May the Second-Best Person Win

            Only God and Kevin McCarthy know how long George Santos, the disgraced Republican freshman congressman from Long Island whose antipathy for the truth stands out even by politician standards, will be able to remain in office. If and when he is forced to step down, say, after an explanation for his mysteriously improving financial status finally surfaces, I do know how his seat will be filled.

And it’s totally unfair.

            There’ll be a special election. But Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat defeated by Santos in November, won’t even be guaranteed a second shot. Party bosses will pick the two candidates—of whom Zimmerman may or may not be one—like it’s 1880.

            Zimmerman was cheated. The “George Santos” who beat Zimmerman wasn’t a real person or a real candidate. The voters didn’t have the information they needed to choose their congressman. They were bedazzled by a fraud, seduced by a chimera. At bare minimum, Zimmerman ought to be guaranteed the Democratic nomination in a special election.

            But even that wouldn’t be fair to Zimmerman. Why should he have to campaign all over again?

Nor would it be fair to the taxpayers. Each special election costs millions of dollars. Each brings a fresh round of annoying attack ads. And each one requires thousands of voters to cast new ballots. For the sake of simplicity and common sense, let’s be done with it. We already have a winner: Robert Zimmerman.

            Even after the first-place winner gets disqualified for cheating, second-place finishers in politics are doomed to also-ran status. The most famous example of this type of injustice was the outrage, well-known yet rarely reconsidered, vested upon Senator George McGovern.

There is no question that President Richard Nixon cheated in 1972. Nixon’s goons broke into Democratic National Headquarters to steal McGovern’s secret campaign strategies. They burglarized VP candidate Thomas Eagleton’s psychiatrist’s office and leaked his patient records, forcing McGovern to replace his running mate mid-campaign. McGovern might have lost to Nixon anyway. But he never stood a chance after the Eagleton affair.

Three years later, the country knew Nixon was a crook and a big one at that. The Watergate break-in triggered a series of revelations and scandals that forced Nixon to quit. Justice!

But not really. In most cases, when one contestant cheats his fellow contestant and wins, fairness requires the winner to be stripped of his ill-gotten victory and the person he screwed over to be given the prize instead. Not in politics. Nixon slunk off to rebuild his reputation as an elder statesman. What of McGovern? He got nothing. Dead now, McGovern is still ridiculed for losing to Nixon in a record landslide—a landslide Nixon stole.

To add insult to historical injury, Nixon was never held to account for Watergate. He was allowed to appoint his own successor, fellow Republican Gerald Ford, who then pardoned him and continued many of his policies. Following Nixon’s resignation, fairness would have required McGovern to receive the office he was cheated out of in 1972, for a full four-year term followed by the chance to run for reelection.

Constitutional succession should make an exception for political office holders impeached or forced to resign as the result of a scandal. If former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had been forced to quit due to, say, poor health or had died in office, automatic constitutional succession by his lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, would have been proper. Instead, Cuomo quit after being accused of serial sexual harassment. Under these sordid circumstances, allowing his Democratic Party to retain Cuomo’s seat, and his chosen successor to run for “reelection” with the advantages of incumbency, failed to punish his sleazy behavior or his enabling party. Marc Molinaro, his 2018 Republican opponent and the second-largest receiver of votes, ought to have replaced Cuomo for four years.

The same error occurs in other professions.

Milli Vanilli lost its 1990 Best New Artist award for lip syncing. The Grammys never bothered to make it up to any of the runner-ups (Neneh Cherry, Indigo Girls, Tone Lōc and Soul II Soul), all of whom were objectively more talented and important than the shamed winner.

There are no official Tour de France winners listed for the seven consecutive years between 1999 and 2005 when Lance Armstrong won. Armstrong, of course, was subsequently stripped of his title due to doping. The Spanish cyclist Joseba Beloki, the only runner-up during Armstrong’s run not to have been found guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs, deserved to be awarded the yellow jersey he was denied in 2002. Instead, Beloki is wrongly consigned to obscurity.

It is as though once a runner-up, always a runner-up. However, the fact that the person who “beat” you did it by breaking the rules is not—or should not be—a mere footnote.

            If a gold medalist breaks the rules, the silver medalist receives the gold they were cheated out of. That’s how it works in the Olympics, and that’s how it should work in politics and everywhere else.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

What Are Awards For?

           What are awards for? More precisely, what should they be for?

            John McWhorter recently argued in The New York Times in favor of a retroactive Pulitzer Prize for Duke Ellington, who was snubbed for the journalism and arts award in 1965. My encyclopedic ignorance about jazz entitles me to have no opinion whatsoever about this attempt at raising an issue.

            One sentence in McWhorter’s essay, however, deserves special attention: “We assume that Pulitzers are awarded to work that qualifies as for the ages, that pushes the envelope, that suggests not just cleverness but genius.

            Do we really assume that?

Should we?

When the Pulitzer board or governing body of other major prizes like the Oscars, Emmys, Tonys and so on decides upon the recipient of an award, what message is it trying to send?

            I agree with McWhorter. An award for best whatever of the year should first and foremost go to the best work in that category. A close-second consideration — my opinion, obviously — should favor work that is transformative, original, different. Judging by lists of previous prize winners, however, some people disagree…particularly those who decide the winners of these contests.

