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Making sense of Election Day


If we’re not choosing a president, why are we voting? Because there are a lot of elected


offices in this country other than president, including Congress. There are two houses in Congress: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of each will be se- lected today.


House of Representatives: Mem- bers of the House of Representatives are elected to two-year terms. The number of representatives a state has is based on its population. Virginia has 11 representatives; Maryland has eight. (The District of Columbia has one nonvoting member of Congress because it’s not a state). So all 435 seats in the House will be decided by today’s elections. Do you know who your representative in Congress is? (Don’t feel bad if you don’t; less than one-third of American adults do.)


Senate: Senators are elected to six- year terms, and each state has two senators. (So, how many senators are there overall?) This year, there are 37


435


Te number of seats in the House of Representatives to be decided in today's election. All members face reelection every two years.


Senate seats to be decided. One local senator, Barbara Mikulski of Mary- land, is up for reelection. No Virginia Senates seats are contested this time. There are also many stateelec-


tions going on.


Governors: The governor is the lead- er of a state similar to the way the president is the leader of the country. People in 37 states will choose their governor today, including Maryland voters, who will choose between the current governor, Martin O’Malley, and the man he defeated in 2006, then-governor Robert Ehrlich. State legislatures (which are like Congress, but on a state level): There are also lots of candidates running for these seats.


In addition there are local elec-


tions. These include school boards, city and county councils, and other positions. Voters in the District of Co- lumbia will choose a new mayor to- day.


KLMNO FRAZZ


TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2010 JEF MALLETT


TODAY: Sunny HIGH LOW


51 37


ILLUSTRATION BY SACHA GROSSMAN, 12, RESTON


You have to be 25 years old to be elected to the House of Representatives and 30 to be elected to the Senate.


All across the country, adults are going to the polls today to vote in national, state and local elections. Whoa!!! You may be saying. How can that be? Wasn’t it just two years ago, in 2008, that we had a na- tional vote that elected Barack Obama president? You would be absolutely right. But presidential elec- tions are held only every four years, while other national elections are held every two years. When elec- tions happen in years that Americans are not selecting a president, they are called midterm elections. KidsPost’s Tracy Grant tries to answer some questions you might have about why your parents may be wearing “I Voted” stickers today.


Wouldn’t it make more sense to vote for everything at once?


That might seem convenient, but


it’s not what the Founding Fathers wanted when they wrote the Consti- tution. They set the terms of office for the president, representatives and senators so it’s not possible math- ematically to vote for everyone on the same day. Is today the only day to vote? No,


33 states and the District of Columbia allow people to vote early, either in person or by mail. This is meant to make it easier to vote so that more people will do it.


So, how many people will vote? In the 2008 presidential election,


62 percent of Americans who were eligible to vote actually cast ballots. That number will be smaller today because historically there is less in- terest in elections that don’t involve the president.


Does anything really change because of elections?


Right now, the Democratic Party is in control of Congress. The president is a Democrat and the majority of senators and representatives are Democrats. But if Republicans win a lot of the races in the House or the Senate, that could change. Who is in control of these parts of the govern- ment can affect the government’s pri- orities.


37


Te number of seats in the Senate to be decided today. Senators face reelection every six years. Only one local Senate seat, in Maryland, is being decided today.


Te U.S. Capitol shown facing east. THE WASHINGTON POST


AMC’s ‘Walking Dead’ strides ahead of the ‘Rally’ A


bout 2million people watched Saturday’s live telecast of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or


Fear” on Comedy Central. About 5million watched the debut of a zombie show the next night on AMC. “It’s a good day to be dead,” AMC


President Charlie Collier gloated Monday. No word from Comedy Central on


whether it was a good day to be a citizen of voting age. Also no word yet from creators of


AMC’s other series, “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” on how they feel about eating the dust of “The Walking Dead.” Its numbers are for its initial Sunday night telecast only. The “Rally to Restore Sanity


and/or Fear” ratings are for its initial, live telecast on Comedy Central only. The 2million also does not include those who watched it live on C-SPAN, which is not rated by Nielsen. It was no zombie fest — or San


Diego Comic-Con, where zombie aficionados got their first peek at “The Walking Dead” in July. But the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” —which included performances by John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Kid Rock and Yusuf Islam (the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, doing “Peace Train”), which should have been the highlight of the rally but which Stephen Colbert stupidly stomped on when he interrupted the poignant performance to make yet another of his tired look-at-me-I’m-a-rabid- fearmonger gags — was a ratings success of sorts. It attracted nearly 400 percent more viewers than the network has recently averaged on Saturdays in the middle of the day (and in the late morning on the West Coast). In the interest of full disclosure, we feel obligated to note that the percentage of the country’s population on the East Coast using their TVs at noon on Saturdays— and on the West Coast, using their TVs at 9 a.m. — is very small compared with the percentage of the


EVAN FALK/REUTERS TURNOUT:Tens of thousands came to the Mall for Comedy Central’s rally.


