May the Worst Person Lose, Long Live the Six Percenters

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

Even before the American election of 2008 ended, pundits debated what happened.  According to the calculations below, those who really voted for the Republican Party may represent only 18 percent of the American electorate, namely, those who actually voted for the Republicans rather than voting to keep the Democrats out.  This same reasoning would make Republicans who voted Democratic only to keep the Republican Party out a ‘’six percent Democrat bloc,’’ because their major motivation in voting for Obama was to keep the madman McCain out.  Some of them are convinced that McCain as president could have been the greatest threat to global civilization since Ghenghiz Khan.  The real dynamics of the 2008 election may be captured in the simple slogan, ‘’May the Worst Person Lose.’’

The mathematics, reduced for simplicity, are as follows.  In any modern Western democracy, a 50% turnout is average.  This means that in a two party system, where the vote is split roughly 50/50 between the two main parties, roughly 25% of the voting electorate are voting for whichever party gets in.  Out of the 25% who are voting for whichever party gets in, 75% of them are voting only to keep the OTHER party OUT.  Therefore only 25% of 25% = 6% of the voting public are voting because they actually BELIEVE in the policies of whichever party gets in.  This means that the “winning” party has a 6% mandate.

Now we need the qualitative background for the above quantitative methodology.  Who are these six percenters, and how can one possibly compare the hero Senator John McCain with Ghenghiz Khan.

Ghenghiz may have flipped as a teenager when he saw his father being ripped apart by four horses each pulling one of his father’s arms and legs in different directions.  He vowed to get revenge against the rival tribe and simply never stopped in his rampage reaching to the ends of the earth.

President George W. Bush exhibited the same syndrome, according to an exhaustive report on January 12, 2002, in the Washington Post, when immediately after 9/11 he asked George Tenet, the head of the CIA, who did this.  Tenet replied, ‘’Mr. President, it could be any one of 51 different countries.’’ Bush immediately and permanently dropped his ‘’compassionate conservatism’’ hat and demanded of his assembled team, ‘’Take them all out.’’ Of course, Bush was a ‘’dry drunk,’’ so he had a good excuse for his insanity.  Throughout his presidency after 9/11 he seems to have had no idea why he did anything except that God supposedly told him to do it.

McCain seems determined to take revenge on anybody who opposes him on anything, which is why over the decades even his closest advisers have been terrified at his frequent uncontrolled rages over even little things.  He didn’t need something like 9/11 to call for a hundred-year occupation of Iraq and for ‘’taking out’’ Iran.

Ever since I was head of Russian language interrogation in Seoul, Korea, from 1951 to 1953, I have studied the psychology both of the Communist torturers - as well as our own - and of their victims before, during, and after the torture.  Our only rule was to avoid torturing the POWs to death because this might result in the loss of intelligence from further interrogation.  Such torture has always accompanied war and always will.

McCain is subject to demonic impulses even more so than was George W. Bush.  McCain could have been even worse than Bush because Bush has had periods of seemingly real recovery, whereas McCain’s sub-conscious, hardened in concrete during five years of torture in Communist prisons, may be irrepressible.

We can only guess how many 6 percenters voted for Obama against their own party, but they may spell the difference in whether Americans can restore a chastened Republican Party to its roots in the traditionalist movement of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.  Many chastened Republicans hope that a Jindal/Palin ticket, or maybe even Palin/Jindal or even a dream ticket of Palin/Paul, can pick up the pieces after four years of Obama/Biden in the face of both challenges and opportunities unlike any the American people have ever had before. 

If the Democrats can rise to the occasion and provide a moral model for the world, they deserve the right to preside over all three of the branches of the American government, the legislative, executive, and judicial, for ‘’as long as the rivers run.’’