Wednesday, May 28, 2008

GOP Math

There have been a couple of articles by the GOP crowd today deriding the Democrats for their "unfair" system of allocating delegates. The GOP, you see, knows better, for it allocates far more delegates to the winner of any given state, regardless of how close the contest was.

Aside from the basic inequity of the allocation, the GOP system is arguably a much worse system in terms of party building. The Democratic system is set up to reward certain districts for their past efforts and to create incentives to work for the party in the future.

This may indeed be why states like Idaho are over-represented and Puerto Rico, which doesn't even have a vote in November, gets a say in the Democratic primaries, although strangely enough, we have not seen too much criticism of that point by these GOP voices advising the Democrats on how to run their party, perhaps because these GOP voices want to legitimize the popular vote in Puerto Rico.

Regardless, the Democratic outcome has been far more democratic than that which took place in the GOP, so we are faced with the incongruous criticism by the National Review crowd of a Democratic system for picking a nominee that is not democratic enough, and at the same time, too democratic, compared to that of the GOP.

This is how bad things in the GOP are--and they get worse if you read the links--someone like Rich Lowry of National Review apparently does not understand the private versus public distinction when comparing the way a private political party names a candidate and the farce of the publicly-run electoral college:

"The metric the superdelegates are using is who won the most pledged delegates (Obama leads by roughly 150). This is entirely reasonable, given that pledged delegates were the prize both candidates were competing for. But the Democratic delegate-allocation rules can make the Electoral College that Democrats maligned back in 2000 look robustly representative by comparison."


Here's another writer from National Review who has also apparently lost his wits: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/05/democrats-dilem.html :

"Now under what system does it make sense for Obama to collect more net delegates for beating Clinton by 13,000 votes in one state than Clinton does for beating Obama by 110,000 in another?
That inequity, by the way, won't be repeated in the general election, when the winner of Idaho will collect four electoral votes while the winner in New Jersey will get 15 — and the losers get nothing."

So, it's an inequity when candidates split delegates in a close race, at least somewhat proportionately to the actual vote, but it's a good thing when one candidate gets all the electoral votes even if he only wins a state by one popular vote in the general election, or far more than his proportional share in the GOP primaries--got that?

Once again, this is nothing more than the basic incoherence that we are all beginning to expect from the GOP, a party which once prided itself as being based upon rational thought and reason, and looked to intellectuals such as William Buckley, Ayn Rand and F.A. Hayek as its stalwarts, but now has sadly replaced them with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Pat Robertson.