Word: gamesmanship
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Many commentators, analysts, and political junkies love following the gamesmanship and strategy of elections. The process to decide our elected officials is, after all, full of exciting ploys and clever tactics. But the games surrounding the process have too often succeeded in making the entire electoral and policymaking process an empty charade in which tricks and strategies are more important than voter choice. To renew our democracy, the methods in which our elections are held must be changed to more properly reflect voters’ preferences...
...majority of abolitionists might have elected an abolitionist president in 1844, and a majority of liberals might have elected a liberal president in 2000. The winning candidate of every election could proclaim the support of a majority of the electorate, and elections would be about policy preferences instead of gamesmanship. A strong democracy requires a strong electoral foundation, and decades of history and analysis of voting systems prove that we must change our voting system to preserve the legitimacy of our democracy...
...hunted for bargains on eBay so that they could adjust theft reports to reflect lower values of stolen goods, magically transforming major crimes into minor ones. A fight involving a weapon - aggravated assault - might become a mere fistfight by the time the police report was filed. Nevertheless, behind the gamesmanship was a genuine drop in crime. (Murder is down an astonishing 80% from its peak in New York City, and it's very hard to fudge a murder.) Similar declines have been recorded in many other cities. (See 10 things to do in New York City...
...context of the political gamesmanship to which we have become accustomed, Obama's unremarkable checklist that Americans could use in the future to evaluate his presidency seems almost revolutionary. Perhaps government can start down a new road graced by reason and commonsense solutions. Jon Thingvold, Murrieta, Calif...
...government can make a more powerful statement by declaring the end of another era, his own era, an era of small politics. You could call it the Clinton-Bush era, an era of partisan war rooms and poll-tested spin and round-the-clock gamesmanship designed to win the next news cycle. It would be hard to imagine a more compelling proponent of Obama's claim to a new politics than a legendary victim as well as an adept practitioner of the old politics...