Yes we can

[davidn]

Hello, good evening and welcome to the Cynical British election coverage for 2008 (sponsored by Crunchy Nut, McVitie's Digestive Biscuits, etc, etc). Whitney is going to have her friends from the college round to watch the results as they come in, so I'll be sitting here updating from a flat full of Obama fangirls, making it most likely far more interesting and significantly less impartial than most of the other reports you might see around this time. Throughout the process of the Americans trying to show that they can elect a suitable leader for themselves, I'll be increasingly smashing my neurotic habit of strictly making a maximum of one post a day by updating with the numbers from the electoral college as they're received.

I can't even remember if I knew how the system worked when I lived in Britain, so if anyone who reads this doesn't - each state has a certain number of Electoral College votes that are given to the candidate that receives the largest proportion of the vote from the population (there are some states that split their votes depending on the percentages, but... they don't really matter at the moment). The more populous a state, the more electoral votes it has, and there are a total of 538 of them. Therefore, the first to 270 wins. As each district within each state reports the number of votes from the population it's counted, there comes a point at which one side is clearly ahead and the others can't mathematically catch up, at which point the result from that state is declared and its number of electoral votes is added to the running total. Simple, isn't it? To the man who designed Spaghetti Junction, maybe.

The country disappointed me and the whole rest of the world four years ago (is there anyone in the entire world outside who doesn't want Obama to win now? We should get a vote, too - 1776 was clearly a mistake), but I had no idea of the numbers at that point, and this time I'm rather confident in a good result. At least, I'd like to be. I'm actually terrified, to be honest. So as somebody on The Big Breakfast years ago taught me always to bet against myself to alleviate any disappointment, I will extend the invitation that if you elect a decent president then you're welcome to point out and correct all my Britishisms as I try to speak American for an entire month week. If not, then obviously I'm declaring our flat a colony of Britain.

Good luck, everyone.

Comments

[bonappetite.livejournal.com]

re: 1776, one of the first lessons in American History courses is that the majority of the colonial residents (we can't really call it "most of the country" because it wasn't yet, technically, a country) did NOT support a war for independence. If there had been some sort of binding referendum, we'd still be British.
The difference was that a good chuck of the leaders, the powerful, and learned colonials wanted to (and even then it wasn't anywhere near consensus).

Did watching The Patriot teach you nothing?!

[kjorteo]

If we were nice enough to negotiate our way to functioning independently from the United Kingdom while still keeping well within everyone's comfort levels, we'd be Canada. Only through violent revolution could we decisively reject the crown and parliament and everything British once and for all and begin to forge our own uniquely American identity.

That's...a really horrible and messed-up lesson to learn, actually. TV Tropes would helpfully refer to that as a "Warped Aesop," I'm sure. But there you have it.