting when your team’s just had a good spanking and you need to do anything you can to get your mind off the defeat. Manchester City, following on a bore draw last weekend against Sheffield U, opened the day’s Premiership fixtures with a horrow show at Wigan, conceding two goals in the first four minutes en route to an eventual 4-0 defeat. The first goal, by Emile Heskey, was extremely well taken, but the second and third were defensive calamities.

The only positives City can take from the game are the full Premiership debuts given to two young players, Matthew Mills and Michael Johnson. It remains to be seen whether they will be scarred for life by the experience. The fact that Mills and Johnson were in the match reflects the rash of injuries City have had this week. DeMarcus Beasley, still fighting to get fit, has yet to start a Premiership game.

Speaking of Americans, the MLS playoffs start this weekend, and in a welcome development all the matches will be available on television, one way or another. I count myself as a New England Revolution supporter, and hope they can reproduce their time-tested trick of peaking at the right time after an uneven and at times indifferent regular season. They take on Beasley’s old club, Chicago, starting Sunday. The consensus among observers seems to be that the race for the MLS Cup is wide open; DC United fell off badly the last couple of months after a dominant start to the season, and some are tipping Bruce Arena and New York to give DC major problems in their conference semifinal.

Claudio Reyna–Man City’s other American–is rumored to be in line for a transfer to New York in January. He’s in the last year of his contract and has been reduced to being essentially a utility player for City; he would be a fantastic pick-up for New York.

I confined myself to viewing just one of the Euro qualifiers, and I picked well. Rejuvenated Scotland survived a first half French onslaught, then lifted their games in the second half en route to a stunning 1-0 victory over the world runners-up. Defender Gary Caldwell grabbed the winner, slotting home from a corner from about 6 yards. France kept up the pressure until the final whistle, to no avail. The French can justly complain about the dodgy offsides flag that ruled out an early Patrick Vieira effort, but Scotland certainly deserved to get something out of the game.

You have to feel good for Scottish manager Walter Smith, who has worked wonders since taking over from unmitigated failure Bertie Vogts. The ex-Everton boss and Man U #2 has had the right touch. But what most impresses me from afar about the Scottish national team culture is there’s quite a bit more sense of “we’re all in it together” than you find around the England set-up. Smith and his #2 Ally McCoist both appear on a weekly SPL highlights show to give their views on each weekend’s matches–how cool is that? And in the stands Saturday lending support to the cause were two Premiership managers who could easily have Smith’s job if they wanted it, Alex Ferguson and David Moyes.

The Scots have not qualified for a major tournament since the ’98 World Cup, but with 9 points from 9, Euro 2008 just might have a place for the much-admired Tartan Army.

Closer to home, the U.S. women’s national team was kind enough to stop by a few blocks from my house to play Iceland in a friendly on Sunday, to round out their 2006 home schedule. Glorious fall day for a match, and a reasonable crowd of 4,083 on hand, including the requisite quota of pre-teen girls and youth soccer teams, piling in by the minivan. (It’s was quite refreshing to attend a sporting match in which at least half the crowd were female, though I would note that among the demographic of stray persons attending the match on their own–that would include me–males easily dominated.)

I happened to be sitting near a small group of youngish German tourists who for some odd reason included the match among on their itinerary. At one point they started singing at the referee in Germany (the old “we know where your car is parked” barb), and they noted that this was a pretty different atmosphere than you’d find at a German match. Well, yeah. I doubt that at very many Bundesliga matches you’ll find 5 and 6 year old kids sprawled out in unoccupied bleachers drawing with crayons while the match is going on.

As to the game itself, as you might expect it was pretty much one-way traffic for 90 minutes, with the Americans passing the ball around neatly and using their 4-3-3 to find all kinds of space in attacking areas. But the U.S. and in particular Abby Wambach were wasteful in front of goal, and managed just one goal in the first 90 minutes, on a splendid Wambach slalom around the keeper. (There was a slight suspicion of offside on the pass to Wambach, but no flag went up.)

That wastefulness was almost costly as Iceland won an 89th minute penalty and leveled the score. But Wambach sent the crowd home happy with a well-placed, slow-rolling shot off a neat turn that just did sneak inside the post for a 92nd minute winner. Shortly thereafter the indomitable Kristine Lilly‘s volley struck the crossbar and bounced out, capping a surprisingly exciting final few minutes.

At the end of the day Wambach added two more goals to her collection, but really it should have been four or five. The national team is going to need to be more ruthless and clinical in front of goal at next year’s World Cup in China if it hopes to bring home the sport’s greatest prize.

Back to our 3 areas of dispute:

[1] Urban/rural REPRESENTATION. ‘Representation’ in congessional seats doesn’t necessarily amount to effective representation of people’s real interests. The 2 most effective kinds of interest in American politics are corporate [the interests of various groups ‘represented’ by campaign-finance and lobbying processes] and personal [the interests of politicians ‘represented’ by gerry-mandered districts and restrictions on the ballot access of potential challengers]. For this reason reconfiguring Senate seats alone is unlikely to alter the balance of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ interests. Put it this way: the fact that 2 Senate seats go to Idaho privileges mining interests, timber interests, and laissez-faire zealotry generally over the public interest in environmental protection a lot more than it privileges actual ‘rural’ people in Idaho over actual ‘urban’ people in, say, Boston. Put it another way: Idaho’s 2 senators do more for corporations who do business in Idaho among other places [but may not be head-quartered in Idaho or even in the USA] than for citizens living in Idaho. Take away an Idaho Senate seat and give it to Massachusetts, then: you may help the hospital lobby and hurt the timber lobby, but that’s pretty far from promoting the sort of urban reconstruction we both think is necessary.

