I’ve been saying for at least 6 months that we need to get used to saying “President McCain” because I’ve thought and continue to think that, unfortunately, this is going to happen—but not really for the reason of media bias that Mr. Parry emphasizes. Rather, I’ve seen the demise of any opportunity for a Democratic victory going back into the Democratic primaries, when the party abandoned its supposed progressive “base” by doing its quadrennial swan dive toward the political center, as Kucinich, Gravel and even the semi-progressive Edwards were eliminated (albeit with a lot of media-bias assistance) from contention and the primary became an essentially issue-less contest of popularity and social identity between the “woman” and the “black.” With his nomination and subsequent panderings toward a daunting line-up of conservative elements, Obama and the Party have set themselves up for the very focus on “personal” questions of patriotism, competence, etc. that are always the last refuge of campaigns where there is no real substantive difference between the opponents. In this contest McCain “may well” and probably will win. The GOP demonstrated for all to see, by its efficient “swift boating” of John Kerry in the 2004 election, that the Democrats are no match for them in the game of personal invective.

Is this contest salvageable for Obama? Yes, if he took the necessary route for success, which is the essence of simplicity but is a route which he and the party are apparently not willing or able to follow. He wins by becoming the true champion of the interests of “the people” over those of “the corporation,” the proponent of peace and international harmony advocates over those of war and empire. These are the issues of the majority of the American people, and it should not take that much courage to stand up to the power of AIPAC and Goldman Sachs and say: “This is where I stand, with the people, and no amount of derision heaped on me as a ‘radical’ or as ‘un-patriotic’ and no degree of threat of losing this election is going to deter me, as ‘I’d rather be right than President.’” By being willing to lose the election by standing on principle, he can win. Given his and the party’s long-time and immediate dependence on these powers, I doubt this will happen, especially if people in the peace/progressive movement join his ranks as the “best deal available” among the only “viable” candidates.

Given the likelihood that Obama won’t, or can’t, make this trip back to the political left from which the party of the people supposedly derived, the people have no choice but to abandon the party that has abandoned them and support a third party candidate like Nader or McKinney. I can even see the possibility that Obama will reach such a degraded state of support from the people that he will be the “unelectable” candidate and that we, who support McKinney, would be able to say in truth that voting for Obama rather than for her as President is tantamount to a “vote for McCain.” How about them particular apples?

Like all shady “operations,” this one needed to operate in the shadow of public awareness; but the bean-spiller Russ Limbaugh spilled a bowl of them just after the March 4 Democratic primaries in Texas and Ohio when he “bragged” on the air that he had urged his friends in the Republican Party to vote for Clinton, since she was on the ropes after Super Tuesday and it was to the Republicans’ advantage to prolong the Democratic primary race to allow Obama and Clinton to clobber one another to help do the party’s dirty work for it. Of course the “dirty” Clinton campaign obliged and Republican bottom-suckers aided the clobbering process by going back through Jeremiah Wright’s old sermons and putting together a hair-raising montage of utterances designed to embarrass Obama which is, of course, exactly what happened. The loud-mouthed Limbaugh labeled all this muddy business Operation Chaos.

After the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, John Nichols wrote an article for Nation claiming that Chaos had little or no influence on the outcome of the PA race. I’ve done the math and some educated guesses on the election results (which I will be glad to furnish as a paste to this site if requested) to show quite the contrary: that of the 215,000 vote margin of Clinton’s win in PA, about 100,000 of them could be attributed to Republicans who, in PA’s “closed” primary, re-registered as Democrats and voted for Clinton; without that Chaos boost, she would have won by 5-6% rather than the 10% that was the agreed-upon “magic number” of the margin by which she had to win to stay in the race. After her “big victory,” the campaign contributions rolled in and she stayed in the race… at least until after May 6. Operation Chaos, Mission Accomplished!

Like other accomplished missions, this one is still a bit incomplete, especially after the semi-melt down suffered by Obama by virtue of his handling of the Jeremiah Wright “affair.”

Next to the plate step the May 6 twin primaries in Indiana and North Carolina and it remains to be seen whether Operation Chaos will still be operating. For reasons mentioned below, I rather doubt it.

