The People's Choice by Jeff Greenfield.
A TV commentator writes his first novel -- about the Electoral College!
DEBUNKING MYTHS:
EC sets the record straight on alleged failures of the Electoral College system.
1824: Jackson-Adams
1876: Hayes-Tilden
1888: Cleveland-Harrison
The People's Choice By Jeff Greenfield 
Jeff Greenfield, a television political analyst, took a brave leap with his first novel: it's a funny political intrigue about the Electoral College. He formulates his plot out of the old "faithless elector" issue. In recent decades, rare, rogue electors have been voting for someone other than their pledged candidate. Greenfield does his best to turn this historical footnote into a constitutional crisis. It's not easy, as the novel demonstrates. The election has to be very close, and there has to be a reason why electors, who are chosen for their party loyalty, would show the ultimate disloyalty. The scenario also requires a way for dissident electors to find each other and work together without detection from their party or the media. It's all but impossible. But it's interesting to see how he plots it out. Naturally, considering the author, the story is told from the perspective of the media. At times I got the impression that the main drawback of the electoral college is that it would be so blasted inconvenient for the media to cover if there ever was a problem. The weakest part of the plot is the reporters trying to figure out who the electors are. The media may not know, but the state political party organizations sure do! Don't look to this novel as a research paper on electoral college reform. The historical references seem to be exaggerated to bolster the air of crisis. For instance an incident in 1960, where unpledged Southern electors called on other Southerners to violate their pledge to Kennedy, was done openly, and unsuccessfully, without any evidence of concessions from Kennedy. And the quote from Thomas Jefferson that opens up the book was made at a time when many state legislatures still picked the presidential electors (if it was made at all). And I'll nit-pick on the date of the electoral college vote, which is not the first Monday in December. And after all is said and done, the proposed solution is pretty lame: We got to fix this electoral college system. Let's get an amendment through fast: maybe pick the President by direct popular vote; at the least, get rid of the electors, make the votes automatic.By putting this in the mouth of one of the dimmer characters, could Greenfield be acknowledging that electoral college reform is not likely to succeed, no matter what happens? At one point in the story, one of the characters describes a scene in a Charlie Chaplin movie where Chaplin on skates keeps coming perilously close to the edge of a cliff, unaware of the danger that he is in. The analogy with the electoral college is more apt than the character realizes. For he uses it to explain the lurking danger in the electoral college. Yet, to continue the Chaplin analogy, the people in the movie theater are entertained, not frightened. Why? Because they know the apparent danger is only an illusion. Likewise, the fact of the matter is that the electoral college continues to produce reasonable results in practice, regardless of the doomsday scenarios. There have even been times that the system had to deal with deaths, outcomes contrary to the popular vote, outright fraud, competing votes, faithless electors and more. None of these cases caused much more than footnotes and stories. The People's Choice is good fun and state-of-the-art in its portrayal of U.S. presidential politics in the 1990s (even poking fun at the political novel cliches of yesteryear). Its movie potential is evident. Just don't take it as a civics lesson. |
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