Posted by
Rich from Paso on Sunday, June 01, 2008 12:22:59 AM
Not since the founding of this nation has anyone trampled on the concept of "one man, one vote" until yesterday when the Democratic National Committee said that the voters of Michigan and Florida will not be represented at the DNC national convention as whole people. Yesterday, the DNC rules committee said, because the Democratic State Committees of Florida and Michigan violated national party rules, their delegates will only count as 1/2 a vote in Denver. Here is where Irony rears its ugly head.
When our forefathers were working on hammering out our new form of government, one of the big sticking issues, aside from the whole small states vs. big states issue of the Great Compromise, was who would be counted as a person for purposes of determing how many representatives would be seated per state. The southerners wanted all of their slaves counted as part of the total population of each southern state, which would give the South a majority in the new House of Representatives. The northern states opposed this on the grounds that the slaves were, after all, slaves and did not enjoy the rights and freedoms as other whole persons. Therefore, the northern states argued, slaves should not count as people until they are freed and are treated as equal people. This, of course, was repeallant to the South because the entire economy of the South was built on the backs of slave labor. The "3/5ths Compromise" stated that slaves, or "other people" as coyly noted in the Constitution, would only be given 60% representation in the Congress. In other words, they were 3/5ths a person according to the census. The compromise was enshrined into the final draft of the Constitution and ratified into existence in 1788. The United States would wrestle with the issue of slavery for 80 more years before the Civil War was fought to end slavery and another hundred years still before blacks in America would be allowoed unencumbered access to the polling places to vote as whole people.
So here we are, the Year of our Lord 2008, and the Democratic National Committee has voted to count the delegates, the Democrat delegates, of Michigan and Florida as only 1/2 a vote. This is 1/5th less than that of the slaves in the 1787 "3/5ths compromise". It is astounding that the DNC has chosen in a forum of DNC operatives to reduce the vote of their own constituents by one-half. If the Republicans had the gall that the Democrats obviously do, to reduce the power of two huge states by one-half, every Democrat and Mainstream media figure would be out there raking the RNC over the coals with the exact same criticism I am leveling here. The exception would be that the Democrats would be using language far, far worse than anything I have or will said here. Can there be any more doubt or debate that the Democratic National Committee of John F. Kennedy and Harry S. Truman and Franklin Delano Roosevelt is DEAD. The DNC of 2008, under the leadership of Howard Dean, is completely and utterly intellectually and morally bankrupt. The DNC of today views it's party rules with more import than the premise of "one man, one vote".
The greatest disenfranchisement of voters since the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was a process of cold calculation by the DNC. What they have said is that Hillary Clinton will not win the nomination for the presidency this year. They gave Hillary the win, but only gave her half the votes for that win. In addition, they further punished Hillary in Michigan by giving her fewer delegates than what she actually won outright. By choosing to disenfranchise voters that picked Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama, the DNC has decided that the voting blocks of blacks and young voters are more important to the DNC going forward than the voting blocks of white, working class men and woman.
While this caluculus may sound very cynical, it is logical if viewed through DNC eyes. The DNC has decided that they have to stand with their black candidate to keep the black vote from defecting or staying home. The DNC counts on, no, relies on the 90% of the black vote that every Democrat candidate gets simply by putting a "D" behind their name when they run for office. After all, Bull Connor was a Democrat and huge civil rights violator. Connor was the one that unleashed the dogs on civil rights protestors. George Wallace, a Democrat, stood in the doorway of that college auditorium in Huntsville, Alabama trying to prevent four black students from attending the University of Alabama in 1963. It is a "D" for Democrat that a 'former' Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Byrd, has behind his name, not an "R" for Republican. It was Democrat Sen. J. Fulbright, well-known segregationist, that Bill Clinton chose to be his mentor. And after all of these facts, the blacks of America continue to vote Democrat. Even after the Great Society of Democrat Lydon B. Johnson, that destroyed the black family and consigned blacks to a generation of second-class citizen status, blacks still continue to vote for Democrats. Michigan of 2008 is 14% black which represents nearly 12 million people and yet, the Democratic Party wished to count their vote as only 1/2 a person. But Michigan also is 81% white, which is a key Clinton demographic. Here again, the DNC can do nothing to undermine the candidacy of their black male candidate over the white, female candidate. Florida is more problematic for the DNC. Florida is 14.3% black and 20% Hispanic. These are key demographics that Democrats used in 2000 to say that Republicans were working to disenfranchise, even though the precincts and counties in question were ran by Democrats.
I am not willing to say that Florida and Michigan are going to vote Republican this election cycle. I have no way of knowing what kind of repercussions this decision by the DNC have going forward. I will say that this decision will harden Hillary Clinton's determination to stay in the race until the convention. Hillary Clinton will say that she is beign screwed out of the nomination because of this decision. Her determination to sway the votes of the Superdelegates will intensify. The Democratic Convention has become "Must See" TV this summer as the floor fight that is going to ensue will rival, if not surpass, the floor fight in 1968.
Sadly for Democrats, the DNC knows that Obama can't win, but they are stuck with him because of his race. If the DNC were to throw their fatally flawed black male candidate under the bus for the less, but still, fatally flawed white woman candidate, then the Democrats will lose the black vote for a generation, if not forever. The DNC also knows that more new young voters have signed up because of Obama than Clinton. Even though young voters do not vote with the same consistancy as older voters, the DNC knows that those young, infrequent voters will become older, regular voters in a few years. They want them as Democrat voters and they are working now to plant the seeds of a regular Democrat voter later. Hillary just chose the wrong year to pit her identity politics of gender against the identity politics of race.
