Oil-Qaeda Wins Big - 3

A while back in a couple of posts (Oil-Qaeda Wins Big, 2) I pondered the apparent mismatch between a state's favorite music compared to a state's newly elected senators.

This I did with data from only a few states (Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa) nevertheless, the results are very interesting.

The results from one of those states is shown below:

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State: Arkansas
Music: Wiz Khalifa



Senator: Tom Cotton (R)

See Senator Tom's photo below the following text:

Cotton, you see, is the golden child of the Republican party's hawkish establishment. He still calls the 2003 Iraq invasion a "just and noble" war. He's young — just 37 — and fervently backed by some of the most influential conservative figures in the nation.

Like much of the GOP class of 2014, Cotton is extremely conservative on domestic policy. He scored a 92 on the influential Club for Growth's House scorecard last year, a rough approximation of a member's conservatism measured by their votes on economic legislation. That 92 puts him in the top 5 percent of most conservative House members.

But it's foreign policy where Cotton really distinguishes himself from the pack. As the Atlantic's Molly Ball breaks down in a fascinating profile, the Senator-elect's career began in 2006 with his criticism of the New York Times for revealing a clandestine US spying program targeting terrorist finances. "By the time we return home," he wrote to the Times reporters, "maybe you will be in your rightful place: not at the Pulitzer announcements, but behind bars."

At the time, Cotton was a lieutenant serving in Baghdad. When his letter was published on the conservative blog Powerline, it went the 2006 equivalent of viral and Cotton became a conservative media darling. He began corresponding with Bill Kristol, the editor of the flagship neoconservative publication, the Weekly Standard. According to Ball, Kristol and Cotton developed what the former calls "a bond beyond pure policy" over their shared foreign policy views.

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Conclusion: Since Tom Cotton is not one of "We Dem Boyz" I would have to say that there is a cultural disconnect between the electorate and politicians.

That disconnect is probably because the young people who listen to Arkansas' favorite musician (Wiz Khalifa) are not voting.

At least not voting for senators.

Or, if not that, then the election system may be defective seeing as how we are at number 23 (or thereabouts)  in the nations of the world --when it comes to fair elections (as shown in the second post of this series).

The previous post in this series is here.