CAIVP > Non-Partisan Primary

Americans have traditionally respected private property and individual rights, rejecting elitism and excessive power.  We reject unchecked power, generally associated with partisan elitist states and political institutions that take rights and property from the general population and distribute them to preferred party members and supporters in order to reinforce their power.  We are also weary of governance by officials with extreme powers to regulate or supervise other bodies of power, like a Czar does; a term derived from the Greek title for "Emperor".  So, as President elect Barack Obama ushers in a new administration to the white house, it is important to reflect on our ability to reject the consolidation of power and respect representative leadership.

In 1982, a "Drug Czar" was established by a Senate Vote of 62-34, 11 years after Richard Nixon first used the phrase "War on Drugs."  Fun Fact: The Drug Czar shall ensure that no Federal funds appropriated to the Office of National Drug Control Policy shall be expended for any study or contract relating to the legalization (for a medical use or any other use) of a substance listed in schedule I of section 202 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 812).

The Bush administration created the office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2004 (to be headed by CIA veteran John Brennan during Obama's administration).  Informally, this Director is referred to as the "Intelligence Czar".  Fun Fact: The "private" Office of the Director of National Intelligence oversees every intelligence gathering agency including the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Department of Energy, the CIA, the Coast Guard, the Department of State, the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial Agency, the Department of the Treasury, and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

A central bank was established in 1913 with the Federal Reserve.  Whether you like them or not, this small group of politically connected private bankers controls our country's monetary policy.  Though the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is not referred to as a "Czar", the Chairman is a chief executive responsible for "striking a balance between private interests of banks and the centralized responsibility of government". Fun Fact:  The "private" Federal Reserve Bank sets the Federal Funds Rate which controls our entire nations supply of money.

Currently, President elect Barack Obama is considering persons to fill the following offices:

Energy Czar
Climate Czar
Tech Czar
Health Czar 
Cyberspace Czar

And just today, Nancy Pelosi announced that a Car Czar could be announced by the end of the week.
  
When the last Czar of Russia, Nicholas II, was imprisoned during the Revolution of 1917, the Czarist autocracy of Russia was replaced by the Soviet Union, a one-party republic. It was argued by communist party leaders that a single party was necessary to protect the country against the capitalist exploitation of a centralized democracy.  Thus, rule by the force of one person was replaced by rule by the force of one party.  And it didn't work so well.

American's have an historical disaffection with Communist Russia because we pride ourselves for our respect of freedom and democracy, a government of, for, and by the people.  In 1776, the Declaration of Independence marked the sentiments of the American Revolution, which included a list of grievances against King George of England including those selected below:

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

In these times of economic troubles and foreign entanglements, both parties advocate the creation of positions of superior power to oversee different aspects of our society.  To protect the people as the ultimate source of government power, it is argued that so long as we have compromise and bipartisanship between the two parties in power, government will protect us from the capitalist exploitation of our decentralized democracy.  Thus, the power of the two parties is being transferred outside the system of checks and balance to private and unelected officials, so that we may protect the system of representative checks and balances we fought so hard to create.  Quite ironic from a country that champions democracy.  I wonder how well this will work out.

With the the chaos within the Republican Party over how to best rebuild themselves, the left leaning Huffinton Post has an intersting article on where they think the Republicans ought to focus their attention:

With all the party and media babble about who is better equipped to take over the Republican party in the wake of the bloodbath of the '08 election, it's impressive how deeply the pundits have been able to repress the memory of the Ron Paul campaign.

After all, compare the Ron Paul 'Revolution' campaign with Barack Obama's now acknowledged electoral genius. That stuff Republicans are now realizing they have to do in the future? Paul did it months ago. Excited new voters beyond the base? Check. Raised massive amounts of money from small donations online? Ditto. Legions of creative people generating their own campaign content on YouTube and beyond? Did it. Young voters? Had those.

The biggest problem for Ron Paul and his supporters is the turd-in-the-punchbowl way they were treated by the Republicans. Remember Rudy's snide confusion over the idea that the United State's foreign policy may have somehow have been a factor in why the U.S. was attacked on 9/11? Recall the debate shunning?

Read the Full Article Here

Not satisfied with consuming our vigorous national political debate, the storm of “bipartisanship” has now begun striking in the West, aparently with the intention of spreading not just purple mountain majesties, but purple voting as well, all across the fruited plain. No doubt the idea of bipartisanship is attractive, but it assumes a definition of bipartisan which is synonymous with "consensus" and which is, in fact, the opposite of what the word ought to mean.

