Given recent campaign rhetoric, the upcoming meeting of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee, and the airing of HBO’s “Recount,” there’s been quite a bit of talk this week about popular political will, some of it misguided. National Review’s Rich Lowry, for example, seems confused.
Back in 2000, Democrats were contemptuous of rules and technicalities about how ballots had to be marked and the process for recounts. All that mattered was the popular will. And the biggest ultimate obstacle to it was the Electoral College, which kept Al Gore from the White House in this “stolen election.”
Well, the Democrats’ attachment to the unadulterated popular will has gone the way of the hanging chad. Suddenly, Democrats are sticklers for rules. […]
The change from 2000 to 2008 is simple to explain. Back then, the liberal establishment wanted Gore to beat Bush. Now, most of it wants Obama to finish off Hillary. The standards have changed accordingly.
Nonsense. Lowry may not remember, but Dems have long argued that 2000 was a “stolen” election, not because Gore won the popular vote, but because Gore won Florida. “All that mattered was the popular will”? No, all that mattered was counting the votes in Florida, to see who actually won the state.
Popular vote matters in large part for bragging rights. It’s a moral victory. But if candidates are told in advance that delegates (in a nominating fight) or electoral votes (in a general-election fight) will be the measurement of success, and candidates shape their campaign strategies accordingly, it’s hard to argue credibly that popular votes should trump the agreed upon metrics. In 2000 and 2001, Dems used Gore’s popular-vote victory in part to argue that Bush lacked a mandate for his agenda, not to argue that Gore actually should have taken the oath on Inauguration Day.
On a related note, it’s probably worth noting that a similar argument will emerge over the weekend, when Clinton supporters protest the Dems’ Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting.
The Democratic National Committee is bracing itself for protests outside its Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting on Saturday in Washington, where the fates of the Florida and Michigan primaries could finally be decided.
Supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton are organizing to march and then gather on the street outside the panel’s meeting, scheduled for Saturday morning at a hotel in Northwest Washington. […]
Besides their goal of pressuring the committee into counting the votes from Florida and Michigan, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters are hoping that an en masse gathering will demonstrate widespread support for her candidacy — and perhaps persuade a superdelegate or two.
The Obama campaign is urging its supporters not to demonstrate at the meeting, and has instead organized a voter-registration drive across the river in Virginia.
I don’t necessarily blame Clinton backers for trying to help Clinton out at the RBC meeting on Saturday, but I am curious how many of them are demonstrating because they’re genuinely outraged over the dispute between the DNC and two state parties over convention delegates or because they’re hoping to give their favored candidate an edge. There’s nothing especially wrong with the latter, but I get the sense that many want to pretend it’s the prior. It’s not about Clinton, they say, but about an unyielding commitment to honoring non-binding primary votes in states that broke party rules.
If we give the protestors the benefit of the doubt, and accept that they’re outraged because of the DNC’s punishment of Florida and Michigan, I have a couple of follow-up questions. How many of the protestors were outraged when the punishment was originally made last year, before we knew who won the non-binding primaries? How many denounced Hillary Clinton for saying these votes wouldn’t count? How many protested some of Clinton’s top aides for playing a direct role in making the decision against Florida and Michigan in the first place? How many criticized the 12 Clinton supporters on the DNC Rules Committee who voted to strip these two states of their entire slate of delegates?
How many said anything at all when it was just a matter of democratic principles, unrelated to any specific candidate or campaign?
Harold Meyerson concluded, “Clinton’s supporters have every right to demonstrate on Saturday, of course. But their larger cause is neither democracy nor feminism; it’s situational ethics.”