Left Flank

My active interest in the superficial aspect, the candidates, in the 2008 US general election is done. Aside from swapping arguments and tales of disillusionment with my mother and sister (strongly anti-McCain), election news is no longer a high-value target in my RSS feed trawling. What remains, as it was almost from the beginning, is an interest in the nuts and bolts of electioneering.

For instance, the hedge fund industry has contributed $13,836,241 to date since 2006. Banks are in for $29,960,731. Overall, Senator Barack Obama has spent $377 million and Senator John McCain $204 million. Other candidates in this election season have spent less, but still significant amounts of money. House Democrats have a $47 million advantage over their GOP rivals. Perhaps for some these amounts are insignificant, but I wonder about the value of the return, whether considered in monetary terms or a less crasser scale, for these investments in governance.

I've never understood how contributing money is legally considered «speech» in the United States. SCOTUS has enshrined contributions as a First Amendment matter most notably in Buckley v. Valeo. Aside from the etymological quibble, defining an individual by his/her ability to accumulate disposable amounts of cash offered at his/her own discretion undermines the the philosophical notion of political equality upon which American constitutional republicanism is founded. I also just don't understand how groups have First Amendment that privilege them over individuals.

I turned my attention to a forgotten aspect of American democracy: political campaign management. This «curriculum» dates me, since my university didn't offer such a discipline when I studied political science. But, who among us RSS crawlers has not heard now of James Carville, Karl Rove, Mike Murphy, or Mark Penn? These professionals have morphed into celebrities, sometimes notoriously - consider Dick Morris. Perusing Dennis W. Johnson's No Place for Amateurs, I learned just how complicated campaigning (the book was published in 2001) has become. Yet, political consultants are ubiquitous, from the local to national level. Most are not large operations, and often these temporary professionals exist with very little overhead. But, they bring a consistency to campaigns that is the cause for concern. Johnson, himself a consultant turned academic, concludes that the professionalization of campaigns is «inevitable», and, although he offers voluntary alternatives, these same alternative forms of expression, like ballot initiatives, are also increasingly populated with consultants.

Consultants make elections costly and increase voter apathy, by creating generic products that standardize campaigns and their visible manifestations, the candidates and policy platforms. American campaign laws provide the mechanism by which consultants and their staffs are paid. «Joe the Plumber» or Proposition 13 might challenge a candidate or a branch of government with populist ideas, but the same standardization inherited from consultants, and even direct guidance, comes from a campaigning industry seemingly unregulated and given license by a mistaken notion of free speech based on a Darwinian notion of survival by the richest, and usually an organization, not a person. In turn, consultants undermine actual expression by standardizing commercials and other campaign expression - there is now a «History» of the three AM phone call campaign commercial - into brands, like cereal and toothpaste, which laypeople, even «Joe the Plumber» trade back and forth in place of actual observation and argument. Joe Biden made a joke out of the «kitchen table», but William Ayers is the message, not «When did your family last discuss an election?» What my mother, father (who will probably just not vote), and sister believe is ultimately more important than William Ayers, because Ayers will not escort them to the polling booth. The irony is, that consultants operate on what contributors give them, repackage that expression into an actual policy pitch, but often cannot convince more than the original donor population to vote with them. What are «independents» and «undecideds» but those people who don't need consultants to tell them what to think? What about the plurality that doesn't vote? Their voice is the loudest: we don't hear anything we like at all. The American political process has become an echo chamber, and one that continues to hemorrhage cash for no good cause.

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LiberalOasis' Bill Scher is the optimist in the superdelegate debate today, and I need some optimism. Here's hoping for a blowout, just so that the Democrats don't look undemocratic. But then, Conn Carroll (who's the liberal here?) ruins it with his progressive coup scenario.

Fortunately, Kevin Drum rebuts the progressive presumption and Daniel W. Drezner skewers the logic of this incipient undemocratic reaction to what is the result of not establishing a national primary system. If states can decide when to hold their primaries and caucuses, then the two parties will just have to deal with the mess. Ultimately, it's the DNC's fault for not doing at least what the GOP did, taking half the delegate count.

Speaking of democracy, here's a primer on how delegate selection works.

