H. N. BURDETT
Not everything that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted. Albert Einstein's maxim certainly applies to the Byzantine thicket of primaries and caucuses that comprise the current Republican presidential nominating process.
At the end of the day, the actual number of states won by a candidate is inconsequential compared with the total of delegates within the state a candidate can manage to scoop up. In some states, the prize for winning the most votes is all of its delegates. In other states, delegates are divided in proportion to the votes garnered by the individual contenders. Some caucuses and primaries are closed to only Republicans; others are open, allowing for malicious mischief by Democrats and independents with absolutely no intention of voting for the GOP candidate in the November presidential election.
Four years ago in the Iowa Democratic caucuses, freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama upset the far better known and financed Hillary Clinton. Ballistic over the fact that his wife's campaign had poured $29 million into Iowa for a mere 70,000 votes, Bill Clinton was convinced that the Obama campaign had rigged the outcome by importing supporters from Illinois. The Clinton strategy had depended on a low turnout. But 239,000 caucus voters participated, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
With 1,144 delegates required to secure the nomination and after 20 debates, Mitt Romney now leads the remaining field of four with a scant 105 delegates, followed by Rick Santorum (71), Newt Gingrich (29), and Ron Paul (18). Even should Romney sweep the table, winning all the delegates in both Michigan and Arizona on Tuesday, he would have a cumulative total of only 164. There is some conjecture that Romney could win the popular vote in Michigan and still be left with fewer delegates there than Santorum.
If front-runner Romney were able to win every single delegate up for grabs through March 6 Super Tuesday when 10 states hold primaries or caucuses - mathematically possible but astronomically improbable - he would still fall 502 delegates short of clinching the nomination.
Thus Super Tuesday is less likely to be the defining moment for the eventual GOP presidential candidate than two perhaps critical Tuesdays in April. Among the four states voting on April 3 is Texas, which alone has 155 delegates. On April 24, New York's 95 delegates and Pennsylvania's 72 will be determined along with those of three other states with a total of 64 delegates. And the labyrinthian minefield to the nomination could continue even through June 5, when California, with 172 delegates, and New Jersey, with 50, are among the five states voting.
Still, when asked about chances that the GOP nominee will be ultimately decided by powerbrokers at the party's August 27-30 national convention in Tampa, no less an authority than Karl Rove, the contemporary incarnation of Machiavelli, opined that this was as about as likely as discovering life on Pluto, the outermost planet of the solar system.
Meanwhile, Barack (No Drama) Obama's campaign builds its war chest, speculating on whom it will be used in November. The curtain remains tightly drawn on the GOP's final act in this theater of the absurd season. If money and organization retain their traditional significance, when it is lifted Romney will be standing atop the scrap heap into which the Republican party, with its irreparably collapsed center, has fallen.
Whenever the footlights illuminate the GOP nominee, today's odds remain where they were at the beginning: On former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to be the party's standard-bearer. As the farce has unfolded, each of the hopefuls - remember Cain, Bachmann, Huntsman and Perry? - have been tested and found to be untrustworthy or merely unworthy.
Should the script play out, the Republican party will strive to coalesce around Romney, a candidate more comfortable in corporate boardrooms than on campaign rostrums where he tends to spout nonsense about the height of trees and his preference for bankruptcy over bailouts, then in a less than grand finale croaks a few bars of "America The Beautiful." All crudely crafted smoke and mirrors to distract the party faithful from the former one-term Bay State governor's flipflops on virtually every Republican core issue. It is as though Romney has taken his cue from Groucho's memorable quip: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."
More than a few Republicans will be reduced to daydreaming that the underdog they are stuck with will be strapped to the top of one of his wife's two Cadillacs and sped into the sunset. Only then would Chris Christie, Jeb Bush, Mitch Daniels or some other reluctant savior emerge from the GOP ashes, quixotically clutch the party's shredded banner, and march valiantly into the autumn of his discontent.
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Sunday, February 26, 2012
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Campaign 2012: Election or Auction?
