Democracy Is No Club, It's an Expression of Peoples' Rights

Many Americans share concern about the transformation of the American electoral process into a rarefied club unresponsive to the people's concerns.

Joan Didion echos this concern in her Political Fictions (Vintage, 2001)

It was clear in 1988 that the rhetorical manipulation of resentment and anger designed to attract (target voters) had reduced the nation’s political dialogue to a level so dispiritedly low that its highest expression had come to be a pernicious nostalgia. Perhaps most strikingly of all, it was clear in 1988 that those inside the process had congealed into a permanent political class, the defining characteristic of which was its readiness to abandon those not inside the process.

There is little accountability by political elites to the American people, both in the electoral process and in the public policy made.

You can see this by Dick Cheney's blithe "so what?" response to the question noting that the vast majority of the American people want to withdraw from Iraq and say that it was a mistake to have invaded.

You can see it in Hillary Clinton's refusal to stake out positions clearly defining what a responsive democrat is, in favor of blurring the lines with John McCain so that she might brand Obama as less than the mighty McCain and the great leader Hillary.

You see it in the casting out of appeals meant to divide and breed suspicion.

No one beyond her strategists is calling for Clinton to tarnish Obama and mendaciously build up McCain.

As Obama has reached out and attempted to build a people-based coalition based on unity and social justice, the backlash from political elites has been a new low in the amount of crap floated into the political culture.

Many voters are going along for the ride, watching the pollution with a strange, detached amusement.

And those who thought they were Democratic leaders and presidential material refrain from forcefully speaking out for one candidate or another, and watch the pollution occur with mumbled, vague disapproval.

America needs Joe Biden, Christopher Dodd, Tammy Baldwin and most importantly John Edwards, to stand up and forget worrying about the politics in their rarefied world, call out and denounce appeals to fear and division where they see it, and fight for a candidate clearly distinguishable from the tragic John McCain.

This, the pollution and self destruction of our political process, does not have to happen. The people are their own cure. Political blogs are a partial anecdote. Obama is a partial anecdote.

But the baleful virus remains alive and even if Obama gets the Democratic nomination, it will strike and bleed out the American political system if we let it.

The United States is not a mature democracy with a healthy immune system protecting itself. It need boosters and infusions to fight off diseases for which the American people are the only cure and vaccine available.