Open primaries are, especially given California's climate, ultimately nothing but the dreadful first step down a road to one-party rule. And we can be assured that the party in power will not represent the best of different moral visions. Rather, the level of deadening ideological conformity and unprincipled calculation will be so high that it will make Lewis Carroll's Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum seem the very zenith of diversity. Open Primaries will do nothing to increase the diversity of the political process through mechanisms such as third parties; rather, it will swallow all attempts at political insurgency.

But of course, the most oft-cited objection to open primaries is that it undermines the ideological purity of both parties, and this is a weak objection, considering that both ideologues and party elders agree that the American party system is not meant to be a battle between two different ideological camps, but rather between two vehicles for election who use ideology for the purposes of campaign rhetoric. You can paint a pig red or blue, the argument goes, but like a politician, his change of color will not mask the fact that his pork is what sustains his career. Let's grant this premise, and then ask a crucial question: do open primaries solve it?

The answer is no. Open primaries may ultimately expose the fact that the Emperor has no clothes, but they will only exacerbate the unprincipled nature of both parties. Suppose open primaries are allowed – is anyone seriously going to argue that people will cross over to vote in the other party's primary because of ideas of public-spiritedness and democratic accountability? Even if this were true of some rare soul who has survived the vicissitudes of modern politics, it is an utterly unrealistic assumption. It is more likely that open primaries will encourage two kinds of crossover voting – what I will call "hedging" and "sabotage." "Hedging" in this case refers to  voting for a candidate whose platform is similar to the other party's platform such that one's bets are "hedged" in voting. "Sabotage" should be fairly obvious in its purpose – it means voting for the candidate who is least likely to win so as to ensure a victory of one's own party. Those who are skeptical should look to Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos” which tried to resurrect the Hillary Clinton candidacy despite its overwhelming likelihood of failure in a general election, and almost succeeded.

If the reader still doesn't believe these things will happen, it may be instructive to look at the open primaries which existed in the Republican race this year. McCain in most cases lost the actual Republican vote, but carried the independents and crossover Democrats. The only reason McCain could have garnered this large a slice of non-party members is either because they were hedging their bets or because they were trying to make the GOP fail by nominating a broken old warhorse who was badly past his prime. Whichever motive these voters had, the success of their plan was incontestable.

Of course, the proponents of open primaries may point out that just because you have closed primaries, it doesn't mean cynicism will go away. They would be correct to say that cynicism exists in the status quo. However, my point is not that cynicism will magically materialize if open primaries exist – my point is that what little public-spiritedness is left in the process will evaporate because of the perverse incentives.

Moreover, both parties have well-developed enough attack machines that the process of sabotage and counter-sabotage would ultimately monopolize the process and shut down discourse. Suppose, for instance that the Republicans have seven candidates, of which one is an insane man who believes that the communists are tapping all his phones, while the rest are relatively electable. Obviously, the Democrats would have an incentive to vote for such a person, meaning that Republicans would be thrown back on voting defensively for the candidate who they thought had the highest chance of winning, rather than voting for the one whose views most closely matched their own. This sort of Machiavellian calculus is well and good for party elders, but it defeats the ostensible purpose of voting, which is not supposed to be a politically calculated move, but a statement of one's electoral preferences. As a result, voting becomes nothing but the meaningless, mechanized process of lever pulling and loses any rhetorical weight it might have had as a democratic mechanism.

William F. Buckley Jr. once wrote that the "purpose of an open mind is to close it to certain things." Considering that the purpose of an open primary is to close it to genuine debate, it seems quite clear that open primaries are one such example of something which our minds ought to shut out completely.

With elections over for more than a week now, you better get ready for the never ending campaign season to pick right back up.

With Arnold on his way out, a Republican party unable to define itself, and the 2008 elections dominated by Democrats (and Obama's near 2/3 majority in California for the Presidential election), the San Francisco Chronicle reports that a lot of political heavyweights are waiting to hear an official decision from Dianne Feinstein on whether she will seek the highest office in the state.

From the Chronicle:

The 2010 governor's race may be a ways off, but one thing is clear - none of California's wannabe big shots is waiting for Sen. Dianne Feinstein to make up her mind on whether she'll run.

Many of her fellow Democrats are betting that Feinstein will stay in Washington as the new chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Feinstein has said she still has a year to decide on a potential Sacramento run. But whether she's in or out, the jockeying for position is already in full swing:

-- Attorney General Jerry Brown and his wife and unofficial campaign manager, Anne Gust, have been meeting with donors, labor leaders and backers to tie up early endorsements for governor. Unlike other likely candidates, Brown has tremendous name recognition among voters. Plus, as A.G., he has a bully pulpit that he can take up and down the state. So Brown won't need the $20 million the other hopefuls need to raise...

Read the full article here