We hear a lot from editorialists and columnists about the supposed virtues of bipartisanship, and so you’d think our local media elite would have echoed Darryl’s call to cross the aisle and join our friends in the GOP in helping to select the next Republican nominee for President. And yet nary a peep. Huh. Hypocrites.
As for me, I long ago decided to embrace Republican values — at least for one day — and vote for Mitt Romney in Washington’s primary. They way I figure it, he’s the perfect Republican for a visiting Democrat like me: I’m Pro-Choice, he’s sometimes Pro-Choice… I’m soft on immigration, he’s sometimes soft on immigration… he’s a Mormon, KIRO is owned by Mormons (a little brown-nosing might not get me back on the air, but it couldn’t hurt.) So who better to symbolize a Democrat’s one-day embrace of Republicanism than a “conservative” Republican who said and did all the right things to get himself elected governor of a liberal, Democratic state like Massachusetts?
And that’s why I’m swearing my loyalty to the GOP — for one day only — and casting a vote in today’s Republican primary for Mike Huckabee. It is, after all, a Romney Republican’s prerogative to change one’s mind.
Or at least I would be voting for Huckabee, if I were registered vote-by-mail, or I hadn’t gone out of of town at the last minute and missed the election. Ah well, I guess this wannabe oath breaker will just have to watch the results from afar.
As for those of you who insist that there is something untoward about caucusing for the Democrats and primarying for the Republicans, I can only respond that if you really cared about the purity of the nomination process you wouldn’t cling to your childish, bullshit objections to party registration. Yeah, I voted for Ellen Craswell in our blanket gubernatorial primary… and four years later I voted for John Carlson. That’s not manipulating the system, that is the system, and if you don’t like it, change it! A week and a half ago 250,000 passionate Democrats gave up a couple hours of their time on a sunny Saturday afternoon to engage in politics at its most grassroots… so why the fuck should a bunch of dithering, holier than thou, self-proclaimed “Independents” get equal say in choosing our nominee? (Hint: they shouldn’t.)
There are a lot of things wrong about our nominating process in Washington state and nationwide, but party registration is not one of them. And if it takes violating a bullshit oath to cast a vote for Mike Huckabee to help prove that, well so be it.
I, honestly, don’t see anything wrong with saying I like this Dem and that Republican. Rather than forcing us to register by party why not let everyone vote twice?
Hell, all the editorial pages gave a pick for each party.
But, but, but … Goldy, surely you know that Washingtonians are more forthcoming about their sexual preferences — hell, probably even their HIV status — than their political party preferences. Their choice of political party must be kept in the deepest, darkest recesses of their being, and not revealed to any other human.
For the life of me, I don’t understand it.
Let me blow the collective minds of Washingtonians — in New Hampshire, every town’s voter registration/party registration list is always posted publicly at the town hall for all to see.
Personally, I don’t see why the government should officially endorse any political parties by giving them preferential treatment on a ballot. If the political parties want to organize and nominate their own candidates, that’s fine, they should do so on their own dime and by their own rules. But in any Presidential election, we should actually have a “run-off” election, perhaps consisting of four elections, all within about a six-month span of time, which ignores party labels:
The first to select the top ten candidates (dropping off all the ones who clearly have no chance of winning);
The second to narrow the list to the top four or so;
Then the third to narrow it down to the top two;
The fourth is the final election which will select the President.
The advantage to this approach is that it (a) encourages candidates that appeal to the center of the electorate, rather than to the fringes of their political parties in order to win the nomination; (b) it allows those who’s first choice is eliminated to still participate, and (c) it prevents a third-party candidate from throwing the election to a candidate with less than the majority of the votes.
Of course, if we had that system, I suspect that the final election this year would be between two Democrats.
In Olympia, there is a bill to award the state’s electors (in the electoral college) to the winner of the national popular vote count:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/.....ral19.html
It has passed the state Senate, and is going to the House for consideration.
If every state passed a similar bill, it would prevent a repeat of the 2000 election, when Bush won the electoral count but more lost the popular vote.
I voted for a Democrat. I think it’s moderately important which one I voted for, as I hope my candidate gets more primary votes than the other one, and given the confusion about Michigan, Florida, superdelegates, and so forth, it may be that the primary vote has an influence on how convention delegates will be allocated or how they’ll vote.
My point here, though, is that I think it’s important to stand up and represent, to signify by total turnout that we’re going to take back the White House, solidify the Democratic majority in congress, be poised for rebalancing the Supreme Court, and begin to undo the profound damage of the past twenty-some years.
