Cam-pain Reform!

What kind of a political system would you create if you wanted to maximize Presidential candidates’ reliance on a continuing flow of massive campaign contributions from special interests – companies that might like, for example, special tax treatment to continue (big oil) or virtually no regulation of trading and dealing in toxic derivatives (hedge funds)? Well, for one thing, you most certainly want to increase the need for money to require candidates to grovel and promise well beyond the bounds of any pool of cash that might be generated by reasonable, voter-driven campaign contributions.

So one of the most important factors, to foster those special interests’ ability to buy votes, has to be a long primary season (more time to spend!). It’s only about three months from nominating conventions to the actual Presidential election, but it’s almost two years between the start of “exploratory committees” and other nascent fund-raising efforts – all focused on the primary schedule – to that same Election Day. Not to mention two solid years of distraction from actually dealing with the issues that concern us all – you just get to talk about it.

With Presidential primaries and caucuses scheduled eleven or more months prior to the election, candidates consumed with a series of “make or break” primaries (including that infamous “Super Tuesday”) and states jockeying to move up the dates of their primaries to increase their clout and confuse their parties, it all seems to be getting worse. I even wonder how much energy a victorious Presidential candidate has left, after a grueling two-year campaign schedule, to run the country?! This can’t be good for anyone, particularly not the nation herself. I don’t know about you, but I am sick and tired of the “never-ending” election. It will be over on Tuesday, thank God, but do we really ever want to go through this process again?

So keeping in mind the requirements for free speech in the First Amendment, we really do need to create some Constitutionally viable restrictions to protect the electoral process from dragging out so long that the only winners are the special interests with the ability to promote and create funding raising opportunities that literally take the choice away from the American people. We could just ban such financial activities. Or maybe candidates should be conclusively deemed to opt in to being a “write in” only candidate if they take money or create “exploratory committees” or gather future “commitments to contribute” more than 60 days prior to the first primary, and we require primaries to take place no earlier than January 1 of the year of the election in question. Shouldn’t we actually make April Fools’ Day the first permissible date for a primary or a caucus? That would at least be a tad more honest.

Anyway, the system is broken; it must be fixed. What do you think?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I already voted.

Blame the Human Brain

Writing in today’s Los Angeles Times, Karen Kaplan talks about a University of California (Davis) study about brain reaction time. Some may remember tennis star, John McEnroe’s legendary temper tantrums when Wimbledon referees would, in his opinion, miss-call balls as “playable” or not, when they fell onto that fuzzy white line area. Maybe John was right, it seems. After all, those balls were traveling at about 100 miles an hour.

“It takes about 100 milliseconds for the image of an object to travel from the retina to the visual cortex and a little longer for the brain to become aware of it. The brain compensates for that delay by anticipating the object's location,” Kaplan noted. “David Whitney, a vision scientist at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain, and his colleagues studied 4,457 points from the 2007 Wimbledon championship and zeroed in on cases in which the ball landed on or close to the out-of-bounds line. Using slow-motion replays and Hawk-Eye, the tournament's computerized ball-tracking system, the researchers identified 83 erroneous calls.”

Of the erroneous calls, most of them involved calling balls “out” when they were really “in.” “This is not a problem with referees,” Whitney was quoted as saying. “This is a problem with human visual perception.” Ah yes, problems of visual perception in the acuity skills of the professional judges and referees hired to call the biggest tournaments in sports. The people we hire specifically for their ability to exercise good judgment. Hmmm? I wonder?

Could there be a fundamental perception problem – an analytical blind spot – in the brains of experienced investment bankers or professional economists, maybe because they were born with this defect or perhaps they developed it from years of callous disregard for individuals necessary to restructure a company – not one imminently about to fail unless drastic steps are taken – because you can make so much more money by breaking up the assets, get rid of people and making a pile of cash? Not sure what the causes might be, but I’d like to find out.

Clearly, as the JP Morgan Chase experience illustrates, not all bankers have lost sight of social responsibility or the plight of ordinary human beings caught in an economic maelstrom. Just the experienced investment bankers and professional economists we have running the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. The gentlemen’s “predictive” track records, their economic prognostications, well before the huge market crash, were pretty “dead-off.” The results after the crash appear even worse.

I wonder if U.C. Davis would consider some brain studies of a few more professionals who render critical judgments on close calls and narrow (and even very wide) misses? Maybe there are some tests to prevent such “wrongful hirings” ever again.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are just days from the most important election in modern history! Vote!