By H. N. Burdett
The rationale for President Obama's recently announced acceptance of political action committee funds to grease the skids for his re-election bid is all too understandable. That it fails the sniff test is regrettable. That it almost certainly further prolongs the restoration of any semblance of decency to political campaign financing is deplorable.
"With so much at stake," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina said in his announcement of the sell-out to special interests, "we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm."
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama lambasted the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - one that is among the more abominable in American judiciary annals - as a ruling that "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limits in our elections." The president added that he did not feel "elections should be bankrolled by...special interests."
Bill Burton, a co-founder of Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Obama, asserted, "We're committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort (to defeat Obama)."
Ironically, on the day after the Obama campaign capitulated to fighting-fire-with-fire mentality, Rick Santorum's pitifully under-funded drive to win the Republican presidential nomination made a laughingstock of the well-oiled, all-but-inevitable effort of Mitt Romney to be so anointed by whipping the front-runner in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.
In the great game of politics, pragmatism regularly trumps principle. But the line between pragmatism and cynicism is blurred at best. The cynicism of the American electorate at least partially explains the abysmal turnouts at U.S. elections, whereas at this very moment throughout the world men and women defy bullets and bayonets to replace despotic tyrants with their own voices in free elections.
Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of the campaign finance reform law that the Supreme Court's conservative majority shredded in its Citizens United ruling, characterized the Obama campaign green light to special interests as "dancing with the devil."
Feingold said that this "dumb approach...guts the president's message and the Democratic party's message...people will see this as phony, that Democrats start playing by Republican rules. People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy."
Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, issued a statement asserting, "If President Obama had fixed presidential public financing, as he pledged to do in 2008, and seriously gone to bat for more transparency in campaign spending, our political system would be healthier and this would be less of an issue."
Though Edgar said that super PACs would not be abolished by strengthening the presidential campaign financial system, he claimed that "by helping presidential candidates run competitive campaigns from a base of small donors and matching public funds, we would have made it possible for candidates, including the president, to make good on their stated desire to succeed without the aid of super PACS."
The president's determination to outspend which ever opponent the Republican party finally settles upon was announced only three days prior to a report that in 2011 he was outpacing his record-setting contributions four years ago from donors of an aggregated $200 or less.
In 2008, 22 percent of Obama's $96.7 million war chest was pulled from small donations. But lower-end donors contributed 48 percent of the $56.7 million he raised in 2011, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks money in politics.
The CFI reports that contributors of $200 or less accounted for a mere 9 percent of the $56.3 million Mitt Romney's campaign raised last year. Two-thirds of the Romney contributions came from donors of $2,500, the maximum allowed by an individual to a candidate under Federal Election Commission rules. By comparison with other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, small contributions made up 49 percent of the funds raised by Newt Gingrich, 48 percent of those raised by Ron Paul and 32 percent by Rick Santorum in 2011.
The Obama campaign decision to take advantage of the Citizen United ruling's "floodgates" of unlimited funds from undisclosed sources contributing to super PACs that support the president will reveal the most admired nation in the world as, at its very core, the moral equivalent of a banana republic.
President Obama's only saving grace is that his misguided submission to playing by rules that thoroughly distort democracy is that he has no viable opponent with the courage to stand up to forces relentlessly seeking the best chief executive money can buy leading a government of, by and for the wealthy.
There must be a redoubling of efforts to seal the coffin of the Citizens United travesty. Small donors truly concerned about their sacred trust and the sanctity of the ballot box who had intended to contribute to the Obama campaign might be better advised to send their checks instead to organizations in the trenches of the battle for campaign finance reform, like Common Cause, Progressives United and Public Citizen. Let the Big Boys duke this one out, while the rest of us dedicate ourselves to ensuring that November will see the very last U.S. presidential auction.
###
The rationale for President Obama's recently announced acceptance of political action committee funds to grease the skids for his re-election bid is all too understandable. That it fails the sniff test is regrettable. That it almost certainly further prolongs the restoration of any semblance of decency to political campaign financing is deplorable.
