Democracy

by digby

I just heard Bush give one of his officious lectures about democracy with the news that Castro is stepping down. He said that he expects the Cubans to hold free and fair elections — “and I mean free and fair, not those staged elections the Castro brothers try to foist off on the people.”

I laughed when I heard that. Two political brothers staging elections and foisting them off on the people — where have I heard that before? I guess he’s saying that the 2000 election was a real exercise in democracy with the Supreme Court stepping in and saying they couldn’t count votes that hadn’t been previously counted because it would disenfranchise people whose votes had been. Funny stuff.

And then I read this:

As many as 1.5 million votes are projected to be cast in Washington State’s presidential primary on Tuesday [today]. The question is whether they will count.

The state is obliged to tally the numbers, of course, and the state Republican Party will award 19 of its 40 delegates based on the primary results. Yet Senator John McCain’s selection as the Republican nominee is pretty much assured.

More problematic is that the state Democratic Party long ago said it would award its delegates based solely on the results of the statewide caucuses that were held on Feb. 9. The party says a record 250,000 people turned out for the caucuses, which Senator Barack Obama won by 36 percentage points.

So it appears that the primary, first approved in a 1988 referendum with the goal of giving greater voice to voters who might not be able or inclined to attend a party caucus, may have the distinction of being one of the few essentially irrelevant contests in a presidential race so fierce this year that even outposts like Idaho and Alaska have nudged their way into the national spotlight for a moment or two.

The primary was moved up this year from May to February with an eye toward increasing its influence. Yet, while the presidential candidates descended on the state in the days before the caucuses, they do not appear to be coming back for the primary.

WTF?

I guess the lesson here for voters around the country is that they’d better study all the fine print and read every single mailer they get to figure out whether they are voting for any reason or if it’s all just a big show that makes no sense whatsoever. Those poor fools who go to the polls today in Washington to vote for local intitiatives or referendums should just be aware that if they vote for a Democrat on the ballot that the vote doesn’t count. And they wonder why people think voting is a waste of time. In many cases lately it’s absolutely true.

The Democratic Party has shown itself to be a complete mess in this primary season, apparently never considering the fact that there could be a close race with all these proportionally allocated delegates. They played games trying to keep Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina happy and have ended up with this clusterfuck.

To me, the best argument for not letting the superdelegates decide this election is that it’s the same sort of people who approved these ridiculous voting schemes to keep states from moving up their primaries. Are we supposed to trust that they can decide who is the most electable Democrat? If this kind of thing was the best they could do — along with telling Florida voters to pound sand, again — then they are clearly too incompetent to decide a presidential election.

And the United States of America is in no position to be lecturing anyone, not even Fidel Castro, on “free and fair” elections at this point. Our elections are a national embarrassment.

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