The Podcast list

I cranked this out as a "filler" post, while I keep working on a few posts I have in queue.  I thought it might be fun and interesting to see what podcasts I listen to regularly, for news/current events and analysis.  I don't listen to every episode - that would be way too time-consuming - but these are the ones I listen to most often.  So, in no particular order, here they are.

• Deep State Radio is a twice-a-week roundtable discussion of significant political events.  The show's four regulars consist of two journalists (one from the Washington Post and the other from the New York Times), and a pair of academics.  There's also a steady series of guest commentators popping in and out.  Bonus points for the clever show name, too.
• Congressional Dish is a one-woman weekly podcast.  Jen Briney, the host, puts a lot of research into every episode.  I agree with 80-90% of what she says, depending on the episode, and I really commend her for producing a podcast that delivers a lot of useful information about Congressional bills that may affect all of us.
• Common Sense is a unique animal.  The host, (Dan Carlin, someone I've mentioned on the blog before)  is a self-described "political martian", but while his ideas are outside the mainstream, they're not really that farfetched.  Dan likes to take the long view, as in envisioning what things will look like if current trends continue for years or decades; and he's also a big history buff, so he's usually quick to say "Hey, we've done something like this before, and it didn't really work out well." He's a bit slow in getting out new episodes because his audio engineer is always sick (inside joke for people who remember the early episodes), but the wait is worth it.  EDIT (10/14): I just wanted to add a short postscript to this bullet point.  Since I published this post, I've learned that Dan Carlin will probably be discontinuing Common Sense - almost certainly for the short-term, and maybe even indefinitely.  This means we could be losing a popular political commentator with a unique perspective, and that's a huge loss.
• Ken Rudin's Political Junkie also comes out weekly, and is filled with arcane and obscure bits of trivia.  It usually compares current events to analogous historical events.  I think it's a bit dry and too technical even for political wonks like me, but it's good for looking at current events under a microscope.
• Left, Right, and Center is another weekly podcast, and it uses the roundtable discussion format as well.  You probably guessed from the title, but this podcast features discussions from people representing opposite ends of the political spectrum, as well as a centrist thrown in to keep things interesting.  It seems to have gotten livelier over the past few years, and maybe a bit more contentious or polarized (I thought a shouting match was going to break out two weeks ago), but the participants still manage to have thought-provoking debates. 
• FiveThirtyEight is another excellent podcast.  Nate Silver and his crew have lost a step since correctly predicting the 2012 election, but they're still very well-informed and insightful.  I only started listening to this one over the summer, but have been listening more often in the last month or so.

Those are the Big 6.  I'd also like to give honorable mentions to Arms Control Wonk, NPR Politics, Vox's The Weeds, and Power, Politics, and Preventive Action.  I listen to the first three sporadically, and the last one is kind of a weird podcast.  It released twenty episodes on July 20th & 21st, and hasn't released a new episode since.  It's content is dated, but still worth a listen.

All these podcasts are on iTunes, by the way.  Okay, that's a quick and easy post until my next one comes out (hopefully in a day or two.)

Lessons (not) learned from Vietnam

The recent PBS series on the Vietnam War and the recent debate over the national anthem got me thinking about the parallels between then and now, and I'm putting my thoughts into this stream-of-consciousness post about how little has changed since the end of the war.  Specifically, how little we (as a country) have learned since then.  Let's look at the lessons we thought we learned, but then discarded.

First, the US government (the White House and the Pentagon) fell back into the habit of sending troops to fight wars for flimsy justifications, vaguely-defined objectives, and inadequate equipment and resources.  This hasn't happened all the time, but more often than not, the troops went in without what they needed for victory: a coherent plan, resources that matched the objective, and a valid reason to fight.  When it comes to smaller, shorter conflicts, the score is about even.  Grenada and Panama didn't become quagmires, but Somalia and Lebanon did.  In regard to large-scale conflicts, the tally is pretty one-sided.  The 1990-91 Gulf War had a clear mission and sufficient resources, if a rationale that was more about economics than security; but on the other side of the ledger, we have Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Iraq Part II.

