Back to the Races

So the biggest delegate-granting state had their primaries last night and Tsunami Tuesday is just around the corner. By next Wednesday we should all know who our presidential candidates will be. It’s probably unfair of me to say that. Only 40% of the delegates will have been parceled out by next Wednesday which means the race will not technically be locked up even if every state goes toward one candidate. But, c’mon, we all know what will happen: the press will treat the new frontrunner as the anointed candidate, the perception (press-inspired or not) will be that the frontrunner on Wednesday is “the winner” and “the only serious candidate.” It will become important to display “party unity.” The winner on Wednesday will likely waltz their way through the rest of the primaries. So, like just about everybody in the political/political science blogosphere I feel obligated to share with ya’ll my take on the race.

Republicans (Delegate count so far: McCain-97; Romney-74; Huckabee-29; Paul-6; Giuliani-Who cares?)

Giuliani: Thankfully out. He was by far the worst candidate the Republicans had running. He’s a balls-out fascist, a dirty politician, a despicable human being, and possibly certifiably crazy. He should just put on some plaid pants, buy a golf cart, and stay in Florida.

Romney: Well, the race is far from over but McCain’s victory in Florida has put him nearly an entire Huckabee ahead in terms of delegates–making him the frontrunner going into Tsunami Tuesday. McCain’s popularity is rising and has been for awhile. All trend lines have been coalescing around a McCain nod. Meanwhile, Romney’s trend lines could use a shot of Bob Dole’s Viagra. Right or wrong, Romney’s religion probably hurts him. Evangelicals were tempted to vote for Romney when they thought the race was just between him and Giuliani. Then Huckabee showed up to prove that there still were Christians in the Republican party. The evangelicals flocked around him like he was Jesus at a fish and bread dinner and they haven’t looked back. With Huckabee incapable of having another “miracle” comeback (despite God’s best efforts) it looks like evangelicals will stick by their initial promise and just stay at home in November.

Basically what I’m saying here is that McCain is most likely a lock as long as Huckabee stays in the race. If he drops out, the evangelical choice is between the guy who says that there should be more religion in politics (Romney) and the guy that called evangelicals “part of the problem” back in 2000 (McCain). And while McCain has won more delegates than Romney, he hasn’t won by that much. Good baptists in Alabama, Georgia, (most of) Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas could still hurt his chances.

Huckabee: In case your just skimming to read about the candidate you like, I’ll repeat what I said above. Huckabee is toast. After helping him win Iowa, God hasn’t reached down to help the declining Huckabee campaign since. If God had given Huckabee just 15,000 more votes in South Carolina he could have had two wins and fourteen more delegates (and of course, “momentum” which may have helped out in Florida). But he didn’t. For some reason God, despite what you may have thought, seems to prefer McCain.

Huckabee appeals to the evangelicals and is probably pulling votes away from Romney. If Huckabee stays in until February 6, you can call him the kingmaker. The real question is, is he angling for a cabinet/veep spot in a McCain presidency. (I say, “you betcha.”)

McCain: McCain is the big winner in the two most important races so far. He’s ahead in delegates and all signs point to his coming out on top after the February 5 Tsunami Tuesday. This is both bad and good for Democrats and Liberals. On the one hand, a McCain presidency would be better than whatever monstrous crimes would otherwise be committed by Presidents Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, or Thompson. On the other, well, he’s still not all that good and he’s the one who is likely to put up the best fight against either Clinton or Obama (but especially Clinton). It’s hard to decide if I’d rather line up a “best of all possible worlds” scenario with McCain vs. Clinton in November where I could easily end up with a President McAngryPants or if I want to root for Huckabee dropping out, relinquishing the evangelical vote to Romney who will then likely become the Republican nominee. Because…if that happens, Romney will likely lose to Clinton or Obama…but, if he doesn’t, we’re screwed.

Democrats (Delegate count so far [remember Dems have "superdelegates" so I count them here but their actual delegates are in parentheses]: Clinton-232 (48); Obama-158 (63); Edwards-Who cares? (Who cares?))

