In the Cowboy State Daily, Rod Miller cites Thermodynamics and offers a solution.
The only solution I can come up with is Ken Kesey’s Corollary to Newton’s Second Law. Kesey’s Corollary states that, “If the amount of energy in a closed system is finite, open the system.”Opening our system – open conventions, for example – might truly allow our cream to rise to the top and prevent two inept has-beens like Biden and Trump from clogging our pipes.
Opening our system so that the best among us have an even chance of election will give the entrenched powers-that-be a serious case of the dropsy, and they’ll fight that notion tooth and claw. But I think its worth a shot, given what I saw Thursday night.
Aside from the fact (OK, my opinion) that he has limited credibility having shied away from watching the whole debate--what other facts is he shying away from viewing?--heMiller seems to have a different understanding of what an open convention is than I do.
ReplyDeleteIn and open--brokered--convention, [t]he nomination is then decided through a process of alternating political horse trading, delegate vote trading, and additional revotes. In that circumstance, all regular delegates, who may have been pledged to a particular candidate according to rules, which vary from state to state, are "released" and may switch their allegiance to a different candidate before the next round of balloting. It is hoped that the extra privilege extended to the delegates will result in a revote that yields a clear majority of delegates for one candidate.
That's per Wikipedia, and even there, it's a pretty mainstream definition.
He wants to skip that first vote/eliminate it by having the delegates vote from the jump according to their own lights? Delegates chosen how, exactly? In the primary elections done over the last several cycles, those delegates are chosen by the party's voters (and sometimes influenced by the other party's voters in "open" primaries) and, depending on each State's primary election rules are allocated on a winner takes all or a pro rata basis among the candidates standing for the party's nomination.
Over the last several primaries, the Republican Party has fielded a plethora of candidates, some serious, some on an ego trip. The Progressive-Democratic Party, on the other hand, has worked hard to limit the candidates to Party's favorite, to the extent that in the last round, Party limited the candidates, functionally, to just one.
In both cases, though, each party's constituents were able to vote for their own preference. Even in the Progressive-Democratic Party primaries, those voters could have written in someone else, or voted for Phillips and written in his name where it was absent. They chose not to, entirely of their own volition.
In both cases, the parties got/will get the candidate the parties' constituents want.
And Miller wants to take that away from the people and give it to a collection of party elite delegates to horse trade among themselves just because he doesn't like the outcomes of this round? The people as a group are going to do some stupid things. Their--our--track record, though, is a whole lot better than centralized choosers, and I'll bet on us ignorant average Americans every time.
Miller sounds like a liberal.
Eric Hines
I think newspaper writers usually are. The ones around here sure are. You wouldn’t know we lived in one of the most reliably red Congressional districts in the country to read the newspapers. Wyoming is probably the same.
DeleteIt would be even better if the powerbrokers in the Dem party, in addition to completely ignoring the primary voters and all the rules they supposedly are bound by, could cause some previously unknown candidates to appear magically and magically gain instant name recognition and a national reputation. Otherwise we're looking at the likes of Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Jay Pritzker, or Michelle Obama, to say nothing of the putative VP.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I've noticed last night and today, indeed for months, is the relentless emphasis on Biden's age. His age isn't the point. A 50-year-old with early-onset dementia who had degenerated to his shocking state would be as serious a problem as Biden is. What's more, I know many people in their 80s and even 90s who are functioning perfectly well; Trump himself is no spring chicken, but he's coherent. (I know the MSM paint him as a madman, but they're just finding other ways to howl that they hate his policies. He doesn't drool or stare vacantly into space.) The point isn't Biden's age, it's his advanced dementia. Yes, dementia risk grows with age, but we're not talking population statistics here, we're talking the advanced dementia clearly on display in a particular individual.
If it were only Dems harping on age, I'd assume it was their way of teeing up the obligatory parenthetical "But Trump is old, TOO." But Republicans do it just about as often, which puzzles me.
Well, Trump has been pointing out, post-debate, that the problem isn't Biden's age, it's his incompetence.
ReplyDeleteRepublican age-harping may start to abate.
Eric Hines
I agree with Eric's analysis of the Democrat primaries. With the probable exceptions of 1992 and 2008, I'd argue the Democrat's haven't run a clean primary since 1976 when they were shocked that Jimmy Carter was nominated, even though he did go on to win the election. Most of the time it's tweaks to the rules which attempt to "fix" the primary voter's selection of the last loser but they've recently gotten more and more blatant at managing the actions of the candidates, especially the efforts to block Sanders in 2016 and 2020. You can't convince me that four candidates made the decision to drop out in the span of 3 days completely independently in favor of a guy who was not clearly building popular momentum, and 2024 just got worse with some state party organizations canceling primaries altogether and declaring Biden the delegate winner.
ReplyDeleteDNC conventions have been as crooked as a dogs hind leg for as long as I've been paying attention to politics.
ReplyDeletenmewn
Minor tweak--he means laws of thermodynamics, not Newton's laws.
ReplyDeleteA few decades ago I ran across someone complaining that picking candidates via party primaries, while it was more democratic, had the unintended consequence that it brought forward more extreme factions of the party, who were less popular in the general election. He compared it unfavorably with smoke-filled room decisions, where the idea was to get somebody who could win; someone not too far out there.
We all know of problems with the Smoke Filled Room approach.
The kind of people who used to run the SFRs are still around, though the room isn't in the convention hall, and the decisions are enforced through the media--you never hear of some people, or only bad things.
What we seem to have now seems to combine the worst of both approaches--the extremists get more clout, and many groups never get heard from.