Self-described Democrats seem to be at a loss in finding a candidate for the presidency this year. Should they meet in convention, or merely count up the delegates chosen in the several State primaries?
What do they think DEMOCRACY means?
Suppose you want to know, does a cannon ball fall faster than a musket ball? You ask one person, se says; “Certainly not.” You ask another; “Yes, of course.” What do you do? You ask them to come together and work it out, do you not?
Suppose the two can’t reach agreement, what then? You ask some more people to join. Soon, you have so many people they cannot all hear. What now?
Now, you have several small meetings, each one of which sends a trustworthy representative to a general meeting to settle the question.
Every political party, even the fiercely individualist Libertarians, holds a convention; the idea of a national convention is that it can consider and compare candidates from all the States. No individual knows all the possible candidates, but by taking counsel together they can cut the field down, fewer and fewer and fewer . . . .
However, much depends on the purpose of the party. Some, even most, of the members want the person who would make the bext president, but the ones running for office themselves want whoever is best at campaigning. And there have even been parties that existed to advance one person – President Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, Governor Wallace’s American Independent Party, Ross Perot’s Reform Party.
So that it would seem to be a good idea to make sure that the people voting in the convention really are equal; those running for office themselves should be excluded, or at least relegated to a second house.
But the Democrats have done the very opposite! They have made representatives and senators SUPER-delegates,
So that either the Democratic Party, the oldest party in the United States, is wrong, or I am wrong. Which is it?
Look at the Constitution. Art, II, Sec.1, para. 2: “Each State shall appoint . . . a number of electors . . . but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.”
If, in a State, persons holding offices of trust or profit (e.g. F.B.I., Customs, I.R.S., Homeland Security agents, U.S. attorneys) are allowed to vote, then hoi polloi [most people] are less fit to be trusted than the electors; those States that require the electors to follow the popular vote are, to put it politely, misguided.
Or, once again, perhaps I am wrong?
Look again at the Constitution. Art. II, Sec. 1, para. 3: “The Electors shall . . . make a list of . . . the number of votes for each; which list they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the . . . President of the Senate shall . . . open all the certificates . . .”
The words “sealed” and “open” make it plain not only that the electors hammer out a decision of their own, but that the great mass of citizens do not even know what they have done until after the election has been decided. The great mass (which is all too great, including as it does the illiterates and the senile) are used for the purpose they can best serve, which is choosing the best person in their congressional district to go to the conclave and select one or two candidates.
Yes, it is a democracy in the classical sense that the many speak first, the few only later; but it is not a democracy in the populist sense, that the minority dominate over the minority.