Edwards: Let’s get him out of the way early. He’s out. (Note: I actually wrote this this morning before he officially dropped.) He hasn’t performed since his close second place finish in Iowa and he’s not going anywhere after February 5. Pundits and bloggers are speculating that he’s staying in because he pulls (white) votes from Clinton and is therefore acting as kingmaker for Obama who he (presumably) prefers. I’m not sure if I believe that or not. He could just as likely be pulling progressive votes from Obama making him a queenmaker instead. In either case, I think his presence is negligible going into next week. (And of course, completely negligible since he won’t be there). If he really wants to help someone he should drop out during prime time on February 4th. The tiny bump his dropping out/endorsement might give to his preferred candidate might make a difference in some close races.

Clinton: She’s the likely candidate. When people first started talking about her assumed candidacy back in 2004 she was preferred. She was preferred after the rockstar Obama put his hat in the ring. She was preferred up until a week before Iowa and then was preferred after New Hampshire. So with that anomalous week between her third place finish in Iowa and her (rigged?) victory in New Hampshire aside, she has always been the preferred candidate. Going into next week she has the most superdelegates and the second most actual delegates. Her “scorched earth” campaign damages her possibilities in November but probably doesn’t hurt her chances that much in the primaries, where her lead contender can’t seem to get over a third of white voters. (We’ll have to see if that remains true after Edwards’ withdrawal.)

Obama: He’s technically the frontrunner with the most earned delegates and he’s been raking in some high-profile endorsements which may or may not help him on Feb 5. Perhaps the biggest helping hand came from Kennedy which may raise Obama’s appeal with two important (northern) constituencies [white people and Catholics] and one important western one [old people]. Unfortunately the jury is out on whether any endorsements matter. They certainly didn’t help him in the Florida “beauty pageant.” Of course, turnout there may have been hampered by his lack of campaigning there since the delegates don’t count (yet).

At least on blogger seems to think that Obama’s loss in Florida is indicative of a larger trend.

James Joyner from Outside the Beltway:

I believe it foreshadows what will happen on Super Tuesday. Despite both Clinton and Obama raising unprecedented sums of money, campaigning in 22 states in six days is next to impossible. As in Florida, no campaigning gives the advantage to the candidate with the best organization and name recognition. My guess is Clinton will have an impressive showing next week and all but wrap up the nomination.

This seems a reasonable and insightful analysis of what we’re likely to see. If the primaries had been spread out–given Obama’s messaging, his “above the fray” and “hopeful” image, and his momentum–he might have been a more clear favorite going into a Tsunami Tuesday. If he fails to win the nomination, this is why (not, as it will be written, because of the Clintons’ race baiting and “dividing the black vote.”)

However, I don’t think all hope is yet lost. Obama’s been getting a lot of good publicity from his victory in South Carolina and his high profile endorsements. He’s likely to out perform Hillary in the south. If he can pull the south and some of the small states he’s visited like Kansas and Alaska he may still be “in the race” even if Clinton wins California, New York, and New Jersey (delegate-heavy states where polls indicate a Clinton victory). After all, Obama, in addition “the south” will probably win delegate-heavy Illinois and the important swing vote in Ohio. Since he goes in ahead, (and with momentum) my guess is that the sun will shine on two frontrunners on February 6: Clinton ahead but with Obama close behind.

Expect additional ugliness.

There is Only One Republican Candidate

I’d been wanting to restrain myself from commenting on the Republican race. I, of course, have already commented on the horse race. What I mean is that I had, after the first Republican debate, decided to not even bother listening to the overwhelming nastiness that emanates from the so-called “conservative” side of American politics and seriously consider the merits of any of the contestants. But, put simply, I lack the necessary amount of self-discipline

As Stephen Colbert put it not that long ago, the problem the Republican Party has to constantly face is that reality has a liberal bias. Time after time conservative domestic agendas have been wrong for this country. Time after time liberal trade policies as championed and implemented by Republicans have done far more to aid the rich getting richer than they have helped “all boats rise.” Time after time tax cuts have proven incapable of “stimulating the economy.” More recently we have a crew of old, white, rich, men telling us they want to promote fiscal responsibility by which they apparently mean throwing billions of dollars into an imperialistic overreach program, expanding the domestic spying apparatus, increasing the size of the federal bureaucracy, and paying for it through an ever-expanding national debt and cutting funding to the schools that need the most help.

The Republican Party has done more than “lost its way.” It might be irretrievably gone.