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t happen by farting around with votes for folks on the other side.
Goldy,
It is MORMON not Morman. Or you can use LDS.
The only thing keeping me from doing the same thing is the fact that the records will be open , public records for 60 days following the primary. Don’t think for a minute that both parties won’t go through them and build mailing lists of ‘party affiliates’ to send their begging letters to.
I don’t want to get on either the Democratic Party *or* the Rebublican Party mailing lists.
I think you said it well and explained your whole modus operandi:
“And if it takes violating an oath….”
yeah, what’s an oath anyway…has no meaning for you.
Wonder how long before Sharkansky develops an aneurysm over this “plot” to undermine his party and control the vote. I kind of feel sorry for his wife, the other lousy parent, who is forced to listen to his rants.
Goldy, you may have a point about party registration, at least if we insist on using the primary elections to pick party candidates.
But… Even though you may consider that giving your word not to participate in another party’s nomination process to be “bullshit”, most of us do not.
While I have my own issues with the current primary system, once I give my word about something, I keep it.
For example, in my caucus, my fellow Democrats asked me if I would continue to support Senator Obama at the county convention. I gave my word to do so. Nothing else binds me, but even if I became convinced that Senator Clinton was more to my liking, I would keep my word.
Politics in both parties has become more a matter of pragmatism than honor. We’ve certainly seen that in the current administration.
Even worse here is that violating the oath that was taken at the caucus is neither honorable nor pragmatic. The very few votes from people that are willing to cross over to mess with the Republicans will not make any difference to the McCain campaign, except to give it ammunition against us.
So, essentially the idea you’re proposing is to deliberately and knowingly violate an oath just for the fun of messing with the Republicans in a minor and petty manner that will not inconvenience them in the least, but that they could use against us later.
How, exactly, does that help our candidates and causes?
John: Thanks for being more eloquent. And as a more resident Goldstein supporter, maybe it will trickle in that some (most) really do take their oath and values seriously.
Partisan Hacks on either side disgust me
Great article about guys like me. There’s more of us than there are of you fucking losers.
http://www.aspentimes.com/article/2008198091324
@3
Yep, pretty much.
Violence falls 80% in Baghdad!
Iraq really was building nukes!
The left defines patriotism by how much money you give the state!
The folks over at righty mil-blog Castle Argghhh! swear it’s all true:
http://www.thedonovan.com/
Dutch
Goldy is usually a pretty good guy, and I really think that if he found himself at the polling place or filling out the absentee ballot, his better nature would kick in and he’d do the right thing.
After being accused of cheating on elections as often as has happened on some of the right-wing blogs, it is tempting to actually play the game we get accused of so often. It becomes even more tempting because we know that even if we don’t, some folks will make the accusation anyway.
But this is less about what people say about us than it is about what kind of people we really are.
Now, I’m off to my polling place (being in Pierce County, I can still do that) and cast my vote in the Democratic primary.
@12
There’s more of us than there are of you fucking losers.
No, it just seems that way because you whine about everything so much.
@12
“There’s more of us than there are of you fucking losers.”
Wow, your grammar is worse than mine. Congrats, that takes effort.
Take a look at numbers of people participating in primary elections and caucus’s and you’ll see that you are mistaken.
17/12 Ah…so Mark must masturbate in front of a three-panel mirror.
Heh, leaving aside the snark at some of my posters… I agree with Goldy.
If you aren’t willing to declare a party (as I am not and never have, though anyone reading my site is going to figure I vote Republican more often than not, and they’re correct) you shouldn’t be allowed to vote in the party’s primaries – and you should do that knowing full well you’re giving up your 1/xth chance to influence who the parties put forward. If you want that chance, then you should commit – or work to change the system.
4 Boy, talk about jumping from the frying pan we’ve got now into a very nasty fire. We’re at least half disenfranchised out here on the west coast–how many of you have raced to get to the polls in years gone by before the media had already declared the winner? This would make it even worse.
Roger and Richard, what’s your take on whether this is even constitutional?
If this is what our elected “representatives” are spending their time and our money doing, we need new ones, pronto.
encourages candidates that appeal to the center of the electorate, rather than to the fringes of their political parties in order to win the nomination
Because that’s worked so very well in the past, right?
@18
Judging by the postings on rightie blogs it might be an addiction to gun-porn that’s keeping the Republican primary and caucus turnouts so low.
