Elections: Waste of Time and Money?

Today is Mississippi’s turn to hold primary elections. It is the state with the most beautiful name and with the lowest income.

The prognosis is that on the Democratic side, the senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, will be victorious. The population is 37 percent black and this figure is nowhere in America higher. The black electorate has during the course of the election campaign increasingly disengaged itself from Senator Hillary Clinton and has taken Obama to its heart.

Ethiopia

Although in recent years floating casinos have provided for some “glitter” employment in Mississippi, it still remains the poorest state in the Union. Rev. Jessie Jackson called the poorest part of the state the moral equivalent of Ethiopia.

As the former Democratic governor of Mississippi Ray Mabus said in an interview earlier this month: “We the residents of Mississippi regret that we dangle from the bottom of lists when we would much rather be at the top, and vice versa.”

Delegates

In Mississippi there are 33 delegates to be won. But because the allocation [of delegates] is in proportion to the number of votes, Obama has to win with a big difference in order to significantly increase his advantage of one hundred delegates over Clinton (nationally).

After this, there follow 16 more primaries. Since the beginning of January we have been following this and with the Democrats the victor is still not in sight.

Although most of my friends say that they find the race exciting, I hear increasingly more often that this manner of electing a president is extremely cumbersome and that it eats up so much money that the wealthy candidates would have a strong advantage.

Fiasco

Let me this time call upon Simon Jenkins, Sunday Times columnist, as defender of the American system.

Jenkins, who is often very critical about America, wrote last Sunday in his newspaper: “Don’t fool yourself that we are dealing here with a new electoral fiasco. It is exactly the opposite.” Jenkins would like to see other countries also choose their leaders in this refreshing manner.

One could not give the people a bigger influence in the selection of their leaders. And those who want to lead the nation have to prove themselves until they almost fall dead in the process.

Anarchy

Every day, 365 days, all-day-long, [they have to] complete a program that takes them from a school gymnasium via a girls’ secondary school to a basketball stadium, with many stops in between. When hardly anybody shows up, it can not annoy you; the candidates can not have a moody afternoon or just feel a little weary.

“The essence of the elections,” Jenkins writes, “is their unpredictability. A touch of anarchy is proof that they reflect the world’s most pluralistic society.”

Cynical Europeans

Money plays an important role in the elections. But it is a malicious myth that you can only reach the White House with a lot of your own money. None of the three remaining candidates (Republican John McCain, Obama and Clinton) is wealthy. Money is attracted by power or the promise of power and not the other way around.

The January 10 Times Online quoted a statement by H. G. Wells that elections are the High Mass of a democracy. It added that no country celebrates its freedom with more rituals and idealism than America.

“For all the patronizing foreign commentaries on the influence of money, interest groups and sectarian fundamentalists, for all the sneering by cynical Europeans at American politicians’ clichés and voters’ naivety, (…) it is open admiration for a political process that, more than anywhere, is a triumph of the democratic ideal.”

And that is the way it is.