            While the media obsesses over awards and prizes handed out to its fellow elites, such competitions are part of life across every social strata, from elementary-school best-citizen awards to 4-H contests to merit badges to best employee of the month at a fast-food joint to your boss’ annual review. They determine whether or not you get a raise, sometimes whether you keep your job or get laid off, and even whether people are shocked or just shrug their shoulders after you kill yourself. Awards and prizes are key components of human motivation under capitalism, of which angling for higher relative social status is a primary driver, perhaps the top one.

            Like most of my fellow scribblers, I have spent too much of my time and energy handicapping — always unsuccessfully — award decisions for two simple reasons. First, winning one can really help your career. When I started out newspapers were reluctant to pick up my cartoons, which were drawn in a brutalist style at odds with the prevailing, crosshatched norm and ideologically far to the left of my colleagues. The establishment imprimatur of the 1995 RFK Journalism Award made enough editors feel safe to run my work that I was able to quit my day job. Second, we look to award announcements for indications of the kind of work that the powers that be are looking for from us. Conservative cartoonists, passed over in favor of liberals year after year, not unreasonably believe their work is neither valued nor wanted.

            As a judge on several award committees (not the Pulitzers) I have participated in numerous discussions about what criteria should be applied to assess the worthiness of prize applicants. I have also raptly absorbed countless secondhand accounts of the proceedings inside the hallowed halls of the Journalism Building at Columbia University, where the Pulitzers are administered.

            (Earlier this year, Columbia eliminated the Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, merging it with a category so broad that the possibility that a political cartoonist could win has been reduced so radically that there’s no longer a point to entering.)

            My experiences as a judge convinced me that the all-too-human members of prize committees are incapable of rendering anything approximating a reasonable decision. Very few judges have the comprehensive knowledge of the field they are judging necessary to do the job. Almost none have any historical background that informs the relevance of what they are looking at. Most elevate superficial factors — it made me laugh, the art is pretty — over more serious concerns like: does it make you think? Does it make you think differently? Does it take the form in a new, exciting, better direction? Does this award encourage smarter work, or — as is too often the case — discourage it?

Seymour Topping, late administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes, vetoed my elevation from finalist to winner on the grounds that “[Rall] doesn’t draw like the other editorial cartoonists.” The same year, one of the RFK judges told me I won because my drawing style was different. Both decisions were dumb.

So what are awards for? Mainly, they’re for reinforcing the status quo. For example, the common practice of having previous winners of a contest judge it ensures stylistic continuity.

Awards are a stupid idea poorly executed. People win prizes to make up for having been passed up in earlier years even though other, younger creators are now better than them. Corruption is rampant. Committees don’t bother to look at some entries. Committee members direct other members to vote for their friends and drinking buddies. Sometimes there is horse-trading in order to evenly distribute prizes to winners affiliated with different employers. Even worse than corruption is the utter lack of qualifications of those making the decisions; among the decisionmakers for the cartoon Pulitzer have been a freelance technology writer and editors for newspapers that don’t run any cartoons.

            Although I have won awards and still apply — you have to play the game — I would abolish them. Unlike sports like track and basketball, where the metrics are straightforward — you either cross the finish line first or the ball goes through the hoop, or not — journalism and the arts are subjective. I may disagree with the Motion Picture Academy’s choice of the now-forgotten “Ed Wood” over Tarantino’s Gen X masterpiece Pulp Fiction” and giving a Grammy to Milli Vanilli over fellow nominees Tone Lōc and the Indigo Girls. But it’s a fair bet that the voters who made those calls assess film and music, and who should win awards for it, via different metrics than I do. Even if it were possible to objectively determine what is “best,” elevating one person at the expense of an entire field is toxic and discouraging.

            But contests aren’t going anywhere. So we should try to agree on what it means when someone or something is declared the best of its kind.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

Ted Rall is Finalist in Lambda Legal Cartoon Award; Online Voting Open to Public
Posted by Mikhaela Reid

Cartoonist Mikhaela Reid here. I’m supposed to be one of Ted’s guest bloggers, but I’ve been ill with strep my entire guest blog tenure so far and won’t be posting until I get better.

However, I wanted to quickly let everyone know that Ted’s cartoon “Explaining the Supreme Court” is one of five finalists in Lambda Legal’s Life Without Fair Courts cartoon contest. Lambda Legal is a national organization committed to achieving full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and those with HIV through impact litigation, education and public policy work.

Check out all the finalists and cast your vote.

Here’s the contest info:

Lambda Legal has teamed up with Prism Comics (an organization for the LGBT graphic artist community), and media sponsor, The Advocate, to launch a nationwide contest to find the best representation of what life would look like without fair courts. First prize in the contest is exposure in The Advocate and on Advocate.com. Second and third prize include donated shopping sprees from Diamond Comics Distributors. Contest judges include Joan Hilty, Editor at DC Comics; Phil Jimenez, Freelance Illustrator and Comic Book Artist; Mikhaela Reid, creator of the original series, Life Without Fair Courts; and George Stoll, Art Director for The Advocate.

(Disclaimer: I was on the panel of judges who picked the finalists since I drew the original “Life Without Fair Courts” series that came before the contest, so I can’t take sides, but figured Ted’s fans should know about the contest since he’s trekking through the Stans and unable to post about this himself.)

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