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Posted on 11/11/2008 6:53:57 AM PST by bamahead
In a Presidential contest replete with novelties, none was more significant than this: A candidate’s campaign—for his party’s nomination, then for the presidency-was itself virtually the entire validation of his candidacy. Voters have endorsed Barack Obama’s audacious—but not, they have said, presumptuous—proposition, which was: The skill, tenacity, strategic vision and tactical nimbleness of my campaign is proof that he's presidential timber.
Because imitation is the sincerest form of politics, the 2008 campaign will not be the last in which such a proposition is asserted. Obama’s achievement represents the final repudiation of the Founders’ intentions regarding the selection, and hence the role, of presidents...
James W. Ceaser, professor of politics at the University of Virginia, writing in the Claremont Review of Books, notes that, contrary to conventional understanding, the Constitution created not three but four “national institutions.” They are the Congress, the Supreme Court, the presidency—and the presidential selection system, based on the Electoral College. “The question of presidential selection,” Ceaser writes, “was just that important to the Founders.”
Under their plan, the nomination of candidates and the election of the president were to occur simultaneously. Electors meeting in their respective states, in numbers equal to their states’ senators and representatives, would vote for two people for president. The electors’ winnowing of aspirants was the nomination process. When the votes were opened in the U.S. House of Representatives, the candidate with a majority would become president, the runner-up would become vice president. If no person achieved a majority of electoral votes, the House would pick from among the top five vote getters. Note well: The selection of presidential nominees was to be controlled by the Constitution.
The Founders’ intent, Ceaser writes, was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning, such as rhetoric...
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Is Georgie rolling over??
.......
EXCELLENT [and on the mark] pun!!
It wouldn’t surprise me if they dug his body up and flung it into the Atlantic and desecrated his monument. America is his monument, and they’re already wrecking that full speed ahead.
To ignore the DBMs role in selecting and electing this Marxist street punk is to be willfully blind to reality.
You have a lot of gall mentioning the intent of the Founders when you actively trashed the only person on either ticket who had ANY grasp of originalism. Go back to playing with baseball cards and leave the Consititution to those who actually READ it.
But is he not right about demagoguery and mob rule and the erasure of republicanism as the Founders conceived it in favor of pure democracy that inevitably moves toward dictatorship?
He is an annoying prissy little thing.
He probably wears cartoon jammies to bed.
Couldn’t this have been published before the election?
Wake me in two years for the midterms...
WAHOO-WA from Mr. Jefferson's University!
The brief nonpartisan system of candidate selection alarmed some thoughtful people because it left ambitious individuals unconstrained by any dependency. Hence the desire to involve the parties in presidential selection, thereby requiring aspirants to submit to principles and agendas not entirely their own.
And in the end, the American electorate is caught between two warring factions, each with fairly similar agendas and principles when it comes to procuring and maintaining a hold on power, and each with a complete disgust towards and abhorrence of the Constitution...and of the wishes of the electorate, more generally.
BO won the election for one reason only: he’s black.
And Obama boxers..............
Obama is in WAY over his head. Our world became more dangerous when he was elected.
I am not a fan of George Will; in fact, I don’t like him very much. But occasionally he mentions something that he has read that is worth our attention. This is such a piece. We should thank Prof. Ceaser for writing it and Will for publicizing it.
It is ironic that it should appear in Newsweek which has been the MSNBC of the weeklies.
Obama and his campaign is indeed the final repudiation of the Founding Fathers. What really distinguishes Obama from Carter is that Carter was an accident. Obama is the result of a carefully orchestrated effort by the radical left in tandem with the entrenched and corrupt political machine which controls Chicago and the state of Illinois.
The election of Obombast. A triumph of style over substance.
Miss Manners is his wife.
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