To consider Indiana first, it is the first totally “open” primary since Limbaugh described the operation, one in which any voter can vote in either party’s primary. This might seem tailor-made for Chaos except for a couple of things. (1) There are other primary races, Congress for example, in which Republicans may feel that they have a stake, even if the presidential “stake” has been removed by McCain clinching the nomination. Some may feel, as I tend to agree, that the mission has indeed been accomplished and they can safely “stay home” and vote in their own party’s primary. (2) Although I called Indiana a “totally open” primary state, it is not quite that. True, Indiana does not even record party registration on voting records but when a voter asks for a ballot, he/she is expected to request the ballot of his/her “party affiliation:” that party in whose primary he/she has been voting in the recent past. If his/her indication of this affiliation (records of which are maintained by the state) is “challenged” (by whom?), the “challengee” will be required to execute an affidavit indicating his/her intention of voting for the “majority” of that party’s nominees at the next general election. But, as the “green pages” for Indiana elections point out, officials at the polling place do not have access tp a voter’s affiliation records and his/her actual voting at the general election is secret, so the truthfulness of the affidavits is seldom, if ever, challenged. So Chaos-bent persons could presumably violate their “affiliation” even after a sworn affidavit to the contrary, but would I (for example) want to risk the possibility of being prosecuted (in ignorance of the inefficacy of the “challenge” threat) because some hot shot “voter abuse” prosecutor wanted to make a test case of me… all because I was so Republican-or Russ Limbaugh oriented that I was willing to go to jail for a “cause” that had perhaps already been accomplished? No way. Bottom line: in contrast with PA, I don’t expect Operation Chaos will make much difference in IN.

Then there’s North Carolina which, like PA, is a “closed primary” state but, again, it was possible for people to change their registrations before the change deadline of April 11, in plenty of time to implement Chaos directives from the party. Did this happen? Current registration numbers show that, since the beginning of the year, approximately 105,000 have been newly registered as Democrats, about 14,000 as Republicans, suggesting some Chaos potential. With a state with a large black population so decisively leaning toward Obama, one might wonder how many of these 105,000 new “Democrats” are Chaos operatives who will vote for Clinton to “prolong” the race; and how many are respondents to Obama’s campaign to enlist those Republicans, mostly I should think, white males who are in fact attracted to a “black” candidate who is the closet racist’s dream of a black politician who would tell Jeremiah Wright, in effect, to go the back of the bus and New York City blacks, incensed by the exoneration of police who killed Sean Bell, to “accept the verdict” and to avoid “violent” reactions. So again, bottom line, I doubt that Chaos will have much effect in NC.

This brings me to a final observation on these Republican efforts to manipulate the Democratic primaries. Here I’m going to offer a guess at what the “operation” is all about; how I wish I had a “mole” who sits with these creeps and plots strategies. Failing that, I have to guess. I’m thinking that, all along, the Republican preference as a November opponent was Obama, who is vulnerable to the same kind of “swift-boating” operations that were the undoing of John Kerry in 2004. Whether it was his not wearing a flag pin, his suggestion of “negotiating” with Hamas, his association with Reverend Wright or maybe their ace in the hole, the real possibility of a criminal indictment in connection with the public housing scandal in Chicago, they would have a candidate who could be smeared far beyond the rather vague “Hillary hatred” that would make her as well a relatively easy November election opponent. In the several “open primary” election states leading through Super Tuesday, it is my impression (I haven’t done “the math” on these) that Obama won most of these states, perhaps with a boost from Republican voters–provided these occurred in primaries after the Republican primary contest was effectively decided. When it appeared after Super Tuesday that the “operation” did such an over-kill that it threatened to foreshorten the Democratic race and deprive the party of “dirty work” done within the Democratic Party, then Operation Chaos was born: an operation whose mission may indeed be accomplished so that Republicans can vote in what remains of “their own” primary contests and let happen what was originally intended: that a “flawed” Obama would be nominated.

