Vox populi
by James Rutherford
June 1, 2009
Refreshingly, the people have put the latest Internet gambling push into its proper perspective
Last month while Barney Frank
was having another whack at the personal freedom piñata, introducing his second
bill in as many years to make Internet gambling the law of the land, the Poker
Players Alliance was boasting of its success in rallying the troops around an
invitation the Obama administration extended to the nation for its views on
policy priorities. — “Boost America’s
Economy with Legal Online Poker” came in at No. 11.
“Clearly, the citizens are talking and Congress needs to
start listening,” said John Pappas, the PPA’s executive
director.
Actually, the results
were considerably less impressive than Pappas’ conclusion warrants. The
exercise itself, on the other hand, was supremely interesting, not least
because the responses bore only the slightest resemblance to what you might
have expected.
To mark the official close of its transition to power,
the administration’s Office of Public Liaison hit upon the laudable idea of
using the transition Web site, change.gov., to ask ordinary Americans what they
think the government ought to be doing. The results, compiled in a “Citizen’s
Briefing Book” were released last month.
This was wide
open — participants were invited to log
on and submit their ideas in their own words and vote on them — 125,000 did,
which is not an especially impressive number; yet for such a small group,
relatively speaking, the number of ideas they came up with were astonishingly
large, 44,000, and as a result so was the number of votes, 1.4
million.
The ideas were grouped into nine categories (“Economy,
Education, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Technology” and the like), and for the
sake of ranking them each concurring vote was awarded 10
points.
Actually there were 10 categories, the 10th being
“Additional Issues,” a catch-all for the ideas that didn’t quite fit into any
of the others. I mention this because interestingly enough this was the
category that contained the most popular of the 44,000 ideas by far — “Ending
Marijuana Prohibition,” which scored 92,970 points.
“Commit to becoming the ‘Greenest’ country n the world”
was second with 70,470 points, followed by the cannabis thing again (“Stop
using federal resources to undermine states’ medical marijuana laws”), and
“Introduction of age appropriate sex education” in schools. Rounding out the
top five: “Bullet Trains and Light Rail”.
Some other big vote-getters: “Permanent closure of all
Torture facilities” (61,250), “Revoke the George W. Bush tax cuts for the top
1%” (57,080) and “Get the Insurance Companies out of Health Care”
(55,080).
This is the kind of
stuff the celebrity extremists use to make all the Red State
proles crazy.
So what does it say
about Internet poker that it ranked lower than “Bring Back the Constitution”
and “Revoke the Tax Exempt Status of the Church of Scientology” as a national
priority? Poker scored 46,890 points, which means that at most 4,689 of the
125,000 participants agreed with legalizing it: that’s less than 4 percent. And
probably it was less than that, assuming most participants voted for more than
one idea. Mathematically speaking, it could have been as few as 469.
Something’s not adding up, John.
What’s refreshing about all this, though, is what it
says about Americans. They are in reality far more interesting and thoughtful
than that portrait of an unimaginative, suffocatingly conformist and rather
silly people their televisions reflect back at them every night. One hesitates
to say liberal because as a Web exercise the views probably skewed to the
younger end of the population. Let’s say heterogeneous then.
“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for
all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” So Churchill
famously said after winning the war and then promptly getting tossed out of
office.
Or as those of us who were lucky to have missed
out on the bloodshed might put it: “It’s sweet, even if it at times it can be a
little dumb.”
James Rutherford
is a New Jersey-based freelance writer.
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