The official results of the Iowa caucus claim that, on the Democratic side, that Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico received only 2% of the vote, good for fourth place, but news sources reporting earlier on the morning of Friday, January 4, 2008, claimed that Richardson had polled 10%. Later that night, in an appearance at a teacher's college in Nashua, New Hampshire, Governor Richardson himself told the crowd of perhaps 50 or 60 that he had received 20,000 votes by caucus-goers. As there were a reported 227,000 Democratic caucus-goers, Richardson had, in fact, received something akin to 9% of the vote.
He Iowa caucus system is deliberately un-democratic, and the Democratic caucuses are worse than the Republican, who count the number of caucus-voters for each candidate and leave it at that. The Democratic caucuses, however, demand a second apportionment of the vote of those candidates who cannot achieve 15% of the vote, so Richardson's 20,000 votes and 9% of the vote eventually was whittled down to only a reported 2% of the vote, ostensibly those die-hards who would not vote for a second candidate. But who knows exactly what happened. What we do know is that the press then condemned Richardson to oblivion, reporting the 2% figure.
What does that say about the system where such a thing occurs -- that we are now, in our decadence, nearly the equivalent of the old Soviet Union? America increasingly is a Potemkin Village, such as in its use of economic statistics that leave the price of energy and food out of the inflation rate (as if we weren't affected by higher energy and food costs!)
What does it say about the media that it doesn't properly report the outcome of the caucuses, that is, how many Richardson voters were there before he was considered "unviable," but puts everything in the guise of a breathless report on a horse-race, even though the press knows the track is fixed? I've been searching the Internet from the days before it was called the Internet and before there were graphical user interfaces, and I cannot easily find a single source that simply reports the numbers. Everything is hyped up and spun. Perfect, for those who want obfuscation to give themselves power, like political pundits. But what of us who believe we live in a democracy?
Iowa's system is not democratic, that's for sure. According to an article by Jodi Kantor in theInternational Herald Tribune, "[T]he caucuses...tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have babysitting and many others who work in retail, at gasoline stations and in other jobs that require evening duty."
The question, then, is this: Why is this singularly undemocratic event given so much press coverage?
When I was 16 years old, I worked for Birch Bayh in the 1976 New Hampshire primary, a high school student who took time out at nights and on weekends to volunteer. There is a new story that has been spun that Jimmy Carter got a "boost" out of Iowa after "winning" the caucuses that year (the Iowa caucuses had been moved to precede the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary only in 1972), but the fact is, there was barely any coverage of the Iowa caucuses that year. Carter won the New Hampshire primary as he was up against four liberals who split the progressive vote. It wasn't until 1980 that Iowa began receiving press coverage, possibly as it was originally thought that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts would trounce Carter in the New Hampshire primary, as Carter was considered weak and Kennedy the "favorite son," being from neighboring Massachusetts. That didn't happen, but coverage of Iowa did.
Iowa's arcane and byzantine caucus system is difficult for the public to understand. Before going to Governor Richardson's rally in Nashua, I had to explain the caucuses to my friend Gary, who had been at my side campaigning for Birch Bayh in 1976 and was with me tonight.
Is the fact that Iowa's system is so -- obscure -- is this why the media focuses so intently on them, as it engenders power for the press? Not so not very long ago, the Iowa caucuses were seen as being just about utterly without value; they have taken on their now overwhelming prominence only fairly recently, when the media started hyping and over-hyping them.
The Iowa caucuses are the Golden Globes of the presidential system: a sham that attracts press attention because the press gives the event attention. Reading how Barack Obama is now going to be President of the United States -- the Drudge Report headlined its coverage of the Democratic caucus results this morning with the headline "Mr. President" -- is surreal.
Reading the coverage today, one finds that the press has developed this mantra that "there's only three tickets out of Iowa." This wasn't true in 1980. Is it true today? Does this mean that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who barely registered with the very conservative and heavily evangelical Christian Republican caucus-going crowd in Iowa, is through? Or, does that only apply to the Democrats and not the GOP? What madness!
