The national Democratic Party leadership has a problem.

No, I am not talking about Florida and Michigan, a problem of their own making and for which they will have no solution. The Democratic Party nominee—whoever that is, and its problem to be addressed below as the point of this essay—can already mark those two states in McCain’s, the Republican Party nominee’s, electoral college vote column.

Howard Dean and all the grand poobahs of the party, which must include Hillary and Obama among them, made a huge blunder in engaging with the voters of those two states in a standoff about when they would have their say in the primary/caucus season.

Daring the voters to stay home or even vote for the opposition candidate is a dare NO group of party leaders should ever make.

But they did it, and to describe the Democratic Party as having really screwed itself is a rather mild way of putting it.

That water has gone under the bridge.

The Bigger Problem

Right now, the vast left wing conspiracy of voters out there in the Democratic Party is pretty much split between wanting Hillary and Obama.

Neither candidate will win the nomination outright on delegates pledged to a voting result. What must be to the chagrin of super-delegates, they now will have a hand in deciding the nominee.

Obama and his vociferous supporters want to turn upside-down the very reason for the existence of super-delegates. Super-delegates are supposed to be the wise party elder wing there to save the Democratic Party from itself. They are supposed to vote their whim or conscience or personal feelings or whatever it is that strikes their fancy.

But Obama and his fanatics have warned that should he lead in pledged delegates at the end of all the state-by-state voting, even if that lead is only slight and hardly significant, and the super-delegates give Hillary the nomination, then a schism in the party is all but certain. Already a poll here and a survey there indicate that about 1 in 5 Obama supporters will even vote for McCain and not just deny a vote to Hillary by abstaining.

Hillary supporters too have said that any unjust solution which denies Hillary the opportunity for a fair chance at the nomination will drive them to work against Obama the nominee prevailing in November, including voting for McCain.

Howard...Nancy...this is getting super-messy.

An Election Which Was The Democrats To Lose

The 2008 election was to be the Democrats to lose!

We have two terms by George W. Bush, a presidency which absolutely already qualifies as one of the worst in history, and time will tell if it is indeed qualified as the worst ever.

We have a candidate from the GOP, already the presumptive nominee, who is derisively and deservedly known as George W. McCain who vows to continue many of Bush’s hated policies, and I refer especially to that crime against the peace, the Iraq quagmire. And McCain doesn’t even please many in the right wing, particularly with his position on doing nothing to those in the United States illegally.

So it takes a real major clusterfuck for the Democratic Party to mess up so badly that they can not produce a winner from virtually anyone they put up as candidate, even if the pulled out of the mothballs Gore, Dukakis, Mondale, or even Jimmy Carter. In fact, by any stretch, Carter, if he were a Roman Catholic, would have already been canonized and he certainly could not do worse than the moron now in the White House.

The Co-Presidency or Split Presidency

Since neither Barack nor Hillary are going to win this thing before the super-delegates have a say, and it appears that the Democrats have changed their attitude on just what the super-delegates were created for, the party leadership and these two campaigns are going to have to come up with a solution.

And that is something like a co-presidency. Or rather, a split presidency.

Constitutionally, no two people can share the title of president.

Hillary is loathe to be Obama's vice president, and Obama feels the same way about Hillary.

But both want to be president. So the two must get together and agree to the following proposal.

• One candidate will be president and the other the vice president for election year 2008
• In election year 2012, they will officially switch constitutional offices: the vice president will run as president and the president will be the vice president's running mate
• Policies. Should the one who is president in the first term be the one to decide policies for himself or herself without the involvement of the vice president? The answer must be an unequivocal no since there must be consistency of policy from the first to the second term, when presidencies switch. So it will necessarily be the case that the vice president gets to take on several portfolios in the cabinet over which he/she has final say but in consultation with the president, and the same for the president. So in a policy sense, it becomes a true co-presidency. Hillary and Barack will need to wrestle before the general election how those portfolios are to be divided and to inform the American voters. Hillary might get the health care portfolio (Dept. of HHS), for example, and Barack gets to be the man handling Iraq in particular and the activities of DoD in general.
• A method will be used to determine who gets to be president first:
  • It might be the candidate with the most pledged-by-vote delegates, something that seems more fair
  • A coin toss or someone pulling the highest value card from a deck, methods often used to decide winners in elections and other activities

Now it is quite possible that in the year 2012, the one who is president could break his or her promise and run as president again or that other terms of the partnership are not honored, but the best we can hope for is that these two candidates will live up to their word and that the voters will hold the dishonorable among them accountable in some way.

You’ve Got To Be Kidding!

I have yet to hear a proposal which offers a better solution to the very real problem and possibility that the Democratic Party may suffer a schism which would have Jefferson and Madison, the party's founders, rolling over in their graves at what was taking place. This fight between what is really the voters who want Obama and those who want Clinton truly has the possibility of rending the party asunder.

Obama supporters, saying the most dreadful, obtuse, insulting and needless things about Hillary, are asking her to step aside based on the fact that she is trailing by only an infinitesimal percentage of delegates from what Obama has. This is anti-democratic in that not all of the states have finished having their say. While Hillary will not reach the magic number, she could very well lead in pledged delegates at the end, given that the Reverend Wright may have exposed a side of Obama few voters realized. Besides, if Obama were really that impressive, he should have won the nomination by now, right?

Hillary can only hope—and this applies to Obama too—for the super-delegates to make her the nominee. But then she has the greater difficulty of trying to convince enraged Obama fanatics that they should stick with the party. She is not the most charming of candidates, and what might happen is truly bad: that she dares Democratic voters to go against their ultimate self-interest and vote for McCain.

Folks: see the above rule. Never dare the voters to do anything.

Obama too may find that his glib rhetoric fails him and the only way he can keep Hillary supporters in his circle is to dare them also to vote against their self-interests.

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If any of you think that above proposal is laughable beyond belief, then I will be looking for your own proposal. It should not be a proposal like any of the alternatives I have already described immediately above, which I myself have already dismissed as laughable.

Mavi Gözler
American Patriot

27 March 2008

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