The Democrats and their Old Nemesis, Democracy
Filed under: US Elections
You may recall, if you are an ardent political junkie, a furor that arose in the American loopy left just as the primary election cycle was getting serious involving the apportionment of electoral votes in California. They decried as a "dirty tricks campaign" a Republican initiative to apportion the nation's most-populous state's presidential electoral votes proportional to the popular vote -- in other words, it wouldn't be winner-take-all. Each candidate would get the same share of the state's electoral votes (it has the most of any state) as he or she had won of the state's popular vote. This would guarantee Republicans a chunk of the state's electoral votes even if they lost, and could have created a major obstacle to the Democrats winning the presidency. Naturally, the Democrats wailed to high heaven that it was unfair.
And yet, as Democrat (and Hillary Clinton backer) Evan Bayh (Senator of Indiana) points out, the Democrats conduct their own primary nominating process in exactly this manner. Moreover, if they did in their primaries what they demanded Republicans do in the general election in California, and awarded primary electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis, then Hillary Clinton would now have a significant lead over Barack Obama even without considering Michigan and Florida. Other than those, the states Clinton has won carry 219 electoral votes, while the states in Obama's column have only 202. You need 268 electoral votes to win the Oval Office. The only reason Obama is leading in the actual primary is because it isn't winner-take-all, and he's been able to scoop up considerable support in states he has lost (including almost every "major" state in the country -- Texas, New York and California, for instance).
It probably will not surprise you to learn that the Daily Kos called the California proposal "steal this election" and opposed it vehemently. If you know Kos, then neither will it surprise you that it didn't mention a single word about that position when it also vehemently attacked Bayh for noticing Clinton's electoral position (since the Kos is feverishly and predictably supporting the wacko extremist Obama -- when a splinter group dared to support Hillary, they were savaged and driven into exile). Their old standby scatology makes its appearance in this attack, so you know that Bayh truly got under their scaly skin.
This, dear reader, in a nutrootshell, is why the Democrats haven't reelected an elected president with a majority of the popular vote since World War II, while since then the Republicans have done so four different times. The fact is that, though named after "democracy," this is the last thing Democrats actually support. See, the people of the country simply don't support the left-wing initiative, which means that by definition to enact it Democrats must be prepared (as dictators of the left always have been) to ram it down the public's throat "for its own good." This is how FDR handled the "new deal" and how LBJ handled the "great society." It's how Lenin and Mau operated, and it seems it will be so until the end of time.
NOTE: Three devastating critiques of the Obamillusion, one by William Kristol in the NYT, one by Christopher Hitchens in Slate, and one -- the most crippling -- by Lionel Chetwynd in Pajamas Media. Chetwynd references "that . . . teaching opportunity I hoped you would evoke: not explaining Wright's outrage to me, but explaining his outrageousness to him."
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