"With so much at stake," Obama's campaign manager Jim Messina said in his announcement of the sell-out to special interests, "we can't allow for two sets of rules in this election whereby the Republican nominee is the beneficiary of unlimited spending and Democrats unilaterally disarm."
In his 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama lambasted the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision - one that is among the more abominable in American judiciary annals - as a ruling that "reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests...to spend without limits in our elections." The president added that he did not feel "elections should be bankrolled by...special interests."
Bill Burton, a co-founder of Priorities USA, a super PAC supporting Obama, asserted, "We're committed to providing a balance to Karl Rove and the Koch brothers, who have pledged more than half a billion dollars to their effort (to defeat Obama)."
Ironically, on the day after the Obama campaign capitulated to fighting-fire-with-fire mentality, Rick Santorum's pitifully under-funded drive to win the Republican presidential nomination made a laughingstock of the well-oiled, all-but-inevitable effort of Mitt Romney to be so anointed by whipping the front-runner in Colorado, Missouri and Minnesota.
In the great game of politics, pragmatism regularly trumps principle. But the line between pragmatism and cynicism is blurred at best. The cynicism of the American electorate at least partially explains the abysmal turnouts at U.S. elections, whereas at this very moment throughout the world men and women defy bullets and bayonets to replace despotic tyrants with their own voices in free elections.
Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Senator Russ Feingold, co-author of the campaign finance reform law that the Supreme Court's conservative majority shredded in its Citizens United ruling, characterized the Obama campaign green light to special interests as "dancing with the devil."
Feingold said that this "dumb approach...guts the president's message and the Democratic party's message...people will see this as phony, that Democrats start playing by Republican rules. People will see us as weak and not being a true alternative and just being the same as the other guy."
Bob Edgar, president of Common Cause, issued a statement asserting, "If President Obama had fixed presidential public financing, as he pledged to do in 2008, and seriously gone to bat for more transparency in campaign spending, our political system would be healthier and this would be less of an issue."
Though Edgar said that super PACs would not be abolished by strengthening the presidential campaign financial system, he claimed that "by helping presidential candidates run competitive campaigns from a base of small donors and matching public funds, we would have made it possible for candidates, including the president, to make good on their stated desire to succeed without the aid of super PACS."
The president's determination to outspend which ever opponent the Republican party finally settles upon was announced only three days prior to a report that in 2011 he was outpacing his record-setting contributions four years ago from donors of an aggregated $200 or less.
In 2008, 22 percent of Obama's $96.7 million war chest was pulled from small donations. But lower-end donors contributed 48 percent of the $56.7 million he raised in 2011, according to the Campaign Finance Institute, which tracks money in politics.
The CFI reports that contributors of $200 or less accounted for a mere 9 percent of the $56.3 million Mitt Romney's campaign raised last year. Two-thirds of the Romney contributions came from donors of $2,500, the maximum allowed by an individual to a candidate under Federal Election Commission rules. By comparison with other contenders for the GOP presidential nomination, small contributions made up 49 percent of the funds raised by Newt Gingrich, 48 percent of those raised by Ron Paul and 32 percent by Rick Santorum in 2011.
The Obama campaign decision to take advantage of the Citizen United ruling's "floodgates" of unlimited funds from undisclosed sources contributing to super PACs that support the president will reveal the most admired nation in the world as, at its very core, the moral equivalent of a banana republic.
President Obama's only saving grace is that his misguided submission to playing by rules that thoroughly distort democracy is that he has no viable opponent with the courage to stand up to forces relentlessly seeking the best chief executive money can buy leading a government of, by and for the wealthy.
There must be a redoubling of efforts to seal the coffin of the Citizens United travesty. Small donors truly concerned about their sacred trust and the sanctity of the ballot box who had intended to contribute to the Obama campaign might be better advised to send their checks instead to organizations in the trenches of the battle for campaign finance reform, like Common Cause, Progressives United and Public Citizen. Let the Big Boys duke this one out, while the rest of us dedicate ourselves to ensuring that November will see the very last U.S. presidential auction.
###
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