THE GARDENER’S TALE OF POLITICAL PRIMARIES
- August 2, 2015
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THE GARDENER’S TALE OF POLITICAL PRIMARIES
Category : Seeds/Articles
To be made to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee presented to them by the ruling few at polling time is not exactly the people’s idea of democracy: more work for the National Transformation Council
[Cum apologia to the writings on the subject by Josh Clark]
Before the turn of the 20th century, America
was in dire straits. The country was slashed in two — expansionism
ruled the West as the last of the indigenous American Indian peoples
were wiped out or forced onto reservations, and urban strife dominated
the established land east of the Mississippi. Amid all of these pains
people looked to the government for help. But the political system was
corrupt, necessarily reflecting “wild, wild” laissez faire capitalism. Only a handful of clever people influenced the direction of the country.
Present-day Philippines is not much
different. The oligarchic structure of our society is the root cause of
all our social problems. We live in a world of a few rich daily getting
richer while the majority hardly make it out of the poverty trap. The
Philippine economy may be growing fast – government does not tire of
saying. But we are also experiencing one of the worst poverty situations
ever, complete with new historic levels of hunger and unemployment. The
Philippines gets richer – maybe – but Filipinos undoubtedly become
poorer.
In that turn-of-the-century American setting, in response to the social ills that America endured, the Progressive Era
was born. This nationwide movement produced the unions, the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), and other individual protections. Elite
democracy, on account of strong social pressure from ever stronger
social organizations, started to give way to some kind of social
democracy. In the economic field, the power of regulation by the State
got to be gradually accepted and was now slowly being felt. And in the
political arena, the lack of a popular voice gave rise to, among other
things, a more participative way of nominating (not just electing) candidates through the so-called presidential primary system.
This system was the inevitable people’s
response against the backroom dealings of corrupt politicos that ensured
a rule of the few against the many. To transfer the right to elect a
presidential candidate from an elite few into the hands of the many
voters was the primary system’s paramount aim.
To be made to choose between Tweedledum
and Tweedledee presented to them by the ruling few at polling time was
not exactly the people’s idea of democracy. Their desire, rather, was
for voters in each state to have a choice among candidates, who now had
to pay attention to the issues the public considered important. By enabling the relatively unknown to become known, and the already known to become better known
the primary process alleviated corruption in national politics. The
system was so effective that almost a hundred years later, it would
still succeed in allowing a Jimmy who? (Carter) to become President, as later it would again work well for Bill who? (Clinton) and even lately bring to power a relative unknown like, believe the name or not – Barack Hussein Obama
– who gave the more established Hillary Clinton a very hard time
indeed. And, mind you, this happened in a population of about 300
million.
For one thing, by means of close-to-the-people debates and meetings, the primaries give people a chance to hear the prospective leaders – the wannabees – answer questions about the qualities they would bring to an office if elected. Then, closely resembling a general election
— when voters choose between candidates from each party for office —
primaries get voters to cast his or her vote to determine who will go
onto the general election. That was the idea of the primary system in a
nutshell. The application of the idea, however, differed greatly from
place to place (state to state) so that a non-practitioner could find
the whole thing so very convoluted indeed.
For example, in some places they followed the closed type where
only registered voters affiliated with a given party have the chance to
go to the polls to cast their vote for their chosen candidate within
that party. In closed primaries, only Republicans can vote for
Republicans, and Democrats for Democrats. Independent voters
— those who have opted to choose neither party, but are registered
voters — aren’t allowed to cast a ballot. However, in some other places
closed primaries have been modified to allow independents to cast a vote
for a candidate from one party or another. Such is the case of
Democrats in many states.
In open primaries,
a voter can cast his or her ballot for either party. In most cases, the
voter must choose a party to vote for by making a public statement at
the polling station. In this circumstance, the voter will tell the
election volunteer which party he or she chooses to vote for. He or she
will then receive a ballot containing the candidates for that party. In
some open primaries, voters may choose which party’s candidate to vote
for privately in the polling booth.
A third type of primary — the blanket primary
— allowed voters to vote for whomever they pleased, without having to
affiliate with one party or another, and without making any kind of
declaration. California and Washington were both using blanket primaries
at the end of the 20th century, but stopped after a 2000 U.S. Supreme
Court decision ruled them unconstitutional.
At the end of the day, what is the point
of it all? In spirit, a primary consists of individuals casting a vote
in favor of their preferred candidate. This only means that voters have
something candidates want: votes. So primaries are a
way of forcing candidates to interact with voters. But votes don’t go
directly to a candidate; instead they come in the form of delegates.
In order for a candidate to receive the
nomination, he or she has to win delegates. There are generally two ways
to win delegates in primaries. In some cases candidates win by proportion.
