TW: One of the (many) great things about the blogosphere is that politicians get called out for BS more frequently, it works both ways but in this instance Sen. Mitch McConnell gets busted on his assertion about why Republicans are relevant.
From Jim Surowiecki at New Yorker:
"...Republicans’ new talking point, unveiled yesterday by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader, in an appearance on ABC News’ This Week, is that a bipartisan approach to enacting the stimulus package is important because Republican senators “represent half the American population.”
Now, that didn’t sound right, given that most of America’s big states have two Democratic senators. So I did a quick-and-dirty calculation of how many Americans the senators in each party represent, assuming that each senator represents all of the people in his or her state and that the currently open Senate seats (like Delaware, Illinois, and New York) will be filled by someone from the same party. And what you find, if you do the math, is that Republican senators actually represent about thirty-seven per cent of Americans. So McConnell was off by quite a bit, but then I guess it wouldn’t be quite as dramatic or as effective if he were to say that Republican senators need to be consulted because they “represent one third of the American population.”
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/jamessurowiecki/2009/01/how-many-voters.html
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