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have primaries on June 3, six months
after the original caucuses in Iowa).
Obama has a slight lead in delegates,
a lead seemingly insurmountable
without Clinton turning the tide at
the party convention by convincing
enough “superdelegates” to vote for
her. (A superdelegate is a party big
shot – governors, Congress members,
party leaders – who can vote any way
they want.)
Here is the rub. If superdelegates
turn the tide and elect Clinton as the
Democratic nominee, Obama’s supporters
will be outraged at the subversion
of the democratic process
and likely stay home from the general
election. In particular, black voters,
Obama’s most loyal supporters (90%
of them voted for Obama in Mississippi,
the most recent primary), will
probably lose all faith in the process,
as well they should, and choose not
to vote against John McCain. On the
age over the time between the Civil
War and the early twentieth century,
positioning itself against the big cats
and having a stronghold among poor
Southern voters disenchanted with
big industry. Franklin D. Roosevelt is
surely the best example of this part of
the Democratic Party, elected to fight
the Great Depression and passing the
New Deal to help the common worker.
The Southern base was lost in the sixties,
when Lyndon B. Johnson and the
Democrats supported the Civil Rights
Act of 1964. Today, the party base is
entirely in the Northeast, with much
of it comprised of well-off liberals uncomfortable
with evangelicalism and
megachurches.
But during George W. Bush’s
terms as President, the Democrats
have laid down and accepted everything
thrown their way. Already
weakened – since John F. Kennedy’s
assassination in 1963, Republicans
the Taliban), Americans offered large
bounties for terrorists. Needless to say,
many innocent people were picked up
and transmitted to Gitmo in exchange
for American money.
The triumph of the American legal
system – due process and the rule of
law – has been, shockingly, abandoned
at Gitmo. Prisoners are held without
being charged with crimes, without
recourse to defend themselves, without
access to the evidence presented at
the “tribunals” (what a word! It calls
to mind Soviet Russia more than anything)
they are given, and without access
to the Koran for prayer. They are
allegedly being tortured according to
human rights groups, and they are increasingly
attempting suicide. Worst
of all, American attempts to criticize
countries like China for their human
rights offenses such as torture are absurd
and laughable now that America
itself has refused to ban torture itself.
I think the end of
the Democratic Party
would be a fantastic thing.
other hand, if the superdelegates stick
with Obama, women voters will grow
disenchanted with losing the seemingly
one chance for a female president
and also stay home. Either way,
the Democratic nominee, at one point
an apparent shoo-in against an immensely
unpopular Republican party,
will have a big strike against him or
herself.
This may be stretching the issue,
perhaps, but the controversy over the
Democratic nomination (not just the
superdelegates, but Michigan and
Florida as well) could go a long way
to destroying the Democratic Party.
This is the point I want to get to, and
it is why I spent four paragraphs summarizing
the situation of which many
of you may already be aware. And I
think the end of the Democratic Party
would be a fantastic thing.
The Democratic Party came of
10 FIRST CALL MARCH 24, 2008
have held the White House for almost
two-thirds of the forty-five years – the
Democrats have failed to do anything
to check Bush’s historically increasing
powers. The war in Iraq was based on
the premise that Saddam Hussein was
developing weapons of mass destruction;
he had stopped those programs
in the mid-nineties. Either Bush knew
that, in which case he’s a war-monger,
or he didn’t know that, in which case
he’s incompetent. But in either case,
the Democrats allowed this unnecessary
war to go through without significant
opposition.
Even worse, they have failed to do
anything about Guantanamo Bay and
other human rights offenses perpetrated
by Americans during the course
of the war on terror. After the war in
Afghanistan (a real war – one that it
is progressively failing as the focus on
Iraq has led to a quiet resurgence of
All this has been extensively documented
– no need to list all the rights
lost under the Patriot Act, the Federal
Intelligence Surveillance Act, and on
and on – but the Democratic Party
has done nothing to stop it. With
the Democrats beating each other to
pieces, McCain seems increasingly
likely to win the general election, and
he has, if anything, even more hardlined
stances about such issues than
Bush does. What America needs is
a new political party, one willing to
stand up against the abuse of human
rights against detainees and others as
well as one both willing and able to
fight against the Republican party’s
increasing domination of the political
sphere. I am not optimistic. FC
Isaac Katz is a junior in the College.
You can write to him at isaachk@sas.