THE TV COLUMN Lisa de Moraes


population that uses their TVs in prime time. So zombies did have an advantage over the comics and their entourage.


Still, there is no getting around the


fact that the premiere of “The Walking Dead” bagged the biggest audience ever for any original series on AMC. We like to think of “The Walking


Dead” as an allegory for the Comcast-NBC merger, as has been suggested by at least one former NBC exec. But AMC’s Collier insisted Monday that “The Walking Dead” is that rare piece of programming that works on so many levels. “It is legitimately great


storytelling,” he said — one of those protesteth-too-much canned lines — while also calling it “not only highly


entertaining, but incredibly thought-provoking as well.” Comedy Central, meanwhile, noted


late Monday afternoon that the 570,000 live video streams of its rally make it “one of the biggest live streaming events ever for MTV Networks.” (Comedy Central is one of the MTV Networks.) The network also says that event organizers “feel confident that over 250,000 people attended the rally.” And, the network added, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority says it set a new record for highest Saturday Metrorail ridership for the day of the rally, breaking a 19-year-old record. Of course, the rally was not the only thing going on in Washington. It was the weekend of Howard University’s homecoming, for instance, and people were in town for Sunday’s Marine Corps Marathon. demoraes@washpost.com


Cleopatra biography delves into a mystique slighted by history


book world from C1


cially irresponsible, the law sided with the wife and children. If Cleopatra needed a role model from among her ancestors, she could have chosen from any number of ruthlessly powerful queens. As Herodotus put it, Egypt was a country where a woman urinated standing up. In Rome, on the other hand — even in palaces — a woman was for horsetrading and making babies. Nevertheless, Egypt relied on Rome for


protection. As war-loving Rome hungrily gobbled its way through the Mediterranean, Egypt lost one neighbor after another. By the time Cleopatra inherited her father’s throne, she was surrounded by Caesar. In order to consolidate her power against her brother, she appealed to Caesar himself. (Enter: muscular Sicilian, large sturdy bag.) Schiff has a magpie’s eye for detail; her


Cleopatra, as a result, is hung with shiny bits of history. To wit: An infatuated Caesar struts through Rome in tall, scarlet-red boots to visit his mistress; Cleopatra cooks up recipes for baldness (equal parts burnt mice, burnt rag, burnt horses’ teeth . . .) as handily as she might for contraception (salt, mouse excrement, honey and resin); Marc Antony likes to drink a little too much, and he’s a master at crashing weddings; and, in a scene only a modern-day working mother could appreciate, Cleopatra sails to Jerusa- lem to negotiate with Herod, even as she is large with Marc Antony’s child. But for all its splendor of detail, Schiff ’s book is a mod- el of concision, and its brisk, vividly written chapters move with a swiftness the Nile never enjoyed. Even as she recounts Cleopatra’s exploits — from bed to high sea — Schiff is careful to separate what is likely to be true from what is likely to be twaddle. Well aware that most of the sources on which she must rely were written in biblical times, 50 B.C. to A.D. 150 — anywhere from two decades to two centu- ries after Cleopatra was born— she informs us whether she is quoting Plutarch or Cicero or Dio in her characterizations, and, in the process, these thoroughly feisty, opinion- ated bards, too, become part of the tale.


What fascinates Schiff, and fascinates us as we move through the story, is how unfair history has been to Cleopatra. Despite Cae- sar and Marc Antony’s rampant sexual prof- ligacy with uncountable wives, concubines and passing assignations, it is (serially mo- nogamous) Cleopatra who is remembered as the panting seductress. Despite the real- ity that it was her staggering wealth and powerful fleets that Rome desperately need- ed, literature reduces her to a marginal ex- otic with a few womanly wiles. And despite her remarkable command of languages, ra- zor-sharp mind and transcendent abilities as a ruler — “every bit Caesar’s equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist” — it is the libidinous queen who lives on. Perhaps, as Schiff says, too many poets and playwrights have spoken for her: “We have been putting words in her mouth for two thousand years. In one of the busiest af- terlives in history she has gone on to be- come an asteroid, a video game, a cliche, a cigarette, a slot machine, a strip club.” If Shakespeare once attested to her infinite va- riety, little did he know what half a millenni- um more would do. To add further irony, the publisher of this book announces brightly that none other than Angelina Jolie will star in Schiff ’s book’s Hollywood adaptation. Make no mistake, “Cleopatra” will drive some historians cuckoo: It conflates, guz- zles centuries in a single sentence. It’s too in love with the slick phrase. It has hiccups of repetition a more careful editor might have eradicated.


But it is a great, glorious spree of a story.


In it, a formidable queen with brains, re- sources and a talent for having her way is caught in a shape-shifting moment over which she had no control. Struggling against the tide, as Schiff tells it, “she con- vinced her people that a twilight was a dawn and — with all her might — struggled to make it so.”


She was a politician. aranam@washpost.com


Arana is a writer at large for The Post. She is also a Distinguished Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.


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