The continuing contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has become a frenzy of debates and proclamations about democracy. Sen. Barack Obama's campaign has been particularly vociferous in claiming that its candidate stands for a transformative, participatory new politics. It has vaunted Obama's narrow lead in the overall popular vote in the primaries to date, as well as in the count of elected delegates, as the definitive will of the party's rank and file. If, while heeding the party's rules, the Democratic superdelegates overturn those majorities, Obama's supporters claim, they will have displayed a cynical contempt for democracy that would tear the party apart.
These arguments might be compelling if Obama's leads were not so reliant on certain eccentricities in the current Democratic nominating process, as well as on some blatantly anti-democratic maneuvers by the Obama campaign. Obama's advantage hinges on a system that, whatever the actual intentions behind it, seems custom-made to hobble Democratic chances in the fall. It depends on ignoring one of the central principles of American electoral politics, one that will be operative on a state-by-state basis this November, which is that the winner takes all. If the Democrats ran their nominating process the way we run our general elections, Sen. Hillary Clinton would have a commanding lead in the delegate count, one that will only grow more commanding after the next round of primaries, and all questions about which of the two Democratic contenders is more electable would be moot.
I may be doing something unsavory in my own pool by saying it, but this is the trouble that comes from teaching Political Science to college undergraduates. The positively Byzantine procedures of the Democratic nomination system could only have been imagined by someone who has only foggy memories of a discussion about proportional representation in a Poli Sci 101 class. When these dimly understood ideas are put into practice, God only knows what the end result will be. For all of the, largely nonsensical, hand wringing one can hear about the "undemocratic" Electoral College, it seems unlikely the architects among the Democrats have managed to do anything but make their nomination process less transparent.
The end result, whoever wins the nomination ultimately, may be to leave a sizable portion of the Democratic party base disaffected and dispirited, and all because of a sophomoric critique of the Electoral College that is better off being exiled to the campus dorm rooms of the world.
Gleaned from Memeorandum.
No comments:
Post a Comment