Maybe we can in November by sending out gun-porn spam on the 4&5.
2:
That’s a pretty cool idea, but perhaps not practicable in larger states. A list like that would take up a whole helluva lot of space in Seattle, or a pretty thick register. Could you imagine the size of LA or NYC’s registers?
Artfart:
There’s no doubt that this is essentially and end-run around the Constitutional system of electors, but I’m not sure how it could be considered as “disenfranchising” us.
Essentially, it simply assigns our Electors to the candidate that wins the election nationwide (including us). No electors are assigned until the nationwide vote tally is known. The only thing this prevents is a situation where the Electoral College tally does not reflect the overall vote tally.
Currently, it is actually possible (although very unlikely) to win the Electoral College vote even though the other candidate wins three-quarters of the popular vote. Even though that extreme example is very unlikely, several Presidents have been elected even though they lost the popular vote nationwide. Our current “fearless leader” is an example of that situation.
The law would only take effect when enough states have signed to ensure that the winner of the popular vote nationwide would also win the Electoral College vote under this system.
Voters from states with small populations may dislike this, as their individual votes for President have always counted for more than those from larger states. Essentially, one vote from Delaware is worth more than one vote from California (or Washington).
This evens that field.
And while it is certainly a way of bypassing the inequality built into the Constitution, that doesn’t make it unconstitutional. Each state is given the power to decide how those electors will be chosen.
JB 24: Actually President Bush won both the electoral votes and the popular votes in 2004. 2000 was a different story though, but our “current” president was elected with a majority in both popular and electoral votes….they way it normally should and does happen. Only other times when this happened was in 1824 with JQ Adams winning the uncommitted electoral votes, in 1876 where Florida was (already) a deciding state and in 1888 where Rutherford prevailed.
Just to clarify.
:-)
T @ 21: Actually, what gets me is the run to the fringes candidates of both parties have to go through in order to win the nomination, only to run back towards the center in order to win the election. It reminds me of the wind sprints we used to run in football practice, except in this case the team is lined up on the 50-yard line, and half runs toward one goal line and back, the other in the other direction and back. In the process, each tries to make fun of the other for being contradictory in the process. It’s a fool’s game, and we all participate. I’d rather not.
(Although I’ll admit it can be pretty funny watching the Republicans try to fight over who is more right-wing than the other).
John B @ 10: Okay, you’ve convinced me. I won’t trifle with the Republican primary.
About my mention of posting voter rolls in New Hampshire towns, Broadway Joe sez:
Yes, that’s an issue of sorts. It could be worked out, perhaps, by posting the lists by Legislative District — about the same population as Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city — or Zip code (hang the lists in the post office), or even by precinct.
There’s no “town hall” or “courthouse” in my precinct, and hardly even any non-residential buildings. OTOH, there is certainly a well-known meetingplace in the precinct.
Republican Vocabulary:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/112751
Dutch
Little as I like it, yes President Bush won both popular and electoral votes in 2004. It was 2000 that I was referring to. Personally, I think 2004 wasn’t so much President Bush’s winning the election, as our losing it.
We Democrats are experts at pulling defeat from the jaws of victory. We managed to do it in the 2004 election for President, and we almost managed to do it in the Governor’s race as well. Yes, it worries me that we could somehow do it again this year.
Here in Washington, I routinely say a little prayer of thanks for Mr. Esser. Without his help, we could easily find ourselves as the minority party, and we certainly wouldn’t have as strong a hold on state government.
If you folks ever put someone in charge that doesn’t have a severe case of foot-in-mouth disease, we might actually have to get our own act together.
Hmm, I might give it a thought…but getting Luke out of there might be the problem.
GOLDY
YOU WILL BE BACK ON THE RADIO AS SOON AS PIGS FLY.
I think what this secrecy about party loyalty is all about is that Republicans just don’t want to admit they’re Republicans. I wouldn’t either, if I were them.
@8 You’re a dolt. You wouldn’t know satire if it bit you in the ass. Which it just did.
@9 I don’t feel sorry for her at all. They deserve each other.
@10 John, he was just being facetious to make a point.
Darryl, on the other hand, is perfectly entitled to vote in today’s Republican primary because he didn’t participate in a Democratic caucus and has never formally declared himself a Democrat.
@12 Pay your gambling debt, fucking loser.
@14 Just what this blog needs — another wingnut idiot reporting the “news” from rightwing propaganda websites.
