Democracy as you say stands in many ways: in the school board member I elect, in the mayor for whom I vote (though his/her power has often yielded to an undemocratically elected city manager), in the governor I elect, and finally in my representative and senators in Congress. For any of them my vote counts just as much as anyone within the unitary entity that is my state.

Now, in the one office I have not included and the one to which you refer, yes, the rules are different; and they are so for a reason. Federalism is a good idea, especially in such a vast, disparate nation as ours. Though the improvements in communication, transportation, and reinterpretations of the Interstate Commerce Clause have eliminated many borders and obstacles, the quandary associated with reorganizing the government in such a way that presidential elections could be coordinated and regulated is too much to bear. The federal government would have to become unitary itself to create extra-constitutional laws that cross states borders.

The article speaks of primaries as a right. They are no such thing. The party does not need to ask for input on who is put onto the ticket. If that does not suit voters, they can try to reform the way a party holds elections or caucuses and then preach of the superiority of the party due to the more democratic method of selecting a candidate. Or, they can find a new party that works along the methodology more akin to their liking a build it.

The best solution would probably be to reduce the power of the executive branch to co-equal with the other two, thereby reducing the importance of the presidential election. If the president were not so powerful every little discrepancy would not seem so important. But, please do not end federalism (which I believe would be necessary if elections were federalized) because the parties are wrong.

The primaries are internal party issues - they are how the parties decide who the nominees will be. They can be as ridiculous or ugly as the parties want them to be, and I have no probelm with that.

I do have a problem with the fact that the voting public buys into this crap, that we have allowed these two parties to take over our democracy. These parties were not created by the constitution and are in fact private entities that have taken over our government. Isn't it obvious to everyone by now that these two parties are only concerned about their power, and are no longer even pretending to govern a republican democracy? We aren't one anymore - we are ruled by an oligarchy.

Now I know that Florida is wacky. Actually, its wackiness is appealing to me. Life is never boring here. But...

In theory, as you point out, primary elections are the business of the individual parties. That's fine, as far as it goes. But the State of Florida runs the elections. It costs millions of dollars, something like $5 million, to administer a statewide election here. Now, neither the Democratic or Republican parties chip in for the running of the elections process here. In fact, it was the State Legislature (both Ds and Rs, but initiated and pushed by the Rs which hold huge majorities in both Houses) that changed the law moving Presidential Primary Day to January 29th. Now why is this?

The system is subsidizing the parties. Of course, there is the fig leaf that, should the Greens or the Veterans Party or any of the other 30-odd political parties recognized by the State of Florida wish to hold their Presidential Preference Primary on Jan. 29th also, they are just as entitled to the state apparatus. But let's face it - the magnitude of the affiliations to the two major parties means that really all the work of printing ballots (Yes! We are chucking the touchscreen machines for 100% paper ballots!), opening and staffing thousands of polling places, and counting and certifying the results, is giving the lion's share of this state-run, tax-supported effort to the two major parties.

I suspect that the state-run system is true in many (possibly all) other states as well. But if you think about it, there are all sorts of conflicts of interest that arise when states subsidize what are essentially private organizations.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean offered the Florida Democratic Party (FDP) $800,000 to run an alternative system in lieu of participating in the state-run primary. That kind of money may have paid for a caucus (perhaps), but nowhere near enough for a primary. For a number of reasons - some justifiably logistical, some outright hubristic - the FDP declined.

A short, final observation: I worked the 2004 New Hampshire Primary as a volunteer in the Dean campaign (yeah, I left 60-degree Florida January weather for nine days in the minus-15-to-plus-15 winter wonderland of Manchester - on my dime). A huge plurality of the voters I contacted told me they were tired of the politics and wanted it all to go away. This is understandable at some level - they were bombarded in a very contentious and crowded election of significant import. But this on-the-street attitude contrasted sharply with the pronouncements of the party leaders and activists, that New Hampshire deserved to have the first primary because its citizens were so enthusiastically involved in it, which the candidates ritually parroted (lest they offend anyone in the Granite State). Somewhere in that mix, the orthodoxy and the reality diverged tremendously.

The Soviet Union used to do pretty much the same thing - except they had just one party, the Communist party, instead of two.

Other than that there really isn't much difference. It seems that both parties would prefer a Soviet-style, single-party "democracy" to the two-party system.

The process isn't nearly so simple as Scherer describes, as it omits discussion of the domination of special interests on both parties, particularly corporatists and militarists, in favor of this particular view. Special interests ensure that we vote for the candidates who have the best funding. Ultimately we vote for the candidates preferred by the moneyed and powerful in the ruling classes.

So they do let us "vote", but that's mostly just to make it look good.