Whichever Democrat takes office next January is most certainly to have Bush and his crew of miscreants to thank. No offense to the one or two actually progressive ideas that either Obama or Clinton have promoted but their never-ending support of the Republican-shaped status quo is not winning a crap ton of friends on the truly left side of the political spectrum. Americans are not hoping for a Democrat here, they are just hoping for a not-George Bush.Which of course is the best reason not to bother with seriously considering the Republican race. All of the major front runners are running as Bush clones. Guiliani, Romney, Huckabee, and McCain are all desperately trying to be Reagan and Bush simultaneously, which, of course is hilarious. There is no living Republican less like Reagan than George Bush. Their desperate desire to be a servant of the contemporary GOP status quo and be a GOP reformer like Reagan speaks directly to the confusion ripping the party apart.

McCain hates George Bush. He always has. His current pandering to the administration is not the only, but the clearest, example of the confusion running through all four campaigns. Despite abysmal approval ratings even among the party faithful, despite widespread Republican discontent with nearly every Bush-era program, despite his near-constant foreign policy failures, despite Bush’s having gone wrong in practically every way, the four leading campaigns are, for some reason, convinced that the way to the voters’ hearts is by continuing Bush’s rhetoric and his policies.

It…is…mindboggling.

When Americans are still chanting for change in September, October, and November…is the Republican nominee still going to be mouthing Bush’s words? That depends. It depends on who that candidate is.

Huckabee, Romney, and Guiliani don’t have much of a choice. That’s who they are. But McCain hates George Bush. Even in supporting the surge he has done so through gritted teeth. When McCain stood behind Bush during the signing ceremony of the bipartisan immigration reform bill the veins in his forehead wiggled like burning earthworms. When Bush issued the signing statement authorizing the CIA to continue torturing POWs in direct opposition to the Torture Ban law that McCain authored, you could hear his blood-curdling “Fuck you!” in Washington from Alaska where the senator was at the time.

Romney, Guiliani, and Huckabee all have a public record of only massaging Bush’s aching feet, whispering, “It’s OK, I still love you,” in his ear, carrying his bedpan to the slop sink, sprinkling roses on his bed and leaving him mints that spell “GOP 4 EVA” on his pillow. If any of them make it through the primaries, the change-hungry general population will sink their campaign. Just sink it.

Only McCain has a leg to stand on when it comes to distancing himself from the disastrous Bush era. And it’s an old leg, not very strong, thin and gimpy…but in the land of the legless the one-legged man kicks the hardest. Regardless of who stands on top when the primaries are all over, regardless of who wins in Florida or California, or Illinois or Ohio, only McCain is a reasonable choice for Republicans whether or not they choose it. It is…after all…a pretty shitty choice when it comes right down to it.

Tsunami Tuesday and the New Republican Ideology

Individuals are not a mere collection of labels, and for that matter, individuals are rarely, if ever, wholly of the labels they apply to themselves. For example, it is only for conversational shorthand that I refer to myself as “liberal,” “vegetarian,” or “more like a club than a razor.” Those descriptions tend to sum up or average various preferences. I tend to eat more non-meat products than meat products and I don’t eat anything that is placed above reptiles on the classic Aristotelian hierarchy of life (i.e. no birds, pigs, cows, or humans.)

Political, ethnic, nationalists (and other) groups like Liberals, Libertarians, Republicans, Democrats, American, Slovak, et cetera are vague. A Democrat in Indiana, as is commonly said here amongst people with goatees and decent musical taste, is a Republican in New York. If you throw a stone here you will not ever, ever, hit a pro-choice, pro-gay, Republican. In New York, you might (and hopefully) hit Rudy Giuliani, who is not only one such creature, but the elected mayor.

Political groups (and ethnic and nationalist and others) are more often than not defined by conflict. When two sides go head to head on an issue, whose side are you on? In the pro-choice/anti-choice march, do you line up with the guys and gals with the horn-rimmed glasses or are you marching next to a dour maiden in an ankle length denim skirt? At the next PTA meeting discussing the too-ironic-for-words banning of Fahrenheit 451 are you on the side that invited the ACLU guest speaker or are you, once again, sitting with your group of Pentecostal Bible thumpers?

That process, of finding your political identity through conflict is exciting to each person that goes through it for the first time. Through conflict we not only learn who we are against, but, as we see the same people on our side more and more, we learn who are ideological allies are. We become encouraged to learn more about the things that people who seem like us care about. We are predisposed to believe the things they say before we believe opposing things from the people we have been prone to fighting.