There was supposed to be a deep discussion about America's use of military power in the wake of Vietnam, but it never really got off the ground.  Not enough to lead to any meaningful changes, anyway.  The senior officers who hoped to avoid a repeat of the Vietnam quagmire succeeded for a few years, and during that time they managed to implement meaningful reforms.  For example, when Colin Powell served in the White House as a military assistant to Secretary Weinberger, he helped craft the "Weinberger Doctrine", which acted as a litmus test for when to commit US troops.  The war hawks eventually outmaneuvered those senior officers, though, and critics who charged that the Doctrine was so narrow that it practically guaranteed US troops would never be deployed anywhere.  Vaguely-defined missions began to come back into favor in the 1990s, and became standard procedure after 9/11.

Washington also ably deflected any deep discussion by transitioning from a draftee military to an all-volunteer force.  Richard Nixon wisely calculated that halting the draft would deflate anti-war protests, and he was right.  Once the overall population stopped having a stake in America's wars, they stopped worrying that they might someday get dragged into a quagmire conflict.  This weakened the bond between the military and the general population, and gave military leadership much more license to send the military anywhere they wanted.  Somewhere along the way, Congress (which holds the power to declare war) stopped holding the president accountable in any meaningful way.  How it got there is a story about a lot of boring political maneuvering, but the moral of the story is that "accountability" was a sham.  Political appointees and mid-level staffers took the fall for military failures, partisan bickering replaced debate, and nobody asked the questions that should have been asked after Vietnam.  Which brings us to the present, where history is repeating itself.

I'm almost done here, but I'd like to make one more point.  To me, this isn't an academic debate.  I served in the Army for four years and spent five years after that as a defense contractor.  During that time, I made several trips to combat zones and deployed locations.  My experiences have made me very skeptical of how the government employs the military, to the point where I oppose a military intervention by default unless I see a very good reason for it.  I'm probably not evaluating a military intervention impartially, but I don't really care if I'm being fair or not.  I think being extremely skeptical is preferable to not being skeptical enough.  Every soldier, sailor, airman, and Marine is someone's child/parent/sibling/friend, and if the president and the senior generals put them in harm's way, they need to be absolutely certain that the sacrifice is worth it.  Anything less is morally repugnant in my opinion.

More War on Terror allegory - Marvel's Civil War and The Ultimates 2: Grand Theft America

This is a sort-of continuation to my August 30th post, because it's about how the War on Terror was portrayed in a few other works of fiction.  I guess the War on Terror inspired a lot of creative works, both nonfiction and fiction.  Anyway, there are two works I'm zeroing in on; coincidentally, both were produced by Marvel Comics.

The first one was Marvel's Civil War storyline, which ran from July 2006 to January 2007 and affected pretty much every character in the Marvel universe.  (It doesn't have much in common with the 2016 Captain America movie, besides a mega-battle between two groups of superheroes, though.) At least two Marvel employees have stated that it was largely inspired by the War on Terror.  Axel Alonso, Marvel's editor-in-chief, said "Much of the public debate around that time was, 'How much of your civil liberties are you willing to give up for your security? Many of us were riding on trains having our bags inspected by soldiers. We were in constant 'orange alert' in New York. That discussion was the seed for what became Civil War." Mark Millar, who gets most of the credit for creating the storyline, made similar statements.  The War on Terror's influence is easy to spot throughout the series: for example, the extra-dimensional prison symbolizes Guantanamo and the "Superhuman Registration Act" represents the PATRIOT Act.  Like every other comic book, Civil War is mostly a punch-up between people with superpowers and gaudy spandex outfits; but in between battles, it manages to slip in a handful of moral conundrums specifically pertaining to the War on Terror.  Questions such as these:

• Do you still support the government when it's doing something morally questionable? What if the government's actions are outright illegal? Are people obligated to follow a clearly unjust or immoral law? Who are the "bad guys" in these scenarios - the people who break unjust laws or the people who enforce those same laws?
•  Are there any situations where it's justified to deny individuals legal rights and inflict harsh, possibly cruel, punishments? Civil War stretches the comparison to the War on Terror a bit, because the individuals in question have superpowers, but it's easy to make a connection between the hi-tech gulag-like conditions depicted in the comic and "enhanced interrogation" measures (torture) and denying due process to Gitmo detainees.
• How far is "too far" when it comes to protecting the country? Are detestable acts suddenly permissible? What if those acts betray the country's values?

