Posted on 04/18/2008 9:39:34 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Howard Dean was on Wolf Blitzer's show yesterday, and Drudge picked up his admonition to the superdelegates with the splashy headline: "Dean To Delegates: Decide Now." In the interview, Dean says that he wants the superdelegates to begin "voting" now. "We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time," he said. "We've got to know who our nominee is."
Unfortunately for the party, Dean is in no position to tell the superdelegates when to decide. The reason? The chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee carries with it very little political power - certainly not enough to sway superdelegates.
It has been this way for a very long time. Fifty years ago, political scientists thought of the political parties as "truncated pyramids." The idea behind this metaphor is that it was the state parties that were really in charge. The national parties were powerless organization that few paid attention to. In fact, while digging through the scholarly literature on the parties from the 50s and 60s, I could only find two major works on the national committees. One of them is Politics Without Power. In it, Cornelius Cotter and Bernard Hennessy argue that the DNC and RNC were basically ad hoc entities without coherent organizational structures. They were there to be used by the president for his electoral purposes and, when the President was of a different party, to host the national conventions. That's it.
Flash forward to the 1970s. There's a convergence of two trends in electoral politics. First is the rise of television and the mass media campaign. This induced a great need for campaign cash.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearpolitics.com ...
Between ethanol for fuel and increased popcorn demand, popcorn prices should go through the roof.
That's why I have been buying the big containers at Sam's Club. I expect to go through quite a bit of it between now and November.
These superdelegates are about to get the big payoff for a lifetime of political activity. Once the primaries are over the real wheeling and deeling will start. Want to be Undersecratary of Health and Human Services? How about heading up the EPA? Maybe an ambassadorship? Sorry, we can’t give you Britain, but how about Portugal?
Howie expects them to give that up because he asked them to?
Dean didn't campaign as hard as he did for the chairmanship to guide the Dim Party. He did it to maintain his futer political viability for another run at POTUS.
He's as cynical as Hitlery. and he despises her for short-circuiting his run this campaign cycle.
CALLING FOR ALGORE TO COME TO THE RESCUE - http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZFQHdveG_Pc
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