If a state has 100 delegates and a candidate wins 60 percent of the
vote in the state’s primary, then that candidate will have 60 delegates
from that state at the national convention — the party nomination night. Other states use the winner-takes-all method. This sounds exactly like what it is: a candidate who wins the majority of the vote in a primary — 51 percent — wins all of that state’s delegates.
Some favor the proportional method
because it closely reflects the feelings of a state’s voters. Others
favor winner-takes-all, because it keeps primaries competitive by
allowing candidates to come from behind with huge gains in key states.
When a candidate wins delegates in a
state — either by proportion of votes or winner-takes-all — those
delegates are presumed to be committed to voting for that candidate at
the convention. Each party has a finite number of delegates who are up
for grabs in the primaries. In 2008, the Republican Party had around
2,308 delegates while Democrats had 4,364 in all [source: U.S. State Department].
Delegates are usually people who are
involved in their state’s politics. They may be volunteers, local party
chairs or other interested citizens. In addition to delegates, states
also offer uncommitted delegates. These people — sometimes called superdelegates — are usually elected officials from the state.
Superdelegates can pledge their votes
without regard to primaries or caucuses — for example, after being
courted by a candidate — or they can remain uncommitted until voting
begins at the national convention. While standard delegates chosen by
votes from ordinary voters are important, superdelegates have a lot of
influence as well. In the 2008 primaries, the Democrats had 800
superdelegates, a sizeable number considering that to win the nomination
a Democratic candidate needed 2,183 delegates voting in their favor
[source: CNN].
So, you see, even the primary system is
not without problems. The use of delegates, as explained above, is
problematic to some. While delegates are meant to be committed to a
single candidate, they aren’t bound by law to do so since political
parties are private organizations. So a vote cast by a citizen may not
go to the chosen candidate at all, if the delegate breaks from his or
her obligation. The presence of superdelegates in the primary system —
delegates who possess a vote but are beholden to no voter — also make
some critics nervous. A standard delegate represents a large amount of
voters; superdelegates are equal to one massive vote for an individual.
In the Philippines, there used to be – effectively speaking – a two-party
system, and up and down the length and width of the archipelago the
small towns and bigger cities divided and drove prominent folk to belong
to and be responsible for one or the other party. Today we have a multi-party
system that may have been ideal for a parliamentary government form
that was presumably going to happen but has effectively become a no-party system in the current presidential form. A no-party system means a perpetually ad hoc
arrangement of prominent personalities backed up by big amounts of
money. It can be quite tricky – as we are again seeing today.
The Hayop-Ten-Owned National Government
(H-TONG) has hundreds of billions of pesos in DAP-PDAF form to spend as
they wish. They don’t need Big Business in the immediate grand electoral
expenses. At any rate, Big Business was quite happy with the H-TONG’s
laissez-faire policies, chemically clean as these are of any real
concern for worker and peasant and such majority but powerless objects
of the society at large.
The little problem of H-TONG is their
undue attachment to a candidate whom the people have no desire
whatsoever to vote for. They were hoping that an allegedly popular
running mate might do the trick of justifying massive electronic
cheating for their ruling clique’s leader and candidate. Even that is
not happening easily.
With only a few months before the next
presidential elections, there is not one single dominant personality in
the horizon – which is, indeed, most ironic considering that here is a
political system that is personality-driven with mere lip service for
ideological directions.
The truth is that people look at the
wannabees and all they see are damaged goods. Again, for starters, there
are no ideological directions to look at. The issues are “who is perceived to be less corrupt than the other?” “Who is more photogenic than the other?” “Who can outlast the other longer in senate investigative contests of vocal endurance?” and – most distressing of all, “Who
has more dough to pass around so that vote-counters can use the winning
math in their regard? Who has more dough to control the counting
machines whose cheating capacity shown in 2010 and 2013 is quite
unmatched in all Philippine electoral history?”
A Sincere Desire for Radical Change
This is why deep down in the people’s guts is a genuine and intense desire and need for change
– real change. In sum, what the people are feeling is not all
hopelessness and cynicism – although there is so much evidence of all
that – not irrational anger either but sincerity – a sincere desire for
the new, for radical change or transformation –
if only there could be a sincere tenacious group that would reflect
that desire in their action and being. Does not the National
Transformation Council aim to be such a group?
In effect, the people are saying, “We
cannot have ‘more of the same’ because ‘the same’ has been tried too
many times and it was always found dysfunctional. It simply doesn’t
work.”
And that is why people cannot get excited over ‘opposition’ posturing in any of the many given crises the nation is undergoing.
