Keeping things in perspective

Ask any conservative and he'll tell you the most important politician in America today is Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the mastermind behind the GOP budget plan that's supposed to solve the nation's fiscal problems. One newspaper pundit even proposed a series of national debates between Obama and Ryan, just the two of them going mano a mano.

Paul Ryan represents Wisconsin's House District 1, which is about as solidly red as any geographic area can be. In November 2010, with 99 percent of the precincts reporting, Ryan had 179,702 of 263,362 total votes, or roughly 68 percent. That's a substantial victory, but to keep things in perspective, the voting population in Ryan's district is smaller than the current population of Tulsa, Oklahoma (392,000).

In the 2008 presidential election, there were 2,928,655 votes cast in Wisconsin, and Obama got 1,670,474 of them (56.3 percent). To put it another way, Ryan's winning vote total in 2010 was about 6.1 percent of the total state vote two years earlier.

As a rule of thumb, members of the House of Representatives don't need to win many votes to stay in office, certainly nowhere near as many as a U.S. Senator, a state governor, and definitely not the president. District boundaries are drawn to make the re-election of incumbents as foolproof as possible. As much as anything, this probably explains why the U.S. House of Representatives is the closest thing to an insane asylum as we have in the federal government. A relatively small number of yahoos, assholes, dipsticks and lunatics can put House members in office, and the deck is stacked to keep them there.