Hillary also underminded her own moral high ground by going for the disenfranchisement of Michigan and Florida voters before the first ballot was cast. Through her own arogance in believing that she was the candidate of destiny, she agreed with the DNC in striping the delegates from FL and MI. However, she continued to keep her name on the ballot in each state as a cynical ploy to be able to go back to those states and claim them as victories if she needed them, which she does. If she had fought the DNC from the start on this plan to disenfranchise FL and MI voters, campaigned in the states as if they were regular states, then she would be able to say that she was entitled to all of the delegates she won. Now she just appears desparate for delegates to prop up her failing bid to be president.
I wish to remind you, the reader, one more time that this is totally a problem with in the Democrat Party, not the Republican Party. The chaos this election cycle has been created and implemented by the leadership of the Democratic National Committe.
If someone had asked me, here is the compromise that I would have put forth:
1. The DNC pays for revotes in Florida and Michigan in order to ensure that Obama is accurately represented since he abided by the rules and didn't campaign in either state.
2. Seat all delegates with out prejudice this year.
3. In 2012, as punishment for violating the 2008 rules against moving their primaries ahead of New Hampshire, the states of Florida and Michigan will not have their primaries before March 1, 2012.
This compromise would have affirmed the concept of "one man, one vote", would have punished FL and MI in the following election cycle and would have ensured that every voter's vote counted. Now there will be chaos, maybe even rioting, Denver this year because the DNC lacked the forsight to see a way out of this mess they created for themselves without trampling on the rights of voters in two very populace states.
Problem the DNC also has is that crap is still surfacing against Obama. First he had the Reverend Wright (known here simply as The Rev) and all of The Rev's anti-American, racist hatemongering. It wasn't until The Rev reiterated everything he said on the pulpit to the National Press Club did Obama distance himself from The Rev and disavow The Rev once and for all. But Obama didn't disavow the church, his church that had employed The Rev for the last 20 years of Obama's life. So the Trinity Baptist Church brings in the Reverend Michael Pfleger, a white man that spoke and said exactly the same things that The Rev had said for 20-years. So finally Barack Obama leaves the church that married him and his wife and baptised their childrem. The Superdelegates have to be scratching their heads wondering what else is waiting in the weeds to pop up against Obama. It has been 6 months and there are still things we don't know about Obama and his past associations.
Also, Obama can't keep his feet out of his mouth. In the span of 24 hours, Obama said that dead veterans are walking among us, that an uncle he didn't have helped the Soviet Red Army liberate Auschwitz in World War II. The truth is that Obama's great-uncle liberated Buchenwald in Germany, not Auschwitz in Poland. But the fact remains that Obama does not speak extemperaneously worth a damn. When Obama is off-script, he stammers and stutters worse than Bush every has. When on-script, Obama makes the most plain substance-free things sound profound. Constrast that with Bush, who says many profundities but are framed by the media as being the stammerings of an idiot. The Superdelegates know that Obama is fatally flawed and doesn't have the grit to stand up to the war hero status of McCain. They have to know this and yet they will still pick Obama at the end of the day.
In order for John McCain to capitalize on this huge mistake by the Democrats, can do several things:
a) He can select Charlie Crist from Florida as his Vice-Presidential candidate to try to lock up that key state. This might be unnecessary since the state has been prime McCain territory back in January.
b) Select a woman as his Vice-President. This would be the smarter move as this would endear McCain to Democratic women voters who feel that Hillary has been a victim of "sexism" pepetrated by the mainstream media and the DNC. Candidates here would be Sarah Palin from Alaska, Elizabeth Dole from North Carolina or Lisa Murcowski, also of Alaska. An outside choice her would also be Condaleeza Rice. Because of her ties to the Bush White House, which could galvanize Democrat opposition to McCain and solidfy the label of "third Bush Term", the fact remains that the biography of Condi Rice makes Barack Obama's look insignificant by comparison. Condi is everything Obama isn't: she is a genuine black American woman that grew up in the segregated south who has accomplished much on her own merits. She witnessed churches burning in Alabama whereas Bill Clinton could only say he read about it. Condi would be a great choice, but I don't see this as a real posibility because of her stated desire to not run and the McCain camp wishing to distance themselves from the Bush Administration.
c) Select Bobby Jindal as V.P. A true conservative in the Reagan mold, Jindal is the son of Indian immigrants in Louisiana. Jindal would be able to stand for minorities while championing the fixes to the government that would prevent the disjointed and ineffectual Federal response to Hurricane Katrina from happening again. Jindal could expand the Katrina reforms to a national stage and lock in McCain as different from Bush by picking a man that has had to deal with the aftermath of the largest natural disaster in U. S. history. Also, Jindal is a reformer and a visionary that has successfully changed the culture of corruption that has existed in Democrat-dominated Louisiana since the creation of the state. Also, and most importantly, Jindal is a young man of 36 years old. He would be 40 at the end of the first McCain term. If McCain only ran for one term, Jindal would be in a prime position to use his youth and his vice-presidential experience to beat Hillary Clinton in 2012.
Mitt Romney really doesn't make my list because I think that he would overshadow McCain as Veep. Romney and McCain also have animosites left over from the primaries that would linger into the general electin run.
My votes are 1: Jindal, 2. Palin, 3. Murkowski, 4. Crist, 5. Dole, 6. Romney
This Democrat disenfranchisement plays right into McCain's strengths if he makes the right choices here on out.