>It doesn't mean it's an American list, not at all, but I would prefer
>that people who comment on domestic U.S. politics show some
>familiarity with this strange place.
And you can break this down even more to asking for some familiarity with the strangeness that is places like John McCain's adopted state of Arizona.
States with a particularly high level of provincialism and willful ignorance have a disproportionate influence in U.S. politics. And any whiff of talking something like proportional representation will cause a firestorm of the type that surrounded Clinton's naming Lani Guinier as a possible candidate for Asst. Attorney General.
The sway people from non-urban areas have over politics here is by design. (And yes, I do think urban areas are more progressive and rural areas less progressive.)
Doug laid out the blueprint for this structure very crisply in this short item from LBO 122:
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As almost everyone knows, the Senate Finance Committee, led by a conservative Democrat from Montana named Max Baucus, has had an outsized influence in shaping health care reform. Baucus and five of his committee colleagues have been dominating the process though now it's being opened up somewhat as the bill exits the committee and proceeds to that abomination known as the full Senate.
Those five Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, Kent Conrad of North Dakota, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Charles Grassley of Iowa, and the vastly overexposed Olympia Snowe of Maine along with Super Max himself, represent states with less than 3% of the U.S. population. Their combined populations are only a little larger than New York City's, and less than a quarter of California's. Three of the six states Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana together have fewer people than Brooklyn.
Why should representatives of these small, mostly conservative states dominate national politics? Well one answer is that that's the way the Founding Fathers wanted it. The whole point of the Senate is to act as an elite check on popular sentiments.
Don't take LBO's word for it. Here it is, from the horse's mouth the Senate's official history, on its website:
"In selecting an appropriate visual symbol of the Senate in its founding period, one might consider an anchor, a fence, or a saucer. Writing to Thomas Jefferson, who had been out of the country during the Constitutional Convention, James Madison explained that the Constitution's framers considered the Senate to be the "great anchor" of the government. To the framers themselves, Madison explained that the Senate would be a "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" that tended to influence the attitudes of the general public and members of the House of Representatives. George Washington is said to have told Jefferson that the framers had created the Senate to "cool" House legislation just as a saucer was used to cool hot tea."
If you're an insurance exec fearful of expropriation, or a Fortune 500 CEO loath to create a new entitlement among the always-dangerous (at least in potential) masses, then you have to be pleased with how things are working out. Nice to know that Madison et al. had your back.