Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Leadership Council, and How to Lose an Election

 

THE DUOPOLY WATCH | Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

Hillary Clinton won the Presidential election where it doesn’t count, in the popular vote, while she lost it where it does, in the electoral vote.  Much has been written about the electoral vote system and why we have it.  But a major reason for its existence is the same one that has riven this country since its founding: the institution slavery and its underlayment: the Doctrine of White Supremacy.  As I wrote in my most recent column, Donald Trump ran first and foremost on the racism that has been at the core of Republican doctrine since Nixon declared the “Southern Strategy” and on the xenophobia that has been in its DNA since it was created in the 1850s. 

But running on those themes (and a few others based on hate and prejudice), Trump won the Presidency only because of the Electoral College.  In the Electoral College, which decides who gets to be President, each state has the number of votes that equals it number of Representatives plus its two Senators.  This gives an outsize weight to the smaller states.  And that system, just like the Doctrine of White Supremacy, is in the Constitution because of slavery. And that system can throw an enormous imbalance into national elections, as just happened.

The “two Senators per state system” was put in place in part to protect the interests of the smaller population states.  But it was also put in place in part to protect the interests of the slave states of the South, which generally had smaller populations than those of the North.  This was despite the fact (and what a contradiction this was) the states were awarded a population calculation to determine the number of members of the House of Representatives they received which included 3/5ths of the number of slaves included in their populations.  (Native Americans counted for nothing.) There are two interesting points here. Slaves were not “people” except when they could be used to get more seats in the House of Representatives for a given state.  There were slaves in the Northern states as well as in the Southern ones.  In fact, New York, the last state to abolish slavery, did not do so until 1827.  But the numbers were not high in any of the Northern slave states so they did not figure in elections. 

In any event, the racist candidate lost the popular vote.  But because of the outside weight given to the smaller, rural states, which have that outside weight in it because of a remnant of governance based in the old Slavocracy, he won the Presidency.  But then the question arises, could Hillary have won anyway.  Or rather could a Democrat not bearing Hillary’s personal and political baggage have won anyway?  In my view the answer is yes.  And in my view, even Hillary could have won if she hadn’t been bearing her political baggage, which can be summarized in three words: Democratic Leadership Council.  (Further, and I agree with her on this point, that even with her personal and political baggage she would have won, as I said, before the election, if the FBI Director James Comey had just kept his trap shut at the end of October.)  But she did bear that political baggage, which combined with the personal stuff, what I called the “Cometization” of the 2016 election, and the existence of the Slavocracy-based institution of the Electoral College, doomed here chances. 

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Source: The Greanville Post