One more thing I hope to accomplish by this article: to keep open a discussion, while the “pain” of the present election mess is still fresh with us, of needed structural changes in the way we “do business” in American democracy. Primary elections should, in my view, be reserved for participation to whose people who are genuinely committed to advance the causes of a party: “open” primaries are practically oxymorons. To prevent changes in party registration for the specific purpose of doing mischief with other peoples’ elections (a la Operation Chaos), states could enforce earlier deadlines for registration changes, perhaps to the beginning of an election season, before parties could calculate who was winning or losing in the other parties’ primaries. (Kentucky now does this, as registration changes for its May 20 primary closed on December 31, 2007). Finally, and this one is debatable for several reasons: the institution of a single “Primary Day” in say June or July could avert not only the situation in which parties with “already settled” races of their own would feel free to enter their rivals’ party primaries, but also perhaps obviate the bandwagon effect of earlier on later primaries. All these reforms are open to discussion and critique, but wouldn’t it be good strategy to begin the debates now while the problems with the present system are laid out before us?

1. “Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, you both speak of immediate withdrawal from Iraq beginning as soon as you become President. If the war is a ‘mistake,’ why must you wait until next January to help bring it to an end? As a member of Congress you have the ‘power of the purse’ to stop the war by voting to withhold funding in the immediately-upcoming vote on a supplemental war appropriation. Will you vote to do that?”

2. “Senator Clinton, you just said, in response to my question whether the U.S. should consider an Iranian attack on Israel as an attack on the United States, that this country should have an “umbrella” of protection against nuclear attack under which any country could come that would forego its efforts at nuclear weapons production. Since your answer referred to a question about Israel, I assume that you expected that country to fit under that umbrella. But doesn’t Israeli itself have nuclear capabilities that we have helped to develop? So could people living in Tel Aviv, or in fact Philadelphia, enjoy the protection of that umbrella?… Senator Obama, your response?”

3. “Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, you have both indicated your opposition to NAFTA even though, Senator Clinton, it was passed during your husband’s presidency. Though you both now are opposed to the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, one of your aides, Senator Obama, was said to have told a Canadian official not to take this issue “seriously” and you, Senator Clinton, had a top advisor who was found to be assisting the Colombian government in securing its passage. Given the fact that both of you supported last December a Free Trade Agreement with Peru very similar to NAFTA and the Colombia one, how can the American people believe that either of you is “serious” about addressing trade practices that are harmful to workers in the United States and in other countries?”

4. “Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, Israel has just begun building additional settlements in the West Bank, in violation of the “roadmap to peace” that was negotiated with U.S. support. If you were President, what would you do to insure that Israel would not further violate the terms of this roadmap?”

5. “Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, you have both spoken eloquently about the need for fiscal responsibility and also about your commitments to insure the future of Social Security, full funding of No Child Left Behind, massive reconstruction of American infrastructure and other urgent domestic needs of the country. Given the cost of these programs and your desire to accomplish them without deficit financing, how would you pay for them? Specifically would you consider reductions in massive defense expenditures if these cuts could be accomplished without compromising the security of the United States? If so, where would you look to the possibility of such cuts?”

6. “Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, you both have indicated your intention to reduce the influence of “special interests” during your presidential administration. But the investment firm of Goldman Sachs, to cite one example, has contributed around a half million dollars to each of your campaigns. You, Senator Clinton, have a former campaign contribution “bundler” who is now in jail for illegal campaign fund-raising and you, Senator Obama, it has just been revealed in a USA Today article, have been assisted in such campaign fund bundling by 38 lawyers who are associated with firms that lobby in Washington. Can you really expect the American people to believe that your presidency will counter “special interest” influence?

Were there to be a genuine “debate,” issues like the ones addressed in these questions would surely be raised; otherwise, further debates might be useful in selling the commercial products advertised with such profuseness in the Wednesday night debate, but would have little other redeeming value. Since, I would guess, these two candidates would give essentially identical answers to these questions, would it not be vital to future debates that other candidates besides the Republican and Democratic ones be included before Americans elect their next President in November?

