Tuesday, March 11, 2008

BFT 4.0 - Whiny primary voters

It is a good time to be working on a liberal talk show. At least if it is non Air America related, after all, we can at least pay our bills, I think Mr. Franken and Miss Garafalo are still waiting on paychecks (don't worry, they are in the mail). Take yesterday for instance, where despite being on a lower powered AM station and running with a last minute fill in host (thanks Phil for coming in on 1.5 hr notice), we ran a full board of calls for the better part of two of the three hours we were on the air. The show had plenty of input by moi, enough so that I may end up posting it on imeem as being my content as well as Phil's.

That is not why we are here today however. A theme has come up regarding the Democrats, one that pits the Obama supporters against the Clinton supporters, and one that should be fairly easy to address and that is the rules of the game. I am plenty sick and tired of hearing Clinton supporters complain that caucuses favor Obama, or Obama supporters yelling that the superdelegates could undermine the will of the people. Get this skippy, those were the rules you signed on for when the contest began. This is akin to a football team taking the field then bitching that it takes ten yards to get a first down. You knew this going in, there were no hidden curtains or unknowing surprises sprung on either of the candidates. The Clinton campaign should have anticipated that caucuses would matter and the Obama campaign needs to bag this notion that the superdelegates should reflect the will of the voters, that is not what they are designed to do. If it were the case, then the votes of the two senators and one governor from Massachusetts, all superdelegates, should in fact belong to Clinton since she won that state. The superdelegates are designed to be outside of the process, sure some superdelegates will cater to their elected districts in order to maintain their office, but if they don't, it is not a crime against humanity. Ideally they are to use their judgement in determining who they support, regardless of how flawed or flawless that judgement may be.

Don't get me wrong, in an ideal world I would be perfectly content with one voter - one vote primaries for all 50 states, no caucuses, no superdelegates, but I don't get to make that call, nor do the candidates. All they get to do is play by the rules that were in place long before the campaign took place, so to all of those people complaining now how the rules are unfair to their favored candidate, grow up.

1 comment:

  1. I don't understand clearly where the caucuses and super delegates fit into your whole political process, I'll have to do some research on that later.
    From my perspective your whole election process seems very long winded.

    ReplyDelete

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