by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Why is it that the Democrats seem to take perverse pride in shooting themselves in the foot? Here we have a post by Matthew Yglesias, a widely read, selfprofessed democrat, which contains the line

"To regard a political party which has won the popular vote in the past three presidential elections and whose current nominee is, despite a widely noted lack of charisma..."

Well, turns out that I have a theory about this. My theory is that significant numbers of non-Democrats actually register as "Democrats" in order to be able to vote in Primaries. When they do vote, they vote for the weakest candidate they can come up with. Or maybe just one of the weaker candidates. The fact of the matter is that there is no way for the political parties to confirm that a person is a "member". In fact, "membership" itself is a polite fiction that we accept. The truth is that, unless you are donating time and/or money to a party, your connection is tenuous at best. Add to this that there is no real way to impose party discipline upon the rank and file and you have a virtual sham as far as actual political parties are concerned. We do not have party leaders (other than the current president who is accepted as the de facto head of his/her (maybe..sometime) party) setting forth the political philosophy, dogma, policy and program(s) of the party. No, the head of, for instance, the DNC is more concerned with fund raising and campaign tactics than such things as political philosophy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005