Hillary Clinton is right. Hold on, I just threw up into my mouth a little bit...ok... Hillary Clinton is right about the injustice of the Democratic Party's nominating process, which does not mean that she is not also self-serving, self-absorbed, and self-pitying. It does mean, however, that she has a very valid point when she criticizes her party for its disenfranchisement of two major states.
One of the lessons of American politics is that the Democratic Party will always find a way to shoot themselves in the foot. Or the face. How did they do so this year? Well, for some bizarre and Byzantine "reason", the party leadership decreed that the millions of Democrats in Florida and Michigan would not be heard.
Why did they do this? That's like explaining why the tax code is longer than the history of dirt. There is no logical reason, other than that there is a whole parasitic class of Americans who make their living by taking simple rules and guidelines and weighing them down with footnotes and loopholes until it is possible to write off beer as a business expense or to give the presidency to George W. Bush.
So whatever their "reasoning", the party elite decided that Florida and Michigan were to be disenfranchised. Why? Because some other group of elites decided to hold the primaries in Florida and Michigan earlier than the party would have preferred. Why does this matter? I have no idea.
The relevant question is how the "Democratic" Party publicly promised to disenfranchise millions of people in order to punish a handful of smoky-room dwellers who, for whatever reasons, changed the dates of the primaries.
The Democratic nominees, to their well-deserved disgrace, promised to abide by these rules. Hillary Clinton, in perhaps the most unsurprising about-face in political history, has now decided that this is unfair. She's right. I can say she's right because this has nothing to do with her, and everything to do with millions of normal folks who voted in these states and are now being told to piss off.
I don't want Hillary Clinton to be president. I think Hillary Clinton makes Richard Nixon look like a well-balanced and empathetic public servant. But I am more loyal to truth and democracy than I am to my own desires, and the truth is that Hillary Clinton will finish this primary season with more votes than Barack Obama. She wins. Period.
What was the Democratic Party thinking when it swept two huge and crucial states under the rug? It was thinking two things. Firstly, it was thinking that it could afford to piss all over millions of people and then expect those same voters to show up in November and vote for whoever the Democratic nominee is. So, they were not allowed to have a voice in picking that nominee, but they were expected to use their voices in endorsing that nominee after that fact. Presumptuous much?
The second assumption the Democratic Party made was that the nominating process could not possibly be so close that a few million votes here or there would be missed by any candidate. Interesting assumption. Right up there with "The Iraqis will love us" or "Nagin's got his shit together; he'll handle the hurricane."
Well, lo and behold, it has transpired that those millions of votes do matter. They cannot rightly be counted for Hillary at Obama's expense, since Obama wasn't even on the ballot in both states and he campaigned in neither. But neither should they be deprived from Madame Clinton because of some smoky-move maneuver that the voters had no say in.
I don't know what the solution to this problem is, but I know that the Democratic Party is about to do to its own voters what the Supreme Court did to the whole country in 2000. Everyone votes. One candidate has more votes. Then a bunch of Brooks Brothers twerps explain to us why that person didn't really win.
Here's what I would do: I would rewrite the rules for the Democratic Party. They would fit on a cocktail napkin. "On June 1 of a presidential election year, every state will hold a democratic primary in which only registered democrats can vote. Whichever nominee wins the most popular votes wins the nomination."
I defy anyone to explain to me why this cannot be done. If it had been done this year, we'd have a legitimate nominee, even if it proved to be one we despised. Instead, we have this kaleidoscopic farce in which Hillary Clinton will impale her entire party on the sword of a half-truth that this ridiculous system has provided her with.
Why wouldn't the Democratic Party adopt my two-sentence rulebook? Well, if they did, what in the world would all the lawyers do?
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