When a politician like Bill Richardson, surely the best qualified person to assume the Presidency in this day and age with Al Gore out of the race, a politician with almost as many years in Congress as the Democratic "Big Three" of Clinton, Edwards and Obama combined, a man with Cabinet experience and diplomatic experience (including being ambassador to the United Nations) and five years of executive experience in his two terms as governor of New Mexico -- how a man like this can be so poorly served by the electoral system that our Founding Fathers gave so little thought to in designing when writing the Constitution is a sin It's a sin compounded by the adolescent, money-focused attitude of the press.
The poor showing of such an eminently qualified politician is particularly egregious in a time when the Imperial Presidency now means that one man lifted by this horribly inadequate system to the Oval Office can wage war on his own initiative, due to the exigencies of his own vanity, without any effective checks. The Founding Fathers never intended the President to have such powers; if they had, they would have designed a much better system than the Darwinist anarchy that exists now.
What can you say about a system in which the best candidate doesn't come out on top, about a system focused more on heat rather than light as candidates outspend each other to manipulate the media? The media's hyping of Barrack Obama, a man of little experience but who can fit some type of civics class narrative that the advertising driven media so loves in its embrace of shallowness in pursuit of the marketing dollar, is surely one of the signs of a seriously dysfunctional system.
In reality, the system is the way it is. There's nothing voters can do to change it. This is not a parliamentary system that encourages democracy, but a plutocracy in which pecuniary power equals political power. Anticipating the reaping of the dragon's teeth that have been sown for two generations, the harvest of two generations of shallow movie-star-like media-driven politics predicted by Norman Mailer in Superman Comes to the Supermarket in 1960, all I can say is that America likely deserves the fate it is facing. And the media will be there to make a show out of it Like any old whore, it is ready and willing to go every which way. Unlike the old whore, the media claims itself as the blushing virgin, while taking the money right over the table. It is all so meretricious.
Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying that if he were forced to choose between a government without a free press and a free press without a government, he would choose the latter. But what would he say today of the confluence of a corporate press shackled to the demands of the all mighty dollar, and a political process more enthralled to cold hard cash each and every day?
The presidential election system is in dire need of reform
He Iowa caucus system is deliberately un-democratic, and the Democratic caucuses are worse than the Republican, who count the number of caucus-voters for each candidate and leave it at that. The Democratic caucuses, however, demand a second apportionment of the vote of those candidates who cannot achieve 15% of the vote, so Richardson's 20,000 votes and 9% of the vote eventually was whittled down to only a reported 2% of the vote, ostensibly those die-hards who would not vote for a second candidate. But who knows exactly what happened. What we do know is that the press then condemned Richardson to oblivion, reporting the 2% figure.
What does that say about the system where such a thing occurs -- that we are now, in our decadence, nearly the equivalent of the old Soviet Union? America increasingly is a Potemkin Village, such as in its use of economic statistics that leave the price of energy and food out of the inflation rate (as if we weren't affected by higher energy and food costs!)
What does it say about the media that it doesn't properly report the outcome of the caucuses, that is, how many Richardson voters were there before he was considered "unviable," but puts everything in the guise of a breathless report on a horse-race, even though the press knows the track is fixed? I've been searching the Internet from the days before it was called the Internet and before there were graphical user interfaces, and I cannot easily find a single source that simply reports the numbers. Everything is hyped up and spun. Perfect, for those who want obfuscation to give themselves power, like political pundits. But what of us who believe we live in a democracy?
Iowa's system is not democratic, that's for sure. According to an article by Jodi Kantor in theInternational Herald Tribune, "[T]he caucuses...tend to leave out nearly entire categories of voters: the infirm, soldiers on active duty, restaurant employees on the dinner shift, medical personnel who cannot leave their patients, parents who do not have babysitting and many others who work in retail, at gasoline stations and in other jobs that require evening duty."
The question, then, is this: Why is this singularly undemocratic event given so much press coverage?
