“Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee,” (Harold Ickes) may be one of the more depressing utterances of this campaign. I mean just the cadence of it, its perfect mingling of the imperial and the meritorious which pretty much sums up American governance right now. One isn't against credentials, necessarily, nor the committees that disburse them (well, I am, for the reason that credentials are in essence disappointing to those who depend on them, the human spirit being as it is sort of stupidly aspirational, but we'll leave that point for now). One dislikes that this is the idea, now, behind Clinton's campaign. Pushing on towards the void.
I am not absolutely convinced of Barak Obama's idealism--his selling point is really that he's a creative bureaucrat--but Clinton at this point is running a campaign of pure nihilism. First, she's for the disenfranchisement of the rebel states, now she's shocked (to quote Sen. John Yerkes Iselin) shocked! to think that those poor delegate's votes could be cast away. Which, given the electoral college, is perfectly fair. The system is unequipped to handle anything but unequivocal support of one or another candidate, and its weakness is to the advantage of anyone ambitious to ferret them out. We've run into its limits repeatedly over the course of this miserable decade, of which the Supreme Court decision of 2000 was the most damning example. We won't scrap the electoral system, because we're lazy and to do so would admit defeat, but to look closely at its reform would be to catch a shock from its ad hoc and undemocratic vibe. I admit Michigan and Florida had to be made examples for illegitimately shuffling their primaries around, yet still I sympathize with the impatience of their legislators. So then, somewhere in this morass, it was decided to award half of the formerly banned delegates a seat at the convention. On what precedent? Is it extralegal? Who knows? Everything's now being taken to the credentials committee.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 10:16 AM,