Although I freely admit to being a party hack and liberal propagandists, unlike the propagandists on the other side I don’t make shit up — I don’t have to, because the facts are NEVER on their side. Even though I’m a propagandist, almost all of my propaganda posts consist of little more than copying and pasting the daily news reports. That’s because ALL the news makes Republicans look bad. There isn’t a fucking thing under the sun they haven’t fucked up. They don’t do ANYTHING right. As a liberal propagandist, I’m little more than a relay station for MSM news reporting and scientific reports. I don’t even have to spin that stuff, because the simple facts speak for themselves. All it takes to make Republicans look bad is the truth. So, there’s a huge difference between wingnut propaganda and my liberal propaganda. Their propaganda consists of fabrications, denials, lies, and smears. My “propaganda” is simply true facts that speak for themselves.
@15 Finally you’re making a little sense, John. Republicans cheat so much they’re in no position to complain about anything we do, notwithstanding the fact we’re not even doing it. As you imply, if anything, we ought to. “Fight fire with fire,” you know. But personally I prefer Coulter’s idea — throw them in concentration camps and execute some of ’em.*
* Just kidding!! I wouldn’t really do that (although I have no doubt THEY would). Just throwing a little wingnut humor back in their wingnut faces. Give ’em something to beat off to.
Let’s just get rid of our state’s costly and useless primary. That’ll solve a lot of problems and settle the arguments.
We have better things to do with $10 million than spend it on a straw poll.
As far as I can see, nothing would prevent a poll voter in King County from signing the Democratic oath, and then voting for a Republican candidate. Or vice versa. Or not signing either party’s oath at all. The voting machine cannot tell which party box (if any) you checked on the sign-in sheet. While King County absentee ballots can be segregated by party (based on which party’s oath is signed by the voter), the poll ballots cannot be.
@20 I really don’t know if it’s constitutional, Art. I’m inclined to think so, though, because a number of lawyers have studied it, I’ve read their explanations, and it does look to me like it works legally. You’re not changing the Constitution, nor does it appear you’re doing anything that conflicts with the Constitution. Whether it’s a good idea is a different question altogether.
@24 I think you need all the states on board to make it work.
@25 Only if you disregard the votes that were manufactured inside black boxes and the 3 – 4 million voters who were blocked from voting (including some military personnel in Iraq) by the GOP voter disenfranchisement machine. The Republicans can’t win an honest election, and Bush wasn’t the most popular candidate in either 2000 or 2004. It took rigged numbers to make him look like the winner of the popular vote in 2004, but he really wasn’t.
@30 I think you’re mistaken, John. The outcome probably would have been different if Kerry hadn’t pulled the plug on challenging the Ohio count. What actually happened in Ohio is that the county vote totals fed into the computers in Ken Blackwell’s state election headquarters were simply relayed by those computers to secret GOP owned and controlled computing centers in Tennessee and Kentuck that “processed” the data and fed it back to the official Ohio election computers, and what the news media and public were given was not the actual numbers but the “processed” vote totals produced by the GOP’s secret out-of-state vote-altering computers.
Kentucky
In other words, Kerry won the election and the Republicans stole it.
Remember back to Election Night. All the states were in except Ohio. It came down to Ohio’s electoral votes. There were inexplicable delays in reporting Ohio’s results. Then, shortly before midnight our time, and contrary to all the exit polling that had led MSM media to say their data indicated Kerry was leading in Ohio (although they had learned from Florida not to “call” it), it came out that Bush’s numbers from Ohio were just enough to give him the state. Add two and two, John, and see what you come up with. If you’re still not convinced, do some reading and what investigators and researchers have found out about Ohio since 2004.
reading on
@46 I need to correct myself. You only need enough states on board to give a majority of electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.
Roger at 3:03 PM
You may well be right about Ohio, but Senator Kerry did “pull the plug”, so the results we have must be taken as definitive. That leaves our “fearless leader” as the winner of the popular vote.
And gives us yet another example of our uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The most telling moment in the 2004 election, for me, was something that I saw but never heard mentioned again after the event. Robert Novak said early in the evening that he had been in touch with his sources and that they made it clear to him that Kerry won Ohio handily. This was an obvious call to Novak, who is not fan of Kerry. As the evening went on, and the GOP realized they had to have Ohio’s votes, well, we know what happened. Another case of fraud, as later evidence shows.
Voting in Spokane County is all by mail. Ha ha!