I wish I had images of the comic panels where these issues are brought up, because that would be a better way to highlight them than me trying to describe them.  I couldn't find any good images, though.  Anyway, Civil War was a slightly above-average comic storyline, but it did touch on some major events in a thought-provoking way.  

The other comic in question was part of Marvel's Ultimate line of comics, which was a retelling of the entire Marvel franchise in an "edgier" way.  This particular storyline, called Grand Theft America, came out in December of 2004 (and took until May 2007 to finish, for some reason.) The comic's plot goes like this: the Ultimates (this comic's version of the Avengers) operates like a superpowered SEAL Team 6 when they're not saving the world.  As the comic opens, they're on a mission to destroy some hostile nation's nuclear facility.  Fast forward a few months, and several nations that have grudges against the United States launch a coordinated attack against America using their own superpowered team, each of whom has abilities comparable to one of the Ultimates' members.  Naturally, the Ultimates counterattack and save the day.  It's basically a standard punch-fest, kind of like Civil War; but the preemptive raid at the comic's beginning is analogous to the Bush Doctrine, as well as the low-visibility counterterrorist raids which elite units like SEAL Team 6 and Delta Force conducted around the globe.  

This comic also does raise several important moral/legal questions (although not as obviously as Civil War.) regarding the raid on the nuclear site at the beginning.  Is a raid that violates a nation's sovereignty permissible if that nation possesses both nuclear weapons and a hostile or unstable government? Or any nation with nuclear weapons? Are covert raids (in general) acceptable under just war doctrine? How is that raid's benefit weighed against the costs of any blowback or retaliation?

Some of these questions have been heavily debated, and not just by comic book readers.  The Cold War and the invention of nuclear weapons led to a lot of discussion among scholars and military thinkers about how those two things changed the rules of the game.  I'm going to present two viewpoints on the issue.  First, just war advocates set a pretty high bar when it comes to what is considered a just war; to meet their standard, the war must be for a morally justifiable reason, be the last resort, be ordered by a legitimate authority, and the initiator must have a reasonable chance of victory.  These advocates might acknowledge that the Ultimates' raid was justifiable under the circumstances, but they would likely require convincing proof that the target nation posed a threat - meaning that it absolutely possessed nuclear weapons and that its leadership showed intent to use them.  On the other hand, Eisenhower-era hawks showed much more willingness to use force.  A 1954 presidential panel concluded that the United States needed to employ covert action liberally to combat the Soviet Union.  Here is a quote from that panel's chairman concerning the importance of covert action:

It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever costs. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the US is to survive, longstanding American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated means than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.

These questions are still significant many decades later.  It's not too hard to apply the debate to North Korea or Pakistan, or even the United States (Trump's not the most rational head of state, folks). This comic was first published in 2004, so 9/11 and Operation Iraqi Freedom undoubtedly influenced the writers.  Especially since Mark Millar (remember him?) was one of those writers.  By the way, there's a special term for this dilemma.  It's called the "Dirty Hands" question, and I think you can guess what it means in context.

That's all I have to say, but I'm posting a few additional links below if you'd like to get other perspectives on various aspects of the just war debate.

https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/1291-dipert-preventive-war
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a547264.pdf
http://www.iar-gwu.org/node/213

The Turning Point

Some day, maybe a few decades from now, I think the history textbooks will refer to the events of the past week as the "before and after" moment in the Trump presidency.  The moment when he hit rock bottom, and showed the entire world just how wildly unqualified he is at being president.  What makes this different from before? That's a fair question.  It's not like Trump's incompetence hasn't been on display before: at the United Nations, meeting European heads of state, mishandling the North Korean nuclear situation.  The difference is that now, we're seeing the consequences of that incompetence in tangible, horrific terms - pictures of devastation and stories of suffering coming in from Puerto Rico.  Before Puerto Rico, the consequences of Trump's incompetence could only be measured in harsh rhetoric and cooled relationships.  Trump certainly antagonized heads of state, among others, but nobody died.  He raised tensions with North Korea, but still, nobody died.  That's the difference here.  Trump's screw-ups up until now carried consequences, but not dire ones.  Before Puerto Rico, his incompetence didn't matter the way it does now. 

