Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 204 Editor's Choice: 44
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Shooting Fish in this Particular Barrel
[Read the article: Why Hillary Clinton should be winning]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The silliest, of course, are the Hillary supporters who are hoping magic ponies will make the mean man go away so they can have the victory they haven't earned. Hello, why on earth should Obama "suspend his campaign"? Abraham Lincoln had little relevant experience to be President.
Then there is Hillary's failure to make any effort to organize caucuses or otherwise to learn the rules. Her husband (whose experience she always cites) was really good during both his campaigns at counting. He knew to count to 270 and that he didn't need to count one electoral vote past it. He won two plurality elections without ever getting a majority, with huge electoral majorities. If Hillary's staff was unable to do the same in the run up to the convention, shame on them and I really don't care to hear their second-guessing of the validity of the rules. One thing is sure: Barack Obama didn't control the DNC or the state parties when these rules were put in place.
On the unfairness of caucus votes, it goes both ways. Our precinct had six delegates to the county convention. When the preliminary vote was taken, there would have been five Obama delegates and one undecided delegate. After discussing it for an hour, 10 of the 11 undecided changed to Obama. So the result was that Obama got five delegates and Hillary got one delegate. No system is perfect.
If you really want to fix the system, start talking up the stupid and entirely changeable size of the House of Representatives, which is set by Congress, not by the Constitution. D.W. Meinig has shown that the origins of the 435 seats was based on anti-immigrant sentiment around the turn of the last century. The result is to give the citizens of North Dakota (who haven't voted Democratic since 1964) far more power in a Presidential election than the citizens of California. There are more citizens in Florida who are disenfranchised by the ban on convict voters than there are citizens in North Dakota, but they get three electoral votes nonetheless. If you doubled the size of Congress (or, and this would take an amendment to Constitution, did it solely for the purposes of the Electoral College), you'd reduce the disproportionality substantially.
Increasing the size of the Electoral College could also make the Republicans' current wet dream about getting rid of winner-take-all by state to make more sense. Frankly, if it were done on a national basis, it would make the election far more participatory. As it is, citizens in more than half the states may never see a presidential campaign ad for the general election, let alone a candidate. Texas is going Republican, but certainly there are large areas that could go Democratic.
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The article is far more balanced than the headline
[Read the article: Cashing in on the Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's nice to see some actual reporting for a change, and a relatively even-handed approach (the facts make the case that Clinton has spent far more wildly and Obama has both controlled costs and gotten better value for his contributors' money). And the article is timely with Mark Penn's resignation.
I'd love to see a chart showing the amount spent by Bill Clinton in 1992 on the same services Hillary is buying now. In 1992, their staff was largely unknowns seeking their way in the world, attached to a candidate given little chance (and even less after Iowa). Now, those same people or their successors from 1996 (and 2000 and 2006) are used to first-class operations and featherbedding, and they're charging Hillary accordingly.
The real question is why we all continue to drink the Kool-Aid on campaign appeals where the money is spent like this.