[2] Representation of PLACE. The states that are small in both area and population can be counted on 1 hand; what people are really talking about when they speak of reforming the Senate are the dozen or so spacious and sparsely populated plains and western states. But my 1st statement of this objection was muddled in a key respect: of course the US Senate doesn’t represent places rather than persons in any systematic way; it does so only fitfully and incidentally, by dint of the way new states were delineated and admitted to the union in the middle and later 1800’s. But the general proposition [vague though it is] that place and space deserve representation in addition to persons would seem pretty intuitive, at least to environmentalists and preservationists. And it militates against any proposal to reconfigure the 2nd chamber according to the same persons-oriented scheme as the 1st.

[3] Dodgy MATH. If you’re prepared, TW, to announce your conversion from Rawlsian justification to Hobbist arbitrariness, I’ll withdraw my initial objection to your peculiar apportionment calculus!

Finally, a not so modest counter-proposal: If what we want apportionment to do is to make urban issues a national priority, why not go backward rather than forward? First off, abolish the Senate altogether, and with it the very idea of state representation in national councils. Secondly, give particular historic urban centers special status, like the chartered boroughs and university corporations used to have in the England of Locke’s day, and give them more representatives per head than the suburbs and farms, which we could group into ‘counties’ separate from the ‘cities’. This proposal, unlike your modest one, would at least have the merit of bearing a strong relation to the worthy goal of putting urban issues at the center of the national agenda.

So let’s turn away from English football and to English political theory for a moment. We’re reading John Locke in my class this week, and he has this to say in Chapter 13 of the Second Treatise of Government:

“Things of this world are in so constant a flux, that nothing remains long in the same state. Thus people, riches, trade, power, change their stations, flourishing might cities come to ruin, and prove in times neglected deoslated corners, whilst other unfrequented palces grow into populous countries, filled with wealth and inhabitants. But things not always changing equally, and private interest often keeping up customs and privileges, when the reasons of them are ceased, it often comes to pass, that in governments, where part of the legislative consists of representatives chosen by the people, that in tract of time this representation becomes very unequal and disproportionate to the reasons it was first established upon. To what gross absurdities the following of custom, when reason has left it, may lead, we may be satisfied, when we see the bare name of a town, of which there remains not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much housing as a sheepcote, or more inhabitants than a shephered is to be found, sends as many representatives to the grand assembly of law-makers, as a whole country numerous in people, and powerful in riches.”

Now here in the U.S. we have a mechanism to correct this problem with respect to the House of Representatives (the Census and re-apportionment). The real injustice rather lies in the rules governing the U.S. Senate. I liked Montana a great deal and enjoyed the people there very much, but I don’t think they should get two senators the same as New York. The fact that the Senate features unequal representation by design rather than on account of shifting populations does not make the outcome any less absurd than what Locke is describing.

So I have a modest reform proposal: All states which currently have 4 or fewer electoral votes should only have a single senator: these include Alaska, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wyoming. In an ideal world I’d make it all states with 5 or fewer, but that brings in 5 more states, for a total of 15 effected–more than enough to block ratification of any constitutional amendment along these lines. Also, note that the ten states on this list include 5 Democrat-leaning states (DE, HI, ME, VT, and RI), 4 Republican-leaning states (AK, MT, WY, ID) and one that is usually up for grabs (NH), so no one can accuse this part of the proposal of having a liberal bias.

The second part of the proposal is this: any state with over 20 electoral votes should get 3 senators, and any state with over 40 electoral votes should get 4 senators. This would mean 3 senators for Florida, Illinois, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, and 4 senators for California. This leaves us with one extra senator to allocate. Ideally I would allocate one to the unrepresented District of Columbia, and one to the next largest state with only 2 senators (in this case Michigan).

It will be noted that of these 10 new senators, 6 will be in fairly strong Democratic states (two in CA, IL, NY, MI, and DC), one will be in a Republican-leaning state (Texas), and three will be in battleground states (OH, PA, FL). The net result would be taking away 5 seats now in liberal small states and putting them in liberal big states, taking one seat now in a conservative small state and putting it in a conservative big state, taking one seat now in small battleground state and putting it in a big battleground state, taking two additional seats from conservative small states and putting them in big battleground states, and lastly taking one seat away from a conservative small state and putting it in DC. Only these last two transactions would have a partisan effect.

That doesn’t mean the proposal would have no effect on American politics if implemented, but it wouldn’t result in a large partisan shift. Liberal New England would lose representation in equal measure with the conservative West. The big gainer would be urbanized America, which is now under-represented per capita relative to rural America. That gain in turn could have a progressive impact on federal policies regarding mass transit, aid to cities, and other public goods peculiar to urban America which now get less attention and less resources than they should.

Now our friend futbolpol might be a bit nervous about New England (probably the area of the country with the highest per capita readership of John Locke) losing political influence given its deep connection with democratic thought and practice in the United States.

But look at what would be gained–a much fairer system of representation that better reflects the urbanized nature of the American populace.