Dubya's Gift To The Ballot Box

As Bill Maher noted a few weeks ago, it’s getting just about impossible to keep track of all of the scandals, abuse of government power and overall incompetence and stupidity originating from Bushco on a day-to-day basis (he said he downloads the latest ones every day to his i-Pod, and it’s hard to tell if he was joking or not).

In addition to Abu Gonzales hanging onto his job like he’s the last passenger onboard the Titanic and his fingertips are slipping off the life preserver, we also have the latest FEMA report stating that their disaster plan won’t be ready for the 2007 hurricane season (I mean, gosh, it’s only been about a year and a half since Katrina, and I guess these things take time; sure they do), and Paul Wolfowitz using his influence to get his squeeze hired from the World Bank to the State Department where she pulled in more money than Condoleezza Rice (who runs State, after all – here is an update to this post), we have something of lesser importance at the moment that was pointed out here by Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker.

Update: Speaking of FEMA, I wonder if this has anything to do with their lack of preparedness?

Before I get to it, though, I should remind us of the fact that, more and more, every state wants to move up its primary in the election cycle so its votes will carry more weight in naming the candidate of the major political parties (with the “Super Tuesday” primary in the south as the first shot fired in this battle). That’s an admirable instinct, and it’s also an attempt to encourage voter participation beyond the typically anemic numbers of the past (the subject of a whole other rant, so I’ll hold off on that for now).

However, if we keep going as we are, we could be faced with a situation where the state primaries are grouped and “front-loaded” to the point where they’re ending in the spring of the election year while the two major party candidates slug it out with attack ads into November (and only someone who is truly a masochist would prefer a spectacle like that). Another more important negative of this, as noted by Hertzberg, is that the accelerated election cycle means accelerate pitches for money from the candidates, at earlier time intervals and asking for greater quantities (and I don’t even think a masochist wants to see that).

Now that we have this context, I’m going to “set the wayback” here for 2000, during the Bush/Gore presidential election. As it turns out, former Republican Party chairman Bill Brock had an idea that could have prevented all of this, as follows…

The closest anyone has come to cutting the Gordian knot of the primaries was a little-known effort in 2000. A group of Republican grandees led by Bill Brock, a former senator from Tennessee and national party chairman, spent months hammering out what was dubbed the Delaware Plan, which, beginning in 2004, would have mandated four sets of primaries, a month apart, beginning with the small states (twelve of them, including New Hampshire) and ending with the largest (which would pick a majority of the total delegates). Brock said recently that he had developed the plan in consultation with friends in the other party (“Such things were possible, once upon a time,” he said), and was fairly sure that the Democrats would have followed suit. But, because the Republicans couldn’t have proceeded without a floor fight at their Convention, the Bush camp, determined to avoid any hint of discord, shot the whole thing down at the last minute. Various other ideas—revolving regional primaries, for example, or randomly chosen primaries at two-week intervals—continue to float around. Eventually, though, Congress will probably have to take the lead in sorting out the mess.

And how much do you want to bet that someone will file suit in response to whatever Congress tries to do in response to this?

So just remember that, when you get frustrated out of your mind with the length of the presidential campaign next year and amount of times that you’re hit on by someone for some dough (to say nothing of the level of stupidity and mendacity in the dialogue between the candidates and the brainless media punditry), remember that we had an opportunity to change things before Dubya and Turd Blossom utterly poisoned the well of bipartisanship, making a hash of this as they have with everything else.