Election Day, None of My Business

Yesterday morning I went to a polling place in Berkeley to watch people voting. As someone who has no say in leadership change in my own country, I'm a jealous observer of what's happening in the US. The polling place was located in a small church on University Ave, with a billboard saying "Vote Here" in English, Spanish, Chinese, etc. People stayed in the short line, quietly waiting to vote. They're lucky to live in California, a deep blue state, therefore they didn't suffer much from ubiquitous campaign ads like in Ohio. People are voting, but are not crazily mobilized to vote. They came here as a stop to work or a lunch break, and checked the box after Obama and Biden.

Democrats' victory in White House looked almost certain before the ballots were counted. Despite the poor performance on economy, Obama seemed to have persuaded voters that Romney could only lead the country to a worse situation. Electoral forecasters on Intrade.com believed the odds for Obama's re-election vary between 60% to 90%. Sandy is the last straw that crushes Romney, as FEMA showed its strong disaster-relief capacity and the NJ governor praised Obama for his reaction to the hurricane and afterwards reconstruction. At least I never doubted that Obama could get re-elected when I heard Romney talking about opening windows on airplane and the 47%. But many of my American friends, those working on environment and energy issues in particular, were truly nervous before the result was released. I guess this is a true reaction when politics is closely related to your everyday life.

Tomorrow the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China will take place in Beijing. It's a party congress, not a national congress. However it will determine the Chinese leading group for the next ten years. We already know who the next CCP chairman, i.e. the next Chinese president will be, and we are also pretty sure who the next Chinese premier will be. But the rest seven vacancies in the central politburo standing committee remains opaque. 800 million CCP members are not able to vote, let alone the 1.3 billion non-communists. A small group of old men decide what China will be like in the next decade. Since I have no clue about what policy options have been debated within the decision-making body, or which policy/politician I should prefer, I'm not nervous at all. I will just wait and see, and probably guess what policy will be adopted in the future.

The beautiful part of checks and balance is to put restrictions over power, therefore incumbents have to carefully watch their behaviors and do less wrong. The relation between the government and the public is like a multiple gaming, with each side trying to gain more. Yes democracy makes mistakes, but the political party and politicians who made the mistakes never had a second chance. While in dictatorship, there is no restriction over the power, and dictators can do anything to maintain their rule, such as lying about history, suppressing dissents and blocking internet. As a result, the public lose the second chance to know the truth. If we try to model these two political regimes, in democracy, both the public and the government have utility functions out of which they try to maximize their utilities; while in dictatorship, only the government has a utility function while the public is a condition to subject to.

@ University Ave, Berkeley CA