Periphery and Center
Monday a week ago one of my co-workers, an attorney from Barcalona, and I talked about our respective horseraces. My friend is nominally "for" José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE), however, he didn't vote for Zapatero. Instead, on March 9th, he voted for whatever insipid idiot the PSOE put on his ballot.
My friend transfered his frustration with having a meaningless ballot to the Americas, to Florida in particular. He expressed to me his genuine outrage that the DNC had disenfranchised the voters, and the not quite so organic theme (available in the trans-Atlantic print media) that the PLEOs shouldn't have a determining effect on the selection of the party's nominee.
I explained that Florida voters are always ignored because of how, in "normal cycles", the early contests determine the outcome long before the Florida primary, and ... there is a lot to explain, and my co-workers don't let me off the hook, I mean after all, they've got a hack married to a hack trapped over pizza and beer to cross examine ... basically took the position that I've written about here, that the general comes down to Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and possibly Michigan, and that disenfranchisement in Florida would make Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan mandatory if the surviving Hero Twin is to beat Saint John.
But I wasn't listening as closely as I should have. So what if a Catalan lawyer from Barcelona wasn't happy that the one time his vote might have counted in the Spring primaries, it wasn't? The Fall general is where his vote is counted, unless he's in Miami-Dade or ... and this time we'll have better ballot protection than we had in '00 ...
So I heard, but didn't attend, when my friend said that if a political party from the distant capital treated his vote, and the votes of all of his city, all of Catalonia, with such indifference, he wouldn't vote for them, he would not permit the distant owners of expectations and outcomes to continue to treat a vote in a democracy like a vote in a dictatorship.
Now that I'm back, the prospect of an enduring message, from the people who make up the FDP, to the people who make up the DNC, seems vastly more likely than not. At this point, it seems prudent to me for the candidate who cared to express her condolences to the colony of Florida, and put every dime into Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and look hard at Wisconsin, Minnesota and Colorado, just in case Michigan is also lost-in-advance.
I understand there's an idiot at an orange site that thinks this is a really good thing.