A US territory was leveled by a natural disaster, and Trump's reaction has been marked by callous indifference, zero sense of urgency, and political grandstanding.  A president who is more concerned about San Juan's mayor hurting his little feelings, who takes days to waive a law in order to speed up deliveries of aid, who lectures residents with a "pull yourself up" sanctimonious attitude, is unfit to lead.  Trump's unfitness has been obvious since Day 1, but this is arguably its worst manifestation.  This is his "Nero fiddled" moment. 

Donald Trump has crossed over from a loudmouthed buffoon to a dangerously incompetent president.  He has Americans' blood on his hands now.  The GOP Congressmen who shield him are complicit, and their constituents need to exert pressure on them to stand up to Trump.  The citizens who support Trump after what we just witnessed need to walk back their support, or otherwise be called out and shunned.  Personally, I don't want to associate with those people anymore.  It's not political theater anymore.  Those people and Congressmen are enabling someone who will do grave damage the longer he remains in office.  Trump is not a harmless nuisance any longer, and it's time to start considering the need to impeach him.

Demolition Man, John Stuart Mill, and the "Nanny State"

Who remembers that 1993 movie Demolition Man? Most people (including me) probably remember it for the explosions and action scenes, and maybe that "three seashells" scene; but there's another part that was probably overshadowed by the rest of the movie.  Early-ish in the movie, John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) asks for a cigarette after waking up from cryogenic prison in the future city of San Angeles.  Here's the dialogue from that scene:

Spartan: "Yo, gimme a Marlboro."
Cop 1: "Yes, of course.  Right away. What's a Marlboro?"
Spartan: "It's a cigarette! Any cigarette."
Lenina Huxley: "Uh, smoking is not good for you, and it's been deemed that anything not good for you is bad; hence, illegal. Alcohol, caffeine, contact sports, meat..."
Spartan: "Are you shitting me?"
Computer: "John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."
Spartan: "What the hell is that?"  
Computer: "John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute."
Huxley: "Bad language, chocolate, gasoline, un-educational toys, and anything spicy.  Abortion is also illegal, but then again so is pregnancy if you don't have a license."

What's going on, right? Anything and everything harmful - including things that people use to harm themselves - is illegal. That would never happen, right? And what does it have to do with political theory? 

We'll get to the first question in a bit, but to answer the second question, I'm going to introduce you to John Stuart Mill.  (Not literally, of course - he's been dead for almost 150 years.  That would be creepy and awkward.) Mill lived in England in the 1800s, and he was pretty big into utilitarianism.  He also formed a concept called the Harm Principle, which connects back to the Demolition Man quote above.  The Harm Principle works like this: any actions a person takes to harm themselves are legally acceptable (AKA, the government shouldn't interfere), but it's okay to outlaw any actions which harm others, and punish people who do so.  Here are a couple quotes directly from Mill, to help drive the point home.

"The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self protection.  That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

"There is a sphere of action in which society . . .  has, if any, only an indirect interest; comprehending all that portion of a person’s life and conduct which affects only himself, or if it also affects others, only with their free, voluntary and undeceived consent and participation . . .  This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty."

There's a well-known quote (usually attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes) that does a good job of capturing what Mill's Harm Principle is all about in a single sentence: "The right to swing my fist ends where another person's nose begins." That leads me to the first question from earlier - whether the prohibition of all those things in Demolition Man could ever happen in real life.  Well. . .it's not nearly as universal as it is in the movie, but if you think about it, there are a handful of things that generally hurt oneself that come with legal penalties.  Here are a few examples: riding a bicycle without a helmet, driving without a seat belt, taking drugs, and buying sugary drinks.  Laws like these are part of what some derisively call the "nanny state."

