"Once upon a time, in an America now consigned to the mists of memory, there was a quaint and (it is now said) oppressive custom called Election Day. This great national coming-together of the public in public polling places, this rare communitarian moment in a nation of restless individualists, was an exhilarating episode in our civic liturgy.
Then came, in the name of progress, the plague of early voting. In many states, voting extends over weeks, beginning before campaigns reach their informative crescendos.
This plague has been encouraged by people, often Democrats, who insist, without much supporting evidence, that it increases voter turnout - especially among minorities and workers for whom the challenge of getting to polling places on a particular day is supposedly too burdensome.
The plague made many Super Tuesday voters - those who hurried to cast their ballots for John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani and other dear departeds - feel like ninnies, which serves them right.
On Tuesday, the Democratic Party paid a price for early voting - especially in California, where more than 2 million votes were cast in the 29 days prior to what is anachronistically called Election Day. The price was paid by the party's most potentially potent nominee, Obama, whose surge became apparent after many impatient voters had already rushed to judgment.
Obama lost California to Clinton by 380,000 votes, but surely ran much closer in the votes cast on Tuesday, after her double-digit lead in polls had evaporated. Had he won the third of the three C's - he won Connecticut and in Colorado - he might now be unstoppable.
Evangelical Christians, who in 2006 gave Republicans more votes than Democrats received from African-Americans and union members combined, wanted to determine the GOP's nominee - and perhaps they have done so. By giving so much support to an essentially regional candidate, Mike Huckabee, rather than to Mitt Romney, they have opened McCain's path to capturing the conservative party without capturing conservatives. McCain's Tuesday triumph was based in states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California) he will not carry in November.
Although Obama is, to say no more, parsimonious with his deviations from liberal orthodoxy, he is said to exemplify "post-partisan" politics. The same is sometimes said of McCain.
Five days before Super Tuesday, McCain received an important endorsement from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, another supposed practitioner of post-partisanship, which often looks a lot like liberalism that would prefer not to speak its name.
Three days before that endorsement, the emblem of Schwarzenegger's post-partisanship - his extremely liberal (lots of mandates and taxes) and expensive ($14.9 billion, slightly more than the state's current budget deficit) plan for universal health care - died in an 11-member state Senate committee, where it got just one vote.
Perhaps we are seeing the future. It looks familiar."
Nothing will ever stop the early, and/or absentee voting process, and during a primary it does at times make the early birds feel quite dumbass but thats what the conventions are for, namely to sort out the fine mess. And certainly by the time both eventual candidates face one another for the big prize there is far less the chance of voting for someone not even in the race anymore. Thats of course unless John McCain has an aneurysm or Hillary at long last succumbs to all of her crying jags and passes on due to dehydration.
Obama's sudden rise to prominence is a media construct so who really cares if he was screwed out of California. Those who voted for him to overcome the Clinton bandwagon might not necessarily vote for him to actually become President, and look for lots more Monday-Morning-Quarterbacking to explain the whys and wherefores but pay it little attention because the Presidency is going to rest upon whom the media spins as the best person to run the show for us while we pay attention to more important matters.
Those who thought that Blogs had come far enough to inject common sense into the equation were and remain incorrect. Myself included. We collectively touch so relatively small a percentile of potential voters as to be virtually meaningless during a nationwide campaign. There is no other way to explain the paucity of genuine candidates. The Jurassic Press still calls the shots, and since it is a liberal entity the ones left standing will be left-leaning at the very least, and dyed in the wool communists at the very worst. Our time has not yet come but that doesn't mean we shouldn't hone our abilities until it does.
All of this would be balderdash were there a genuine Conservative Republican in the running, or at least one who could debate without sounding like a high-pitched whining little soul who just doesn't sound all that Presidential. If Mitt Romney had better speech writers and was capable of actually debating, he might very well have persuaded some folks to disregard the Yellowstream Media's crush on Manchurian Johnny.
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