And the Winner Is…?
April 5, 2008
In this race for the democratic party nomination for president, I think that many of us have learned a great deal about the roles that so many issues play when it comes to picking a president. We have seen the isues of race, gender, age, money, corruption, religion, and infidelity, just to name a few. Oh, and let us not forget, the ever important super delegates.
For many observers, it conjures up the illusion of some back room filled with a bunch of party bosses sitting around smoking cigars and drinking scotch while deciding who is going to be the next president of the United States. I think that there is some validity in that line of thinking. These super heroes that are going to rescue our democratic party and sort out all of this election mess does seem to be a process fraught with ambiguity. Many are asking why the vote of a party chair person, a member of congress, or a governor have more than one vote. In fact, they get to vote twice and their vote as a super delegate does in fact carry much more weight than my simple vote for Senator Clinton did.
It has the air of an elitist process, not the egalitarian type that is typically promoted by the democrats. However, as a student of political science, I look at these issues in an historical context as well. Looking back to the time of the founding of our country, a similar system was set up with the establishment of the electoral college. Under this system, electors are chosen by each state to represent it in the electoral college. These chosen people have a lot of power. Can you draw any parallels to super delegates?
From my studies and research I am aware that the electoral college was designed to save our country from the uneducated and uninformed “regular citizens” by creating a system by which the more enlightened among us can decide such important issues. Again I ask, sound like the super delegate system?
I write this post to make the case for a national primary with a direct election. It is time to trust the people of this great country to make the all important decision of who our leaders should be. This drawn out primary season has created a dangerous condition that we should try to avoid…voter fatigue. I know that it seems that so many people are being brought into the process by both Clinton and Obama, but I posit that when it comes to election day, our historical trends will unfortunately be proven true once again. It will be the older people in our population that will exercise their right to vote in greatest numbers because I think that this election cycle is beginning to turn off many in the younger generation. After all, research shows they have shorter attention spans.
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This work by Jason Rowsey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