In an earlier article, I wrote of the “games” that Democrats play, referring to their agonies over superdelegates and the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan. Limbaugh may be highlighting for us a Republican form of gamesmanship in the current election season: creating havoc in the opposition party ranks in order to enhance their own November prospects. There’s a connection with the Democrats’ own games, at least in the case of the debacle of the still-suppressed Florida delegation to the convention, as it was a Republican-dominated legislature and governor who spearheaded advancing of the date of both parties’ primaries to January 29, supposedly to increase the influence of the state on the national parties’ nominating processes, only to put that influence on the sideline as some Floridians now wish they had arrived fashionably late rather than annoyingly early at their party’s party; at least the Democrats, who were far more severely sanctioned by the DNC than were their Republican neighbors by the RNC. Democrats now cry foul play by the legislature, though Democratic legislators were for the most part complicit in their own screwing.

To return to the specific instance of Republican encouragement of voting in the Democrats’ primary with such mischief-making purposes, it should be noted that Limbaugh’s Republican friends in Ohio and Texas must not have been registered as Republicans but as “independents” because, in the “semi-open” primaries of both states, only such independent voters could choose the party slate on which they wanted to vote; so maybe the influence of such cross-voting on these elections was relatively insignificant (though in a really close race like Texas any small difference can be significant). However, in states with fully “open” primaries in which one can choose to vote in the primary of a party with which he or she is not affiliated, cross-voting could have far more influence on election outcomes. Some of Obama’s strong showing in open primary states like Missouri and Wisconsin could have been helped by heavy cross-voting by Republicans, whose motives at this earlier stage may have been to promote the winning of a perceived “weakest” candidate rather to prolong a rival party’s primary contest.

The main control against such “mischievous” cross-voting from one party to another is the situation in which both parties have an undetermined outcome in the contests in their own party. Limbaugh said, for example, that his Texas and Ohio friends’ voting for Clinton would not hurt John McCain who had (for practical purposes) already been assured of the Republican nomination. Therein lies one of my motives in bringing out this situation at this point in the campaign. With McCain already assured of nomination, we can now anticipate much more involvement of Republicans in the remaining primaries of the Democratic party, the primaries that will determine the Democrats’ nominee (or will result in the outcome being determined by superdelegate and any other “uncommitted” delegate votes). Between April 22 and May 6, three populous states with a total of 345 delegates will hold primaries. While all three of these states have “closed” primaries (one must be a registered Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary), there is time yet for Republicans to change their registrations to Democrat in order to be able to vote in the Democratic primary: by March 23 for Pennsylvania’s April 22 primary, by April 9 for the May 6 primary in Indiana, and by April 6 for North Carolina’s primary, also on May 6. Since there is little likelihood that the Obama/Clinton race will be decided before May 6, we can anticipate every incentive for Republican voters, lacking a contest for their own nominee, to change their party affiliations in order to vote to prolong the contest in the Democratic Party by voting for whichever candidate seems to be “on the ropes” at that time. After May 6, and after a possible but seemingly unlikely re-do of the Florida and Michigan votes (in which Michigan would have an “open” primary if it re-does at it originally did), one would think that, if the race is still “undecided.” the Republicans would finally allow the Democrats to vote their own preference; or return to an earlier policy of voting for whatever Democrat they perceive as the “weakest.”

If all this sounds like a lament for poor embattled Democrats, I don’t mean for it to be this. I voted in the “suppressed” January 29 Florida primary, not for either Obama or Clinton, nor would I vote for either of them (or McCain) in November. Rather, I want the bottom line of this analysis is to be my urging three reforms of our primary electoral system that would reduce the likelihood of this “mess” from happening again.

(1) Eliminate “open” primaries which sound like fine democratic exercises in freedom for voters, but in fact bring in voters whose motives are not the best interests are not those of the party in whose primaries they are voting.

(2) Lengthen the time interval between a primary election and the date at which a voter may switch his/her registration between parties; the model here might be Kentucky, which now enforces a December 31, 2007 deadline for such party switches for its May 20 primary.

(3) Establish a single day for primaries in all states, so that one party can no longer “game” the voting process by waiting until a contest in their own party is already determined and then creating mischief in the other party.

I know that the media which depend on revenues from their reporting and commentating on half-year or more election seasons, with even an equivalent of the Academy Awards or World Series in a “super Tuesday,” would have to be hog-tied to support such a reform. But whose media is it, anyway, if the public interest requires changes that will protect the integrity of our electoral system, why should Fox News, CNN and the New York Times stand in our way?

