07 May 2008
The more, the merrier
Fascinating that the chattering classes keep insisting on discipline and order in politics, as if those are cardinal virtues. A presidential campaign, ideally, is a messy business because it's a human business. The Democrats have registered record numbers of voters in 2008 precisely because there's a "race" for the nomination between a black man and a white woman. (The advantages of a Harvard Law grad as president vs. a Yale Law grad quite escape me; they're both pledged to maintain the status quo.) Increased primary registrations generally lead to increased general election registrations, which will lead to a higher turnout overall. Isn't that what's important? Don't we want everyone to participate in democracy? The Gasbags already have way too much sway over the process (as Elizabeth Edwards so brilliantly described in The New York Times 10 days ago). They want everything nice and neat and tidy so they can make their dinner reservations. I say: Bring on the mess. It's a much better story that way.
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so strange reading this is 2020, after no less than - 22? 25? - candidates campaign for the dems nomination. i agree, Hillary vs Obama was a healthy and informative race. since i'm canadian, i have no skin in the game, but the fact that it *did* seem like a game was distressing nonetheless. I wonder if the sociolect of sports writing has increased recently in political commentary, because it seems to me that conceptually, more and more voters regard politics as something akin to sport: winners/losers, home team/away team, balls/strikes, etc - as if livelihoods, as if real lives weren't hanging in the balance. it didn't look like grassroots to me, it looked like a profile-raising gambit for many of the candidates. I also worry about electors refusing to play because their team was eliminated.
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