At its best this process encourages us explore new political concepts. At its worse, it encourages blind leadership of the party faithful.

Nevertheless, we are fast approaching Tsunami Tuesday and the Democrats are down to two real contenders, the Republican have three (maybe four). A large field of contenders hurt the Democrats in 2004, indicativing a party without an identity. In my opinion this is even more true for the Republicans in 2008. The big difference is that Democrats have had eight years of fighting amongst themselves and the Bush administration to coalesce around a more or less united front. Very little will change with the Democratic decision revealed on February 6th. Obama, Clinton, and Edwards are all basically in the same camp on all the major issues. Except for vice president they are likely to pull from the same stock of ex-[Bill] Clinton-ite bureaucrats to fill the various administrative posts. They are all equally able to work with current congressional seat holders.

The story is quite different for the GOP. Quite frankly Bush’s win in 2000, in addition to being basically a coup d’ etat (like it or not) would have been surprising even if it were to have been legitimate. After eight years of solid economic growth, lowest crime rates in half a century, lowest unemployment ever, and a good reputation overseas, the Democratic loss in ‘00 can be seen as nothing but an amazing upset. Under Clinton’s moderate governance both big business and the middle class and most sectors of America’s lower class all prospered.

If political groups define their identity by fighting against other groups, it could be argued that the Republican party should have been in complete disarray, unable to foment a common identity for their voters to get behind. Their leading competitor, Bill Clinton, basically had done more to pass Republican-friendly legislation than any actual Republican would have gotten away with during the Reagan-Bush(I) backlash that epitomized the 1990s. You couldn’t rail against Clinton’s support of the military, not real effectively anyway. Like all presidents before him except Jimmy Carter (maybe), Clinton increased the military budget every year of his two terms. You couldn’t argue about his desire to rid the world of commercial regulations. No president since before the Civil War had presided over such a dramatic expansion of free trade. The only president that surpasses Clinton in deregulation was Ronald Reagan.

The only defining element of the Clinton administration for his enemies to glom onto was his steaming locomotive of ugly mistresses, the caboose of which was the not-so-ugly but famously chubby Monica Lewinsky. Unfortunately for America and democracy, Clinton’s inability to “keep it in his pants” coincided with one-two punch of the cresting power of the Christian Right and the Republican’s three-decade-long Southern Strategy. That is, if you define yourself by attacking your opposite, Republicans from Delaware to Oregon had to define themselves by being…well…monogamists.

And while Karl Rove made sure to market Bush to Christian evangelicals. The ex-jock, coke head, alcoholic and “reborn Christian” (who famously couldn’t get the story of his rebirth straight) was the best they could do in that regard. Not a sure bet at all. The marketing of Bush to evangelicals only really took off after Rove and Bush sunk McCain’s campaign in South Carolina by degrading his war record, lying about his wife, and claiming that McCain’s adopted daughter was really the product of an interracial, extramarital affair. Although not a safe bet, it was the only chance Republicans really had to define themselves; and when it worked, it was only a matter of common sense that they would exploit that victory in 2004, centering their campaign on domestic issues of such immense triviality and evangelical-dominated inanity that they skirted all the critical issues that should have ensured a Democratic victory.

But the evangelical base has proven a fickle and illusory compatriot in 2008. One major problem, of course is that over the last two (or eight) years every Republican currently in office has either faced an indictment or been victim of an official reprimand from some committee on ethics or other…or they have had a very close friend or major funder who has. The ridiculous criminality of the Republican party has come from just about every angle, bribery, prostitution or sex in public bathrooms garnering the most headlines. And, as much as I might hate evangelicals sticking their nose into my government, you have to respect their distaste for criminals in public office. Evangelicals have begun being a little more picky about who they stick their support behind and the Republican party doesn’t really have anybody to offer them. They were ever only reluctantly affiliated to start with and it just hasn’t worked out all that well. Evangelicals are some of the most annoying enemies and that his proven true for both pro-choice Democrats and pro-prostitute Republicans.