Now, obviously these prohibitions aren't a march to some dystopian future where people can't go skydiving or drink Mountain Dew anymore, but it's worth wondering how we got this far.  The answer, which you might have guessed, is money.  Not always, but a lot of the time; cultural norms and morals play a part too.  There's a podcaster named Dan Carlin (he's awesome, you should check him out) who sometimes talks about "wallet rights", which came about because the definition of what's considered a person's "nose" in that apocryphal Holmes quote gradually expanded to include things that cost people and the government money.  Taking drugs? You might hurt someone or damage someone's property while in an altered state, and society can't have that.  Ride a bicycle without a helmet? You might wreck, and ambulances cost money. On the surface, that seems fair, until you consider that just about everybody does something that potentially costs society money.  Eat too much red meat? You'll probably require more expensive medical care someday.  Like to go whitewater rafting? The odds are that you'll have an accident someday. Okay, so maybe you play it safe and stay home playing video games.  Unfortunately, a sedentary lifestyle contributes to early mortality.  Oops.  Even a healthy lifestyle backfires in the long run, because older people have higher medical costs.  It's simply a consequence of aging.

So where do the limits to our individual rights exist? Have we moved too far away from Mill's standard? Or, to consider it from the other side of the issue, should society have to bear the costs of that person exercising their rights? Resources are finite and things like ambulances do cost money, so is using legal penalties to disincentivize behaviors that eat up those resources justified? These questions are part of a long-running debate about individual rights (which are a cornerstone upon which the US was founded), and to hear some sources, the erosion of personal freedom due to things like "wallet rights" has never been worse than right now.  Are they right, or is it overblown? And can people be trusted to make sound decisions without state coercion? The answers depends on one's point of view, but whatever answer you come up with, these are questions worth debating.

The Push to Abolish the Electoral College, Part 2: Possible Solutions

I wanted to include all this at the end of yesterday's post, but that piece took a lot longer to write than I expected.  I'm chalking it up to a healthy dose of writer's block plus lots of writing something, striking it out, writing something new, then going back to what I originally wrote.  Repeat until insane.  That post was an absolute grind to write.  Plus, I got distracted by Atlanta's beat-down of the Packers.

Anyway, here are a handful of off-the-cuff suggestions I have for improving the Electoral College.

First, eliminate "winner take all" districts.  There's something deeply wrong with a rule that lets my vote contribute to Candidate A's electoral vote tally even if I voted for Candidate B.  Unfortunately, forty-eight states play by "winner take all" rules.  This practice is truly undemocratic, because it invalidates the votes of everyone but the people who picked the winning candidate.  I propose that all of the states adopt a proportional allocation system: the number of electoral votes a candidate gets is based on the percentage of the popular vote they received.  I didn't come up with this idea, but I think it makes a lot more sense than the "winner take all" rule.

Second, redraw the outrageously gerrymandered districts to make them more reflective of their inhabitants.  Gerrymandering has been a problem for a long time, and has been derisively described as "politicians getting to choose their voters." The Supreme Court is hearing a case about partisan gerrymandering right now, and I'm glad to see the practice is being challenged in court.  I just hope SCOTUS rules against gerrymandering.

Third, let's take a look at mandatory voting as a stop-gap solution while we figure out why so few people are voting.  (Hey now! Whoa! I said we should just consider it.  Stop yelling at me.)  I was going to suggest implementing mandatory voting and leaving it at that (so maybe that yelling is justified), because it would solve the problem of low voter turnout, therefore making election results more reflective of the overall population.  Unfortunately, this is like a kid shoving all their toys, stray clothes, etc into the closet instead of actually cleaning their room.  It gives the appearance of everything being fine while ignoring the issue.  Something is wrong when 41% of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2016 election.  Maybe those people don't feel represented, and that's a symptom of bigger issues.  I was going to write about those bigger issues, at least as I saw them; but I realized pretty quickly that those issues were a lot more than I was prepared to tackle right now.  I haven't done enough research or thinking to write about them, and besides they're outside the scope of this post, so I'm tabling them for another day. 

