Wait...
I thought "proportional representation" meant that if your party gets 20% of the vote for, say, Congress, your party gets 20% of Congress?
I mean, yeah, in Canada, you vote for the party, not the person, and the party with the most votes (whether below 50% or not) puts in a guy they choose.
But usually you know who they're going to choose... I don't think it's -illegal- for them to do a bait-and-switch, but it's certainly bad form and I think it'd ruin their chances in the future, so they don't do it.
Then again, we elected Harper to a majority government, so we're basically pants-on-head retarded. He's basically the Canadian G. W. Bush.
But in Canada, the MPs are elected by district, not by overall vote. The parties are far more powerful than the individual reps, however.
For example, say you live in the district of Windsor West. The NDP (the big union party) gets ~50% of the vote and the Conservatives get around 30%, with the liberals getting 15% or so. Yet in the entire country, the NDP gets significantly less of the vote and the liberals/tories get more. Even if the NDP wins 100 seats in Parliament with 90% of the vote in each seat and gets some silly percentage of the overall popular vote like 65%, they are still in the minority because they lost the majority of seats (unless they form a coalition govt). Same process as the US basically, except since it's parliamentary we have three real choices instead of two. Oh, and of our three choices, one is pie-in-the-sky silly/incompetent and the other two are crooked as hell.
What I think would be best would be approval or range voting: instead of voting for one candidate, vote (based on preference) for whoever you like the most and whittle it down until the votes shift enough for one to make a majority. This way, Right Wing Libertarian party A doesn't "subtract" from Right Wing Fiscal Conservative party A as they probably end up behind whichever does better in a given district and the same for the rest of the "compromise" parties.
No, this won't cause an economic expansion so quickly as to render the election a landslide. It's too close for November for it to do that. But it does minimize the downside risk for Obama. With the Fed taking such aggressive new action to support the economy further economic deterioration seems unlikely.
Probably. But then, the US economy is in very bad straits right now, regardless of how much anyone wants to claim there has been a recovery.
What's most telling is that the Fed isn't cracking down on excess bank reserves, which would almost certainly create liquidity. They know quite well that the day that happens is that day the US dollar falls apart.