So the the three front-runners are all appealing to three different images of the Republican party…or four. Mitt Romney is the Big Executive aiming for the hard noses, business oriented realists of the Republican market place. Huckabee is aiming for the still reeling evangelical vote. Giuliani (if there still is a Giuliani) is aiming for the jingoist fringe. McCain is a virtual throwback to Eisenhower era Republicanism. He’s pro-Iraq (pro-surge), he’s pro-government infringement (on gun rights, for example). The fact that he’s 72 years old only helps reinforce his perception as the only candidate dedicated to a bygone era of genuine Republicanism. McCain, although a “maverick” is only a “maverick” to a Republican party gone astray. He is a real conservative’s conservative. Which only makes him moderately appealing to independents that, for the last 16 years or so, have voted Democrat. And of course, after it became big news that the evangelicals wouldn’t put their vote behind Giuliani, Huckabee stepped up to be the evangelical avatar.

Four candidates and four distinct images of the Republican party. The problem, of course, is that, having spent the better part of two decades without a Jimmy Carter to kick around, the Republican party just simply hasn’t had the small-group dynamic necessary to gel around one idea of the future Republican party. Whoever stands up as de facto nominee after February 5th has a long road ahead to prove that his vision of the Republican party is the vision that all the rest should align themselves to.

But this process of definition will only succeed if the de facto nominee on the Democratic side successfully fills the contrary position.

Some People Don’t Like Horse Races

There’s always a lot of talk around this time of the election cycle about how and why the primary season is a steaming movie. It starts just before New Hampshire, runs through Iowa and South Carolina and Florida and culminates on whatever the commentaria are calling Super Tuesday that year, the day when the most states vote simultaneously. The perennial complaints of non-representativeness and “momentum” are fair and just. The system is, to put it gently, stupid. There are innumerable fixes for the problems and if you want to know what they are, just pick up any of thousands of magazines or newspapers between January 1 and early February published in years divisible by four (with no remainder).

Other complaints pop up that are new or relatively new each year, although for the most part they are used as buttresses to the larger arguments. For example, some have stated that Clinton would have done a lot worse (and Obama) a lot better in New Hampshire were it not for the Accuvote machines that seemed to magically favor her. A study after the fact revealed that those particular wards using Accuvote historically have different voting preferences than the wards that didn’t use them, initially a strange defense until you consider that preferences for new voting machines and for Hillary Clinton are based on the relative affluence of those wards. Nevertheless the story received very little air even before the alleged political hijink was revealed to be no jink at all. However, I think that any press it did receive is primarily based on this idea of momentum. That is, in addition to revealing a potentially devastating obstacle to “free and fair elections” in November, the Accuvote machines might have had a significant impact on deciding who our choices would be in November. (The Accuvote machines also decreased Mitt Romney’s voter deficit by about 12 points…so it appeared that the fine people at Diebold might have been favoring a Romney/Clinton match-up for the Fall.)

Whichever candidate wins in one state, gains a bump in the polls that, if the next primary is close enough to the previous win, the candidate can often (theoretically) ride the polling bump to a subsequent victory…and so on. Although the bump in popularity in the polls is observable by looking at the polls and the theory makes good sense in a very “common” way, there is a pretty good common sense manner in which to disprove its efficacy, namely that the theory would predict that whoever wins in New Hampshire would subsequently win Iowa and then win Michigan (or wherever) then Nevada (or wherever) then South Carolina then Florida etc. Which doesn’t happen often and hasn’t happened for awhile, if ever.

Of course this flaw is only a flaw with my simplistic restatement of the theory. The bump in the polls does not necessarily bump the candidate into victory. If, for example, a win in New Hampshire provided a 5% bump in Iowa to a certain candidate, it would only ensure a victory if that person either previously led there or trailed by less than 5%. And of course, polls can be wrong.

The bump in the polls is exacerbated by the press. The press believes in momentum. In my experience the press believes in momentum far more than the average person does. The horse race analysts are nearly always more confident of their ability to predict the next winner than the average voter who, if he or she is rooting for one candidate to prevail, wastes away with anxiety. The relatively uninformed, the future voter who only knows who won previously, never seems overly confident that that person will win again. A lack of expectation that is supported by historical precedent. The press anticipates that the common reader will want to know more about the winner and less about the loser(s) and so runs more stories about them. The additional free press for the winning candidate increases name recognition and the perception that that candidate will prevail in future contests. In our primal desire to back a winner, the bump in the polls grows for days after the primary, fueled by the unceasing write-ups of once and future victory.