Those are a few quick and simple solutions I came up with off the top of my head.  They probably have flaws, but I wanted to offer up some ideas, even imperfect ones. I don't think the Electoral College is perfect, but I think these changes could improve it a lot.  But even with its flaws, I think the Electoral College is a better system than a direct popular vote.  Let's not throw the baby out with the bath water.

The Push to Abolish the Electoral College

"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch." - Marvin Simkin

Ever since Hillary Clinton signaled her support for abolition of the Electoral College, the number of people echoing that sentiment has grown and gotten louder.  Posts like this one have popped up on Twitter:

It's easy to understand why.  A lot of Americans are furious with Donald Trump, and not in a "He's implementing policies I don't like" way.  It's more of a "He's a complete disaster" way, and with good reason.  Trump will likely be remembered as one of the worst presidents in history.  Maybe the worst president.  The push to abolish the Electoral College is built on an urge to prevent this from happening in the future, because if the Electoral College had been eliminated before 2016, Clinton would be president and we'd all be spared the ongoing Trump fiasco.  It's a justifiable and well-meaning movement, but I'm going to make the case for keeping it.

Let's start with an easy one.  First, there are about 320 million people in America.  Not all of them are eligible to vote, but if you crunch the numbers, only 59% of the eligible population voted (for any candidate).  This is just my opinion, but it doesn't make sense to switch to a popular vote system when 2/5 of the population stays home on election day (a greater number of people than either Clinton's or Trump's voters). 

Second, people are generally pretty decent, but they're vulnerable to a lot of tricks: things like tribalism, their own cognitive biases, emotion-based choices, misleading information, and so on.  They also vote based on superficial reasons.  A common piece of conventional wisdom is that people vote for candidates based on their likeability rather than any of the candidate's policies - that a vote comes down to which candidate a voter identifies with, or would like to have a beer with.  Then there are the people with "out there" beliefs: anti-vaxxers, racists, conspiracy theorists.  Would you want an any of them to have a direct say in electing the president? To have that person's vote be equal to yours? People, even rational ones, don't always make wise decisions at the ballot box.  A large population can diminish a fringe idea's reach, but it can just as easily amplify it; and historically, people with radical ideas have had this pesky habit of gravitating toward each other to form influential movements.  Does the Electoral College prevent this from happening? No.  But a popular vote system increases the chances of this happening.  This isn't some idle concern, either; here's what James Madison wrote in Federalist #10:

"The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.  The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.  Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose."

Third, let's look at a popular vote system as a whole.  I'm going to provide some reasons for why it's a bad idea.  Let's start with a hypothetical.  Imagine that at the start of every NFL season, the entire country voted on which team they wanted to watch.  One team all season long, for the entire country.  Now look at this map.

(Picture courtesy of USA Today)

I'm guesstimating here, but it looks like Denver occupies the biggest swath of land on that map.  (Woo-hoo! Go Broncos!) That's great if you're a Broncos fan, but not so much for fans of the other thirty-one teams; and if you're a fan of the Texans, Jaguars, or Bucs, for example, you'll probably never get to watch a game in this fictional scenario.

So how does this relate to the 2016 presidential election? Here are a few other images to look at.  The top one is a breakdown of the election based on the counties each candidate won, and the bottom one is the same county-by-county map adjusted to account for population.

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

(Courtesy of University of Michigan)

Do you notice anything peculiar? There are a lot more solid red squares than blue ones on that top map - 2,623 to 489 - but the red and blue areas appear to be about equal in the bottom map.  Which they are, approximately.  The popular vote results confirm that.  Here's another way of looking at it.  As of 2013, California's population was over 38 million while seven states had populations of less than a million.  That popular vote proposal looks a lot less fair now, doesn't it? It pretty much guarantees that the 5-10 most populated states will get all the attention (remember how lopsided Trump's tallies were until they called California), and the least populated states will be virtually ignored.  This problem has gone mostly unnoticed, but a popular vote system will only make it worse, because candidates focus on areas that get them the most votes.  So, if you live in a major city that has a higher population than an entire state, you're probably in good shape.  But if you don't, a popular vote system will make your vote worth less.  I'll say that again: your vote will count for less in a popular vote system.  

A president is supposed to govern for the entire country.  A popular vote system makes that less likely.