I won’t devote too much space to elaborating on these well-known sources of advantage and disadvantage in electoral contests. Political campaigns are so outrageously expensive, and public financing of them is so grievously inadequate, that one must either be independently wealthy or willing and able to accept the contributions of those vested interests who are only too willing to invest in some political influence through contributing to their campaigns. Our quadrennial presidential elections, involving a system of two parties relatively even in voting strength, guarantee that candidates of more purely conservative or progressive political views must, to attract the all-important support of “independents,” tack their political appeals toward the center of political philosophies, hoping only that they won’t so egregiously offend their conservative or progressive “base” that these folks will stay home on election day, or else support 3rd party candidates who are more congenial to their beliefs. As to challenger disadvantage, it’s about as easy to unseat an incumbent legislator as it is to beat the home team in a professional basketball game; the political game is “rigged” in favor of the incumbent because people evaluate their representative in terms of how much he or she “does for” the home district or state, how much for example those much-maligned “earmarks” will come home to the local pork barrel. Finally, the factor of “charisma” or the “likeable” personality is a huge factor in our elections; as was said about G.W. Bush, the average Joe would be more likely to want to “have a beer” with him than either of his opponents, the wooden Gore or the aristocratic Kerry. With the exception of Truman and Ford (both of whom gained their presidencies by constitutional rising from the vice-presidency rather than by election), all our Presidents since FDR have been more or less such charismatics, no matter how disastrous for the country some of their presidencies may have been. I could go on, but I want to get to the superdelegates.

To re-iterate the lament against superdelegates, it is said that they are allowed to substitute their “own” voices for those of the “ordinary” voters who have voted in primaries and caucuses. I have two things to say about these charges. The first is to observe that, if elections generally in this country are “rigged” in the manner I’ve suggested above, these superdelegates will not be immune from the same influences that influenced those sacred “voters” in the primaries and caucuses. They owe their own elections to personal or sponsored wealth, they are raised in the 2-Party culture which defines the preferred candidate as the one must “viable” in competition with the other party, they have been judged and their electoral opponents have been judged in terms of their likeability. In other words, they will use their judgment in the same way “ordinary” voters choose the candidate they think will fare best in the general election; if these judgments are divided in the electorate, they will be divided in the superdelegates; a “wash out” in terms of their supposedly decisive influence, which seems exactly to be happening as Clinton support among superdelegates erodes and that of Obama increases (with, I predict, declines in claims of superdelegate “rigging” from those in the Obama camp).

The second and more “principled” point that I would make about superdelegates is the view that it perhaps is a good thing for “democracy” if these men and women are somewhat independent of the views of “the voters” in making their choices for a nominee. Tocqueville, whose views Noorani likes to quote in his article, is somewhat admiring of the genius of the American Constitution’s “checks and balances” that help to ameliorate what the French aristocrat saw as the tendency toward a “tyranny of the majority” in American life. “Representative” bodies like city, county, state and national legislatures involve a process of “deliberation” prior to votes that commit the given entity to a line of public policy. A member of Congress should, in this view, be able to give a more reasoned consideration to a decision than can typically be done in a political campaign in which, before voters “speak” with their votes, they have been bombarded with the likes of sound bite commercials, bumper stickers and swift boat attacks on candidates. There is a certain genius, I think, in a political party reserving a certain number of seats at a nominating convention for persons who are “uncommitted” and therefore presumably amenable to reasoning and debate. Maybe superdelegates are not the best way to do this; they are, after all, subjected to the same “rigging” influences that I described above. But at least they are men and women with some degree of experience in deliberation on issues that arise in their executive or legislative offices so that, absent another distribution formula, it may be as good a way as any to keep the nomination of a presidential candidate “open” to candidates none of whom have captured a majority of delegates in primaries and caucuses.

I close with the words of an American contemporary of Tocqueville, Henry David Thoreau which, even though they don’t sound so “democratic,” may contain an element of political wisdom when it comes to determining the “virtue” of different presidential candidates. “A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is little virtue in the action of masses of men.” (Civil Disobedience).