This piece accompanied Sean Kinane's cover story, "Will you elect the next president? Maybe…but it might be up to Congress" in the Jun. 9 print edition of CL.
“A somewhat arcane institution that many scholars believe we should do away with.”
That’s how U.S. President Selina Meyer describes the electoral college in the 2016 season premiere of the HBO comedy Veep.
Why the lack of enthusiasm?
Because her race for re-election has just ended in an electoral college tie.
Once Selina’s off-camera, she expresses her feelings about the old E.C. more bluntly:
“Didn’t those founding fuckers ever hear of an odd number?”
If you aren’t sufficiently alarmed by Seán Kinane’s cover story about the chances for such a tie occurring in the real world, resulting in no candidate getting a majority of the electoral college’s 538 votes, watch Veep to see just how fucked up (as Selina would put it) the situation could be. Imagine Clinton, Trump and maybe Sanders in full grovel mode — or bribe mode, or threat mode, or whatever mode works — scrounging for votes from every member of every state delegation in the House of Representatives.
The fictional president is horrifying enough as she and her aides go into battle, zeroing in on the state of Nevada as their last hope. But Selina is played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, so she’s hilarious; one suspects the real thing wouldn’t be quite so entertaining.
Veep will definitely get props for prescience if the dreaded “contingent election” does come to pass in November. And who knows? By that time, another TV political drama may have already demonstrated its knack for prophecy: The most recent season of Netflix’s House of Cards conjured up a contested Democratic convention — something Bernie and his supporters have already promised us.
This article appears in Jun 9-16, 2016.