THE ENEMY IS US

Phoning our democracy in
By Kelvin Wade
June 17, 2010

Alvin Greene, the 32-year-old South Carolina political novice booted out of the Army, facing a sex charge and living with his father, shocked the political world by winning the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Many quickly speculated Greene was a Republican plant. But if he isn't, what does this say about our democracy?

By now you've had to have seen the odd Alvin Greene interviewed on television. The last time we saw him I think he was explaining to Forrest Gump all the different ways to prepare shrimp.

Why would people vote for a man whose speaking style is almost as annoying as a vuvuzela?

It's been theorized that South Carolina voters just voted for the first name on the ballot. A 1998 Ohio State University study by Professor Jon Krosnick and Joann Miller showed candidates whose names are listed first on a ballot received up to a 6 percent boost in votes. The authors reviewed the 2000 election in California, North Dakota and Ohio and found that George W. Bush received 9 percent more votes when listed first than when he was listed second.

But that's not enough to explain Alvin Greene's 18-point drubbing of Vic Rawl, a former South Carolina legislator. As explained in Jonah Lehrer's excellent book, 'How We Decide,' emotion is the engine of decision-making, not reason.

With nothing to go on but two names on a ballot, the name that provides the strongest emotional connection is bound to move the majority of people. 'Alvin Greene' just sounds like a more familiar name than 'Vic Rawl.'

One South Carolina voter said she voted for Alvin Greene because his name reminded her of the singer Al Green. While that sounds outlandish, that provided an emotional connection.

If you think that's absurd, sometimes all we voters need is a name to remember in the voting booth. It's why candidates spend so much on signs.

Locally, in the 2004 Fairfield City Council race, third place finisher Stephen Kays lost his council bid by less than 1 percent, gaining more than 6,200 votes. Was it the political neophyte's ideas that almost propelled him into office? Not in my opinion.

Kays spent a fortune and papered the Fairfield landscape with his enormous signs. I suspect many voters just remembered that name in the voting booth.

Try voting without even that to fall back on. Then we use our gut.

A third of us showed up to vote in this past election. I'm willing to bet only a fraction of that number knew something about every name on the ballot. Gut instinct and 'eeny meeny miny moe' play a larger role in our politics than we care to admit.

We laugh at the seemingly clueless Alvin Greene. He gives interviews that play like hostage videos. A CNN interviewer even asked him if he was 'OK,' presumably mentally. He held no rallies, ran no ads and never went door to door.

For all we know, he sat in his parents' basement playing Xbox, watching Internet porn and sipping sweet tea during the campaign.

But the story shouldn't be the strange case of Alvin Greene. The story should be the pathetic state of the American voter. Peace.

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ADDITIONAL NOTES: Yes, this guy comes across like an imbecile. The empiest of empty suits. Don Limon on CNN interviewed him and asked, "Are you okay? Because you don't say okay." His interview by MSNBC's Keith Olbermann is unintentionally funny because the guy looks like a deer caught in the headlights. A drugged deer.

It's a crazy story. But as the investigation continues into how he got onto the ballot and who may have paid for him to appear....what about the voters who voted for him? That's the point of my column. The majority of us don't vote in these primary elections. But those who do, often take more care in voting for American Idol. They definitely do. If you don't have a strong feeling about an American Idol singer, there's no way you're picking up the phone and voting. But people will go into the booth and casually vote for Alvin Greene for U.S. Senate.

We pass laws like the gimmick "top two" law here in California. It's designed to hopefully elect more moderate candidates. Why not just pass a law that we can only vote for moderate candidates? Laws like this are designed to address the obvious: that the idiocracy is here. The American voter is an uninformed voter. Or we get really focused on one or two issues and then get in the voting booth and realize that there are other positions and propositions to vote for. And then we wing it. Is that any way to run a democracy?

Poll after poll shows we hate Congress. Who voted them in there, people? If we think our representatives are boobs, then perhaps we should do more research before voting.

A side note. Alvin Greene is charged with felony obscenity in South Carolina and faces five years in prison. He sat down next to an 18 year old college student in a computer lab and showed her a pornographic website on his computer screen and laughed. Then he asked to go to her room. She felt uncomfortable and called campus police. Okay, he showed her porn and asked to go to her room. In California, that's s very bad way to pick up women. In South Carolina, it's a felony? When I first heard about the charge, I assumed he showed the porn to an underage girl. But...okay.