Thursday, January 20, 2011

Dean the Disenfranchiser


The rush is on. Nearly every state is pushing to move their 2008 Presidential Primary date forward in order to have a larger say in who the respective nominees for each party are. This is not setting well with the national parties, who want to decide the order of the primary election dates for each state.
In a speech to the Mortgage Bankers Association, Dean said that if Florida, the state that looks like it will jump ahead of most other states and hold their primary on the 29th of January, does so they will lose all of their delegates in the nominating process. He also went further to say that any candidate who campaigns in the state if it does this will lose all of their delegates from the state also. The Republican National Committee has said that they will do the same thing as the DNC.
It amazes me that the one thing that the RNC and the DNC can agree on is the potential of disenfranchising one of the largest states in the nation if they don't bend to their will. While I understand that their needs to be an equitable way of determining the order of the primary elections, is removing their say in their representation the best way to accomplish this?
I had hoped that our country was moving beyond the heavily party dominated politics, and instead it would be controlled from the bottom up. This proves that we still have a long way to go before this can happen.

No comments:

Post a Comment