This Associated Press article gives the beef on riots that took place earlier today in Kenya. Foreign news rarely makes waves on BookTalk, but this one interested me in part because the source of conflict in Kenya is partly a problem that Americans have had some recent experience dealing with: namely, disputed elections. About 300 people have died so far as the result of violent demonstrations in the wake of rumors that President Mwai Kibaki, elected Dec. 27th, may have won unfairly.

Having, in the last 8 years, gone through not one, but two elections in which the legitimacy of the popular vote was questioned, I find myself wondering why the American popular response was so ambivalent. I'm the last person to suggest that the reasons for the Kenyan riots are anything so simple as a perception of betrayal, but isn't it at least possible that part of the reason the Kenyans are rioting is that they believe their government has left them no other avenue towards justice?

I feel certain that someone will suggest that the difference is mostly that we are, for whatever reason, more civil -- even if only because we're more accustomed to democracy, having worked with it for a few centuries longer. But how civil is civil? Civil to the point that the problems in the first election are practically unaddressed four years later? What do we sacrifice by not demanding some degree of certainty in our election process?

Certainly, we don't want to come to the impasse now facing the Kenyans. To feel that riot is the only effective mode of protest left is an extreme we ought to avoid if possible, but it seems to me that the Kenyan riots illuminate the whole spectrum, and indicate that we stand on the opposite side of the mean.

Any thoughts?

I've not been paying the amount of attention I normally would to a situation like the Kenyan riots, but I think that one of the crucial aspects of the situation is that they are organised. The opposition are calling for demonstrations.

If the Democrats had called for a mass mobilisation of their supporters in the wake of the Florida results and had they received a degree of sympathy from the media, I think it is possible that there could have been considerable violence in some locations.

P.S. Tis frowned upon by those sections of the internet that concern themselves with net etiquette to refer to events in a country other than the one you live in as "foreign" unless the forum in which you are communicating has an identity that is explicitly linked to a single nation or region. It's like a less severe form of typing in CAPS

P.P.S. Our wink smiley isn't up to much.

I've been thinking about it again today, and I think part of what happened in this country is that the losing candidates in both cases behaved as though what they had lost was specifically theirs. No one else saw much reason to do anything but follow suit. Al Gore is the more emblematic in regard. The moment the returns came in he conceded and denied any intention to challenge the results. Then there's that footage of him presiding over the petitions of disenfranchised voters and dismissing every one. Part of the general confusion of the American electoral process appears to be the perception that the candidates are actually jockeying for a prize that they should be at liberty to give up whenever they please. No one, at any part of the process, appears to have considered the presumed political fact that what was at stake was a right that ought to have accrued to the citizen. Implicitly, Gore said, "I lost, and I should be able to lose on my terms." And that's probably how most candidates view their campaign, but it totally obscures the intention that underlies the whole system, wherein the candidates are vying not for a privilege but for a responsibility.

And our wink smilie makes me even sadder than smilies usually make me. He looks like a stroke victim.

How's this for an idea: WE (the rest of the world) should vote in US presidential elections.

The reasons?

1- Everybody suffers when misguided voters return the wrong candidate in the US.

2- The U S elections get as much media coverage, in Europe for example, as our national elections, and all this is rather tiresome, as we end up with campaigns on TV almost all year round ( so equal TV hammering = equal vote.)


I think I'll be magnanimous: We would only insist on our right to vote when one of the two candidates:

- is likely to start a war or continue one they have started.

- shows an alarming tendency to ignore environmental problems on a large scale.

- has absolutely no knowledge of world geography.


Finally, if we European countries ever felt like having a go at waging war on one another again, we would agree in advance with supporting whichever candidate would be willing to come and help us out-- again.

Since the U.S. has been guiding foreign elections for decades now, that sounds reasonable to me.

I veto this!

I need the feeling of superiority that having no hand in the election of the emperor of the world allows me!

On the other hand, it would be funny to see Nader in office.

Mad, I've been on the forum a couple times now and keep forgetting to drop this title off for you. Richard Posner wrote a book following the 2000 election, Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution and the Courts, in which he argues that Gore and his legal team exhausted all their means in trying to garner Florida's electoral votes. I haven't read the book in it's entirety, but I have read a lot of it piecemeal. Posner's discussion is very interesting, as it usually is. I remember what made me buy the book was, among the first pages, he wrote about the questions of the "real winner" that abounded immediately following the Florida decision. He wrote that the real winner of an election is a legal, not a factual, question. Heh...

Anyway, only a chapter or two addresses the litigation over the election. He has a chapter in the beginning that briefly discussions elections, how they work, significance, a little history, etc. He ends the book with some commentary on ways to address the system. The book itself is full of great citations. It's probably not one you need to own, but one you might want to borrow if it's a matter that interests you.

One thing though, Posner writes the book under the presumption that the goal should be to maintain the system. For instance, he defends the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to stop the recounting as the only way that the process could have been preserved. I think that's a presumption that not all readers would automatically support.

Ophelia wrote:How's this for an idea: WE (the rest of the world) should vote in US presidential elections.

Or perhaps YOU (the rest of world) could spend that energy compelling your leaders to organize some influence away from the U.S. Maybe then you'd realize that you are as powerless as U.S. citizens are in stopping the globalization efforts, and resultant war machine, that is western political affairs. There is culpability on both sides of any hegemonic-type relationship.

Irishrose, I only wrote in jest.

Ophelia I know you weren't really asking for a vote in U.S. presidential elections, and that the comment was offered in jest. But I think the sentiment in your post is pervasive. I assume it must either be something that you feel yourself, or that you're hearing, for you to have posted it at all. And there is a world of truth in that mind-set. The U.S. does have expansive influence throughout the world, and its policies aren't always good for the world. But acting as though that's something the U.S. electorate has any real power over, or influence on, I think misses the controlling issues of both U.S. politics and world politics. Such statements remind me of recent leftist rants about moving from the states, or calls to secede from the union. They're indications of peoples' feelings of impotence rather than any real citizen-activated initiatives. I agree that the U.S. has world influence it should not; but that's not really a matter that U.S. citizens are able to address through elections any more than French citizens seem able to address it through their own.