And the opposite is also true. Nevada voters in general and Latino voters in particular, judged by political preferences alone, should both have supported Edwards over the other two front runners. One should not have expected him to win there, or in any (geographically) large state at this stage in his campaign. He lacks the money and the volunteer infrastructure to reach out personally to large groups of voters. But neither of those shortcomings should have ended in his obtaining a measly 4% of the vote there. I would have expected no less than for him to pull in low double digits.

Do I blame the press? Yeah. I don’t think it was a malicious sinking of his campaign but rather the natural consequences of this worship of momentum. Because Edwards lost outright in an affluent, New England primary the press decided that the voters aren’t aligned with his platform. Which, I think is just flat untrue. His primary concerns are, to my knowledge reflected as the primary concerns of the vast majority of both Republican and Democratic voters. His solutions seems more or less in line with how the vast majority of Democrats think those problems should be solved. For that matter, he isn’t so far out of step with the two front runners that he should ever be very far behind them if voters’ preferences were what went to the polls rather than human beings.

I also blame the Democratic Party. I don’ t mean that Dean and the other machinists in the DNC maliciously set out to destroy an Edwards candidacy (but what do I know?). But Edwards would likely have done pretty well in Michigan. What if he’d come in first or even second there? Clinton enjoyed no bump in the polls from her win there since the press rightfully did not consider the Michigan victory important (since she basically ran unopposed, sorry Kucinich). But a legitimate primary in the foundering blue collar state might have substantially favored the self-proclaimed “son of a mill worker.”

The primaries all lead up to Super Tuesday (Tsunami Tuesday is one of the many nicknames it has received this year…which is my preferred term). Twenty-four states will hold primaries for one or both parties on February 5th and on the morning of February 6th 40% of all possible delegate votes will have been assigned. While 60% of delegates will still be up in the air you can bet the vast majority of the voting public from there on out will be rooting for one person (well, one each for Republicans and Democrats respectively). Whoever wins the most delegates on February 5th will be the de facto nominee. The level of momentum for the leading candidate on February 6th, in part generated by the press’s treatment of that person, will ensure that most people will feel that “that person has already won” and that “voting for anybody else just indicates a lack of cohesiveness in the party.” Expect that, say, Clinton is the majority delegate vote holder on February 6th, if Obama wins in Indiana in May, various Democratic die-hards will insinuate that Indiana voters are “not indicative of larger trends” and that voters like that “threaten the unity” of the Democratic mainstream. Besides, as I said, we all like to vote for a winner.

Remember when we were all behind Howard Dean four years ago? Remember when, because of a sham recording of speech he made we all decided that he was crazy? Remember how, after not knowing who to vote for we all defaulted to John Kerry? Is there any better example of the power of winning one primary (or another guy losing one) that speaks to the power of bandwagoning in the primaries than that of Senator Frankenstein from Massachusetts?

So the criticisms will come that all the primaries after February 5th, including those held in the Hoosier state, are completely worthless. And those criticisms are fair and just.

For my part I have tended to shy away from those criticisms because they are at once too obvious and outside my realm of influence. It seems that no matter who I am talking to, liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, I am always preaching to the choir. But there’s a lot of money to be handed out during a prolonged and worthless primary season; a lot of newspapers and magazines to be bought and sold; a lot of news shows for which to cast a lot talking heads. Trying to end the current primary system, it seems to me, is akin to attempting to eradicate farm subsidies. There’s just too many of the wrong sorts of people invested in the continuance of the system.

It’s possible that the GOP and DNC will have to contend with more and more shenanigans like this years’, with more and more states trying to have their primaries earlier and earlier so their votes matter more, they get more press, and they can take in the largess of the campaign economy that follows the candidates’ tour buses. If that happens, the two major parties may start demanding some sort of order to be placed on these supposedly “democratic” proceedings. With more time to think about it, you can probably expect, some states will try and litigate against the parties on grounds of undue private pressure on elections proceedings which are constitutionally the state’s prerogative, and not the parties’, to govern.

The push and pull factors at work might work out some sort of solution by the next presidential election cycle, but I doubt it. And, even if they did, it’s not real likely that voters, citizens like you and me, will be a part of the discussions that lead to that eventual solution. As always, the two-party system that has prevailed here for the last 90 years or so will make certain that those conversations take place behind closed doors and not in the public forum. The various administrators of our two largest parties are not subject to election and are therefore accountable to no one but themselves and their largest funders.