Smut-Finder General
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n18/print/kidd01_.html
Colin Kidd
Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History by James
Morone | Yale, 575 pp, £25.00
Some aspects of the American political system can seem opaque and
mysterious to the outsider. In particular, the Constitution, which
British journalists regularly confuse with the Declaration of
Independence, is calibrated so as to correct the arithmetical
simplicities of an undifferentiated popular will. The Presidential
election of 2000 introduced the world not only to the vagaries of the
franchise in Florida, user-unfriendly butterfly ballots, and the
arcana of chad - hanging, dimpled, pregnant and penetrated - but also
to the constitutionally mandated authority of the Electoral College.
Shadowy and spectral in its operations, the College proved decisive in
the face of a narrow, but clear, national majority for the losing
candidate. More recently, the State of California has presented
another challenge to the straightforwardness of democracy as the rest
of the world imagines it, with the proposal to recall an elected
governor in possession of an unambiguous and unexpired democratic
mandate.
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