Cowboy Confessional

Prepare for Election 2000, the Democrat Sequel.

Assuming your recreational narcotics permit, you may recall the hilarity of the 2000 presidential election. Eight years ago there was a close vote, and one party (the Democrats) tried to change the rules of the game in order to win/steal the results.

(I don’t care if you are a Republican or a Democrat. I’m neither, and call things as they are and were. Gore and his team tried every way they could to subvert standing election law and recount procedures to find 400+ votes that didn’t exist. He deserved to lose for being a conniving lout.)

Fast forward to 2008 and we see Hillary and Barack running neck and neck with the very probable outcome being that neither will have the necessary number of delegates to secure their party’s nomination. In the absence of a clear winner, there are three ways this dead heat could be settled:

Super-delegates: These are party chieftains who do not represent any voters, and will align with whomever they can extract the largest number of post-election favors — or in the case of super-delegates from Chicago, cash bribes.

Open convention: This is where the party ignores the will of its own members, and frees every delegate to vote for whomever has the most liquor at their hospitality suite. Teddy Kennedy, the Lady Killer of Chappaquiddick, called for an open convention in 1976 when he failed to beat a toothsome peanut farmer for the Democrat nomination.

Redos: Some folk suggest that Florida and Michigan to redo their voting. Both states moved their primaries up in the calendar against party will, and were rewarded by having their delegates dismissed. Now the party may be willing to subvert their own rules to forestall an ugly showdown.

Three options, all of which change the rules to the detriment of the average Joe. The little guy. The union man and rural rube. The poor dupe who believed his vote actually counted.

Redos and open conventions are obvious rule reversals. Open conventions simply dismiss all votes casts, as if the plebs never stood in the pouring rains or suffered through a night of caucusing. Redoing the votes in Florida and Michigan (where Obama was not even on the ballot) reverses Howard Dean’s iron-fisted edict, showing that even he can admit a mistake … silently and to himself alone.

More subtle is the super-delegate sham. Contrary the the basic premise of democracy — one (wo)man, one vote — the party name after the word itself long ago dispensed with proletarian privileges. In a previous contested primary, the Party of Pravda assured the fix would always be in, and now they are ready to exercise it.

I have a lot of Democrat friends, and none of them are happy tonight. The inevitable electoral fistfight will result in a candidate selected by someone other than the voters. In November, a lot of Democrats are going to sit-out the final vote, disgusted that their first vote never counted.

And the Republicans will win again … and Howard Dean, no doubt, will blame Karl Rove for the loss.

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This entry was posted by Guy Smith on Wednesday, March 5th, 2008 at 7:01 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.