On the most recent edition of bloggingheads.tv, Mickey Kaus makes the complaint (that the Clinton folks often make) that caucusing isn't lowercase-d democratic. At the risk of quoting the Vietnamese General, I just don't see exactly why this complaint is relevant. The Democratic Party is entitled to choose its own way to select delegates, is it not? It seems to me that caucuses allow the candidate with the best organization and the most enthusiastic popular support to win, and that seems entirely reasonable to me. Picking the candidate who generates the most excitement among grassroots party members seems like a desirable outcome, and is in fact the desired outcome. True, this benefits my guy this time around, but I'm not sure where it's written that there must be some kind of equal voice and participation for every Democrat. In the general election, this sort of thinking is utterly appropriate, but not necessarily in the nominating process.
In fact, it's impossible to say that caucuses are some sort of violation of the Democratic Party's "one person, one vote" philosophy of nomination contests, quite precisely because there is no such philosophy. If you're a Democrat living in Massachusetts, your vote counts a hell of a lot more than if you're a Democrat living in a state with a similar population, like Minnesota. Why is this? Well, because delegates are apportioned according to a number of factors that are designed to give the most influence to the party's base. This is why the party's convention apportionment rules are so complicated--it has been the decision of the party leadership to award more influence to areas that voted for Kerry than to ones that voted for Bush. This is hardly despicable, in my opinion. And this second factor has undoubtedly helped Clinton.
So, if Clinton opposes caucuses in good faith (which she doesn't because she didn't oppose them at all until she started losing all of them by landslide margins) she should naturally support eliminating the differential apportionment that benefits areas of high Democratic concentration--after all, a vote is a vote is a vote, right? She does not, of course. It's not so much the bad faith of it all as that she cloaks the whole package in a rather sickening display of sanctimony. I'm not really sure that this is an effective debating point, though--the differences between the two methods take too long to get across, and it's a bit too technical in general. She'd better stick to scaring the bejeezus out of people, hoping stupidly that she's going to be able to beat John McCain and the Republican Slime Team at that game. You can't beat the Republicans at their game. They made the rules, after all, and the rules are loaded. That's why I like Obama--he's not playing their game, and he won't.
