GOP And Left Hijack Race, by DICK MORRIS, Published on
TheHill.com on March 22, 2016
2016 has seen the advent of two serious threats to our
democratic process of choosing a president. One is from the right, as
Republican Party bosses seek to reassert their ability to overrule the voters
-- and the other from the left, with demonstrators seeking to shout out Donald
Trump and goad his all-too-susceptible followers into violence.
The nexus of these twin threats is the same: fear of Trump. As
he marches on toward the presidential nomination, he is sweeping aside the best
the Republican Party has to offer. John Kasich hangs on by a thread. And only
Ted Cruz stands in his way.
But the fear he engenders has catalyzed the least democratic
of our impulses: mob rule by the left and boss rule by the right. While
Americans have fought and died for the right to select their leaders in
elections, thousands more have been clubbed, gassed, exiled and imprisoned in
the fight to get the right to nominate candidates in direct primaries.
Before 1964, party bosses routinely selected the candidates.
Primaries were for candidates who had something to prove, a form of auditioning
for the party bosses. In 1952 and 1956, Adlai Stevenson won the Democratic
nomination without competing in a single primary. In 1960, Kennedy fought in
the primaries to prove that a Catholic could win and so he could persuade --
but could not compel -- the bosses to nominate him.
But in 1964, Barry Goldwater turned the Republican establishment
on its head by defeating Nelson Rockefeller in the primaries, leaving in the
dust the old Eastern party establishment.
When the left wing of the Democratic Party, animated by
opposition to the Vietnam War, tried the trick in 1968, its candidates --
Robert Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern -- won all the primaries,
but the party bosses nominated Hubert Humphrey nonetheless. Chicago, the scene
of the convention, was gripped by days of rioting, police brutality, tear gas,
billy clubs and arrests. So rent was the Democratic Party that it succumbed to
Richard Nixon in the fall.
Stung by the events of Chicago, Democrats -- followed by
Republicans -- changed the rules and required that the delegates who chose the
candidates be elected in primaries after making binding and public pledges of
support for a candidate.
Now the leaders of the Republican Party, terrified by the
prospect of a nominee they cannot control and convinced they will not defeat
Hillary Clinton in the fall, are mapping out a strategy to ignore the will of
their voters and derail Trump at the convention. Nobody challenges the primary
voting or alleges that the billionaire stole his victories. But the bosses
would nonetheless have us turn away the candidate that got the most votes and
instead nominate someone more to their liking.
This strategy is obscene and a violation of the spirit of
our nation and our democracy. Even if a candidate should fall just short of a
majority but win the overwhelming plurality, he should not be stymied but must
be nominated.
On the left, noisy demonstrators try to disrupt Trump's
rallies. In the spirit of the communist "agents provocateur" of years
past, they shove their signs in the face of Trump supporters, challenging them
to physical combat. When Trump's backers respond, they film it and broadcast it
throughout the nation, piously decrying Trump's authoritarian predilections.
Meanwhile, the left-wing mob blocks traffic to stop people
from exercising their First Amendment right of peaceful assembly.
These threats to our democratic way of choosing a president
must not be allowed to block the path of popular selection of the nominee --
especially not when hundreds of thousands of voters are participating in the
Republican primaries for the first time. We dare not make them more cynical by
showing that their votes didn't count.
This election is not a question of whether or not you are
for Donald Trump. It's about whether or not you are for democracy.
Dickmorris.com
No comments:
Post a Comment