When I was 16 years old, I worked for Birch Bayh in the 1976 New Hampshire primary, a high school student who took time out at nights and on weekends to volunteer. There is a new story that has been spun that Jimmy Carter got a "boost" out of Iowa after "winning" the caucuses that year (the Iowa caucuses had been moved to precede the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary only in 1972), but the fact is, there was barely any coverage of the Iowa caucuses that year. Carter won the New Hampshire primary as he was up against four liberals who split the progressive vote. It wasn't until 1980 that Iowa began receiving press coverage, possibly as it was originally thought that Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts would trounce Carter in the New Hampshire primary, as Carter was considered weak and Kennedy the "favorite son," being from neighboring Massachusetts. That didn't happen, but coverage of Iowa did.
Iowa's arcane and byzantine caucus system is difficult for the public to understand. Before going to Governor Richardson's rally in Nashua, I had to explain the caucuses to my friend Gary, who had been at my side campaigning for Birch Bayh in 1976 and was with me tonight.
Is the fact that Iowa's system is so -- obscure -- is this why the media focuses so intently on them, as it engenders power for the press? Not so not very long ago, the Iowa caucuses were seen as being just about utterly without value; they have taken on their now overwhelming prominence only fairly recently, when the media started hyping and over-hyping them.
The Iowa caucuses are the Golden Globes of the presidential system: a sham that attracts press attention because the press gives the event attention. Reading how Barack Obama is now going to be President of the United States -- the Drudge Report headlined its coverage of the Democratic caucus results this morning with the headline "Mr. President" -- is surreal.
Reading the coverage today, one finds that the press has developed this mantra that "there's only three tickets out of Iowa." This wasn't true in 1980. Is it true today? Does this mean that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who barely registered with the very conservative and heavily evangelical Christian Republican caucus-going crowd in Iowa, is through? Or, does that only apply to the Democrats and not the GOP? What madness!
When a politician like Bill Richardson, surely the best qualified person to assume the Presidency in this day and age with Al Gore out of the race, a politician with almost as many years in Congress as the Democratic "Big Three" of Clinton, Edwards and Obama combined, a man with Cabinet experience and diplomatic experience (including being ambassador to the United Nations) and five years of executive experience in his two terms as governor of New Mexico -- how a man like this can be so poorly served by the electoral system that our Founding Fathers gave so little thought to in designing when writing the Constitution is a sin It's a sin compounded by the adolescent, money-focused attitude of the press.
The poor showing of such an eminently qualified politician is particularly egregious in a time when the Imperial Presidency now means that one man lifted by this horribly inadequate system to the Oval Office can wage war on his own initiative, due to the exigencies of his own vanity, without any effective checks. The Founding Fathers never intended the President to have such powers; if they had, they would have designed a much better system than the Darwinist anarchy that exists now.
What can you say about a system in which the best candidate doesn't come out on top, about a system focused more on heat rather than light as candidates outspend each other to manipulate the media? The media's hyping of Barrack Obama, a man of little experience but who can fit some type of civics class narrative that the advertising driven media so loves in its embrace of shallowness in pursuit of the marketing dollar, is surely one of the signs of a seriously dysfunctional system.
In reality, the system is the way it is. There's nothing voters can do to change it. This is not a parliamentary system that encourages democracy, but a plutocracy in which pecuniary power equals political power. Anticipating the reaping of the dragon's teeth that have been sown for two generations, the harvest of two generations of shallow movie-star-like media-driven politics predicted by Norman Mailer in Superman Comes to the Supermarket in 1960, all I can say is that America likely deserves the fate it is facing. And the media will be there to make a show out of it Like any old whore, it is ready and willing to go every which way. Unlike the old whore, the media claims itself as the blushing virgin, while taking the money right over the table. It is all so meretricious.
Thomas Jefferson is quoted as saying that if he were forced to choose between a government without a free press and a free press without a government, he would choose the latter. But what would he say today of the confluence of a corporate press shackled to the demands of the all mighty dollar, and a political process more enthralled to cold hard cash each and every day?
The presidential election system is in dire need of reform
No comments:
Post a Comment