New Hampshire and Iowa are now entering into the stretch run of the nuisance race. Not only are both states jockeying for the pole position in the 2008 general elections, by holding their primaries in 2007, but in both states the Democratic and Republican organizations are quibbling about primacy. Aside from just quarreling for its own sake, there are constitutional issues here.

But if the entire calendar mess has revealed anything, it has revealed how weak the national parties are in controlling their state organizations and how impotent they are in restraining state legislatures. (A bill already has been introduced to have Congress take over the primary process, but even if it passes it is sure to be challenged on Constitutional grounds.)

And what really would happen if the parties imposed sanctions on New Hampshire? Would candidates really not campaign there? Would the media really ignore the New Hampshire primary? Both seem unlikely. (And whatever delegates the parties strip away, the nominees can easily restore at convention time.)

This pissing contest has its own version in Florida. In Seminole County where I cast my votes (by absentee ballot), there is something called a «Presidential Preference» Primary on January 29, 2008, but then a «Primary Election» on August 26, 2008. Aside from an abuse of language, what is happening here? I've asked the election commissioner for a clarification. Meanwhile, the «plight» of Florida's political parties has entered the legal arena:

Nelson and Hastings said they felt compelled to assert the voting rights of all Floridians. They are hoping for a swift court order to block the national party from imposing its sanctions.

«What we know about Florida - that Howard Dean may not know - is that Floridians have been in fights about this right to vote for a long time,» Hastings told reporters in Washington. «And fight we will.»

Nelson, D-Fla., called it «a case of fundamental rights versus party rules.»

He noted that the party sanctions led to a pledge by Democratic candidates to avoid campaigning in Florida except for fundraisers.

«Paying for political participation is unacceptable,» Nelson said, «just as a poll tax was unacceptable.»

Legal experts found little precedent for overturning a political party's sanctions, but they did not discount a possible court victory for the Florida Democrats.

«They have a shot, but it's a long shot,» said Bruce Rogow, constitutional lawyer and professor at Nova Southeastern University.

«Courts are reluctant to intervene in the private machinations of a political party. What gives them a shot is that, no question, it has an impact on the meaningfulness of Florida voters' decisions with regard to who the nominee should be,» Rogow said.

Damn the states and the parties (which, as far as I can recall, were pilloried during the Constitutional Convention debates in 1787 and are subordinate to the government, not the fourth branch of government!)! Bickering is a political tactic states don't need to perfect into a national hindrance.

Poliblogger, in a post drawing liberally quoting from a CSM article on the Florida lawsuits, argues plainly:

Party primaries are odd things?part public, part private and they have been shaped by Supreme court decisions in the past, so it is not out of the question that this case could eventually redefine the borders between what state parties can do and what the national party committees can control.

I think SCOTUS has to intervene with a national solution before votes lose their impact or legality. From that CSM article:

«A suit against the state is on stronger ground than a suit against the party,» says Guy-Uriel Charles, an election law specialist and co-dean of the University of Minnesota Law School. «Because one might say that the state moved the primary up specifically to deprive these voters of their rights.»

That is a claim Florida officials flatly deny. The legislature, with the governor's support, did vote this spring to move the primaries ? Democratic and Republican ? to Jan. 29. But after Democratic amendments to set a Feb. 5 primary failed, nearly every Democratic lawmaker joined the Republican majority in favor of the Jan. 29 date.

Several Democrats invoked the same reason as Republicans: to give the nation's fourth most populous state a bigger role in the nominating process.

To argue that SCOTUS (and, by extension, the district courts) can only react when rights are denied, deprives the third branch of its role in national debate. Does SCOTUS have to wait until the current primary system results in lawsuits claiming disenfranchisement, post-November 4, 2008, when it doesn't take a wonk to know that this jockeying is deleteriously affecting political expression now? What is so wrong about reform along the lines of the American Plan, which only mirrors an almost identical debate in the 1787 Constitutional Convention debates about the primacy of large and small states? Is federalism just another word for political cowardice these days? Are politicians so wimpish nowadays that they would wilt before a SCOTUS-mandated reform, and forego a constitutional challenge, via executive order or law? At least such leadership would put the primary reform issue front and center on the national stage where it belongs.

Is it coming to the point where I need to write in protest candidates, because the current generation of political leadership is composed of cowards and autocrats?