Long ago they had developed a natural
aversion to false change, where they see that the more something changes
the more it remains the same… the same poverty if not worse, the same
corruption, the same insensitivity to both human and non-human rights,
the same inadequate infrastructure, the same escape from misery to work
in distant lands, the same Third World conditions. Is there any
difference between administration and the little opposition that hardly
exists? The people see none. And so, much as they want real change, they
cannot get themselves to support either the administration or even a
would-be opposition because they are already sure everything will only
amount to false change.
Time, then, for something new and different…like, say, something analogously close to the presidential primary
system that many are now getting to be familiar with, thanks to TV and
the Internet. But this is the Philippines and many American conditions
do not obtain here, obviously. Knowing, however, the essence of that
system, there is no reason why the needed modifications cannot be made,
and speedily.
Because the deepest desire of the people is the desire for authentic change, what we need to organize immediately is a movement of change agents
– agents of transformation -across the Philippine archipelago,
gathering together such people from small towns and big cities in their
various clustered localities and tasking them with viewing, interacting
with and really knowing prospective national leaders who can facilitate
and lead the movement for real change and national transformation.
A movement for national transformation
needs transformed agents – those who initiate or continue a process of
critical awareness that leads to people’s action at all levels. If the
moral leaders of the land, in conscience, truly support an idea like the
National Transformation Council, let this be made manifest now.
Let them – let us all – identify the Primary Change-Agents
– those living and working directly with small groups – among “C.O.’s”
(community organizations) or “P.O’s (people’s organizations), or basic
ecclesial communities or cells.
Secondly, let us recognize Intermediate Change-Agents –
or those who are associated with the Primary level in broader functions
as facilitators of action groups and projects, and, therefore, are
likewise associated with more distant support groups whose working they
understand and link with the needs of Primary.
Thirdly, let us bring in the Support Change-Agents – or
those whose commitment to change-agent work is at the conceptual,
bureaucratic, research, technological or communication levels. Some
government agents and church leaders are able to cross to both the
Primary and Intermediate levels as initiators and facilitators and
enablers.
We all have our particular work– some of
us are teachers, some of us are healers, some of us are soldiers, some
of us are churchmen or women, some of us are in various professions, and
some of us are farming. We have a variety of occupations. But besides
the particular work we do and the particular lives we lead, we have an urgent task that everyone is involved in and no one is exempt from.
Our movement of change agents precisely
addresses this task. It must consciously, deliberately and
systematically be engaged in transforming Philippine society from its
current status to that of a transformed nation before too long. And it
must find the right national leaders for the purpose – known or unknown
some of them might be right now. We must prepare the people’s minds to
go beyond the massive temporary insanity of an electoral fever to the
very real possibility of a non-violent revolution now.
1896 led ultimately to 1986 both of
which left much to be desired. That people’s unfinished revolutionary
effort demands continuation today.
1n Lipa last August a movement committed to continuing the unfinished Philippine revolution announced who they were: “Filipino
citizens of different personal, professional, social and economic
backgrounds and political persuasions and religious beliefs” – definitely a multi-sectoral movement with the bigger numbers coming from the peasant and worker sectors.
They said: “We reaffirm our deeply
held convictions and beliefs about the common good and our highest
national interests, in the face of the most pressing challenges
.Unbridled and unpunished corruption and widespread misuse of political
and economic power in all layers of society have not only destroyed our
common conception of right and wrong, good and bad, just and unjust,
legal and illegal, but also put our people, especially the poor, at the
mercy of those who have the power to dictate the course and conduct of
our development for their own selfish ends.”
“A crisis of unprecedented proportions has befallen our nation,” they said. “The
life of the nation is in grave peril from the very political forces
that are primarily ordained to protect, promote and advance its
well-being, but which are aggressively undermining its moral, religious,
social, cultural, constitutional and legal foundations.”
Because there is no longer any doubt
regarding the deceitful and fraudulent character of the 2010 and 2013
elections due to the “hocus-PCOS” electoral cheating machines, the
movement declared at Lipa that “until we have a fraud-free electoral
system, we should refrain from holding any farcical election. But once
we have it, we should encourage the best qualified men and women in the
country to participate in the open electoral process so that together we
could put an end to the stranglehold exercised by the corrupt and
incompetent political dynasties upon our elections.”
The immediate task is thus quite clear.
Instead of rushing to join the insane electoral sport mindlessly we
should rather gather the enlightened parts of our citizenry to step back
and take stock. Do we really want this nonsense again? As usual, it
always starts with a determined few. A few can “throw fire” to the many
with the power of the Holy Spirit. Let’s hear each other again and new
and more voices to boot. Let’s get a real focus on the hocus-pcos and be
undisturbed in what is to be done, exhausting all means, true enough,
but ready to do everything else required to stop the nonsense.
The primaries are very important. We must make the primary moves now – soon, now.
FINIS
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