Word: votes
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...This scheme of representation is where it gets tricky. The inherent tension in a representative democracy is, Should our elected leaders vote according to their judgment-or their constituency? Political theorists have debated this for two centuries. These days, you generally hear candidates say we should choose them for their judgment; they don't say, Vote for me, and I'll vote the way you tell me to. "I don't listen to polls," candidates boast, but polls are the way the people speak to their officials-and if you simply substitute the words the people for the word polls...
...should the 796 superdelegates in the Democratic Party listen to? A group of Representatives, Senators, governors, party members and ex-officials, these folks represent 20% of all the delegates needed to be nominated but are not bound to vote according to any constituency. Exactly none of them were elected by primary voters to be delegates. The superdelegates were created in 1982 to bring some power back to the party establishment after the primary process had gotten a little too democratic and unruly-and had succeeded in nominating some unelectable candidates for the general election...
...until this year, nobody much cared about the superdelegates. They were superfluous. A nominee can win-and usually does-without the vote of a single superdelegate. Since the inception of superdelegates, no race has ever been as close as this year's contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama or gone this long without being decided. So there was no reason to think these party insiders might have to resolve it at the convention. But that's the scenario being raised...
...that is the problem. We like our leaders to have won a majority of the vote. The difficulty will come if one of the candidates wins a majority of the delegates during the primaries and caucuses but not enough to win the nomination. What should the superdelegates do? If they combine to elect the candidate who came in second, voters would feel cheated and suspect the whole process was undemocratic. Democratic voters remember those feelings from 2000. Primaries are not necessarily meant to be democratic. They are the creation of the political parties and are in effect private clubs...
...more than a week before the election. And because of staff concerns about abortion protesters, the Senator gave his faith talk not at a Catholic university in Ohio, as originally scheduled, but at a Jewish senior center in Florida, with little fanfare. Nine days later, Kerry lost the Catholic vote in Ohio by 44% to 55%. It was a six-point drop from Al Gore's showing among Catholics in that state four years earlier. Kerry lost Ohio by a margin of slightly more than ? 118,000 votes and, with it, the election...