Lock the Vote

Lock the vote
Geov Parrish - WorkingForChange.com

12.02.03 - Already, critics and fans of George W. Bush are getting ready to
make their voice heard in the 2004 presidential race.

Pity that many of them will be too late.

One of the more discouraging developments in the 2000 race was the
near-complete lack of any chance for involvement of most states' voters in
the selection of our next president. Both Bush and Gore had their party
nominations essentially locked in before a single primary vote was cast;
later, the Fiasco of Florida masked the reality that one of the closest
Electoral College elections in history was a close contest in only a handful
of swing states, border states on the Red/Blue frontier.

It may be worse in 2004. In many states, it's already guaranteed to be.

Here in Washington state, the state legislature is convening next week for a
special, one-day session with only one announced purpose: to cancel our
state's scheduled March 2, 2004 Super Tuesday primary. Democrats had already
scrapped their plan to select presidential nominating delegates using
results of both the primary and party caucuses; instead, they'll draw all of
their delegates from Feb. 7 party caucuses held across the state. Assuming
Dubya doesn't keel over, Republicans already know who their nominee will be.
So why not cancel the primary, saving a desperately needed $7 million for
the state's budget?

Moreover, only three of the nine major Democratic candidates -- Howard Dean,
John Kerry, and Dennis Kucinich -- are mounting meaningful campaigns in our
state. Both Dean and Kucinich drew national momentum from well-attended
events in Seattle this year. But Kucinich has virtually no chance of getting
the nomination, and the state is considered Dean's to lose in the Feb. 7
caucuses.

Our state is hardly unique. In fact, it's home to a number of major donors,
and although it's recently been a "Blue" Democratic state in presidential
elections, it's on many analyst's list of swing states that could go either
way in 2004 -- something 35 or so states can't claim. In state after state,
the Democratic nomination boils down to a media-anointed "favorite" --
usually Dean -- who will either gain or lose "momentum" depending on his
showing. Only a handful of states -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina,
California -- will have a chance to bestow such momentum before the
nomination is a fait accompli. Beyond those states, virtually none have
meaningful campaign organizations for more than two or three of the nine
Democrats running hard.

The reason is simple: beyond those early momentum states, voters' desires
are basically irrelevant. In many ways, party voters here have already
"spoken" -- 15,000 did, anyway, when they turned out on August 25 to hear
Howard Dean at a Seattle appearance.

That event remains a high point in Dean's national campaign, and signaled to
D.C. insiders that the Internet-based Dean "revolution" involved real,
flesh-and-blood people. The story of the 2004 campaign thus far has been
Dean's outsider assault on the Democrats' Beltway establishment, which --
from Democratic National Committee chair Terry McAuliffe on down -- is
stacked with Clinton loyalists. (It was stacked with Gore loyalists, but the
Clintons' faithful mounted a purge after the 2000 election debacle.)

Clintonites are both more conservative and D.C.-savvy than Dean's crowd --
but they haven't united around a single alternative candidate. The pressure
is on for them to do so, and for the party itself to settle on a challenger
to Bush, both to avoid a destructive intra-party battle and to start raising
money to try to compete with Dubya's $200 million campaign war chest. Bush's
record-breaking fundraising prowess is also why Dean and Kerry have now
announced that they, like Bush, have opted out of the federal matching funds
system. They've officially raised enough money -- or want us to believe
they've raised enough money -- that the limits imposed by the match system
crimp their style. The race among Democratic hopefuls now is literally for
which can get financial backing from more big corporations and donors, and
that, even more than the positioning in key primary states, is all about
managing perceptions: who's hot? Who's seizing the public's imagination? Who
can beat Bush? So far, Dean's momentum comes from the simple fact that none
of his rivals have excited a lot of people -- but in our media-saturated
times, that can be changed.

The whole process has little to do with who would make a good president --
and even less to do with who we voters think might make a good one.
High-level fundraising, Beltway deal-making, and media management is where
the contest is being waged -- deadly serious, for enormous stakes, and far
above the heads of ordinary voters. If our opinions in the November election
don't conform to the choices we're offered, it's our opinions, not the
choices, that will be changed.

Such is already the reality in most states. This is why, among those
desperate to get Bush out next year, an organized movement is now afoot to
move money, volunteers, and even voters to states on the Red/Blue frontier,
states whose Electoral College votes could conceivably go to either major
party's candidate in a close election.

What could help bring more, um, democracy into this process? A less
convoluted nomination process, for starters -- there's no reason at all why
states like Iowa and New Hampshire should be a focus group for the country
when the country as a whole can be polled, all at once, easily enough. For
the November election, abolishing the Electoral College would also help, of
course -- for an office as important as the president of the United States,
each person's vote should count the same. But that won't happen in our
lifetimes, because too many smaller states that now enjoy disproportionate
influence would need to ratify the needed constitutional amendment.

George Will, among others, has suggested a fix that wouldn't require such an
amendment: have each state apportion its electoral votes by congressional
district, with the overall winner receiving the two electoral votes that
come with each Senate seat. There's nothing now that requires states to
award all their electoral votes to the winner, although most do. Will's is
an appealing idea, but it would need to be adopted state by state, and if
what happened after Gore's solid popular victory in 2000 wasn't enough of an
impetus for such a reform movement, it's hard to imagine what would stir
states to action.

Viable third -- and fourth, fifth, and sixth -- parties could also help, in
bringing needed choices and greater debate to the ballot. The appeal of
Kucinich has been his willingness to offer serious ideas and positions
nobody else in the race will discuss -- but since he has no real shot at his
party's nomination, most media outlets won't discuss them, either. Laws are
currently designed to reinforce the two-party duopoly, but nothing in our
constitution demands it.

In each case, these sorts of reforms are a long-term project. Ultimately,
it's up to us -- now, and in 2007, 2011, and so forth -- to realize that our
best opportunities to help pick our nation's president come over a full year
before the actual election.

As it stands, by the actual election year, our choices are likely to be
minimal, and depending on where we live our votes are often an afterthought.
In 2004 -- as in 2000 -- the race for both the Democratic nomination and for
victory in November will be to see which of two people can game that system
best.

(c) Working Assets Online. All rights reserved.


URL: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16086





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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt

"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of
Iraq."
-- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,