A Process Corrupted

The following, excerpted from an AP story here, illustrates just how corrupt our electoral process is.

Ickes explained that his different position essentially is due to the different hats he wears as both a DNC member and a Clinton adviser in charge of delegate counting. Clinton won the primary vote in Michigan and Florida, and now she wants those votes to count.

Harold Ickes is both a functioning member of the Democratic National Committee which establishes and oversees the rules for selecting a nominee, and a member of the staff of one of the persons seeking the nomination. Specifically, his function on Senator Clinton’s staff is counting the votes of delegates.

He voted to remove the Michigan and Florida delegates from the process and, now that Clinton “won” those two states, he is arguing that those delegates should be reinstated.

Of course I do not want to see Clinton as the nominee, and part of my argument here is the distaste with which I view her and her staff’s willingness to use duplicity in a winning at all costs approach. She intends to march to the sea, and if she leaves a wasteland behind her that will not bother her at all.

But in a much larger argument, it is the process itself that I would condemn for permitting this situation to exist. It would be like playing the most recent Super Bowl with one of the officials being a paid employee of the New England Patriots. (Okay, NFL fans, I’ll admit that was a cheap shot.)

Does the DNC not vet its employees? Or do they not care? Or did they establish a cadre with the intention of “stacking the deck” for their chosen nominee? Or was Clinton so firmly entrenched in her entitlement to the nomination that they simply didn’t think it mattered?

The prevailing consensus is that all of the political ills of the nation will be cured if we just put a Democrat in the White House. I have written several times why I believe that to be overly optimistic, and here is further evidence. Put a Democrat there by means of a corrupted process and in precisely what way are we better served? Clinton's argument to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations is being portrayed as a relatively minor political ploy, but I don't see it that way at all. I see it as far from minor and seriously corrupt. Is an elected official who was willing to take advantage of a corrupt process to secure nomination going to maintain purity of governmental process after they are elected?

No one who uses corruption to gain power can claim himself to be honest.