Making everyone frustrated is a feature not a bug
by digby
My piece in Salon today discusses the new call from Chuck Schumer for jungle primaries like we have in California all over the country. What a great idea it is — if you’re a centrist bucket of lukewarm spit:
If this were to work the way they want it to work what you’d end up with … is the partisan minority voters having to hold their noses and vote for someone they really don’t like in order to elect someone the majority in the district also doesn’t like. (And the worst case scenario is when a bunch of candidates of the same party cancel each other out in a district that should go their party’s way and leave their voters to choose between two candidates from the opposing party. )
Yet we’re supposed to believe this system is designed to make everyone excited about the political process and get them engaged once again? Hardly. This is pretty obviously designed to drive down participation by wringing every bit of political passion and ideological commitment out of it and leave politically involved citizens with a very bad taste in their mouths. The only people who could possibly be excited by this are the people who hold the purse strings and have a strong interest in maintaining the status quo. Making everyone frustrated is a feature, not a bug.
Read on. There are some examples that show this only works part of the time. But it’s playing more and more into the political establishment’s hands. Considering the discipline and cohesion among Republicans, Democrats would only play along if they want a good excuse to pretend to have been rolled by Republicans when they do the bidding of the big money special interests. Because that’s the result. And they know it.
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