Please forgive me, I didn't recall debating the merits and demerits of the 17th Amendmend with you in the past. I didn't intend to start another argument over the subject, and was certainly not trying to win you over. I was merely trying to use the inherent corruption in South Dakota to illustrate my point—which might have been lost in the noise over the 17th Amendment. Please, if you will, allow me to try and illustrate it once more:
I would argue that Tom Daschle was continuously reëlected to the Senate not by the will of South Dakotans, but rather by firmly-entrenched ELECTORAL FRAUD which was pervasive on the Indian reservations within that State.
It was, by my logic, not necessarily "the people's will" that Daschle was recalled, but was instead the fact that, due to the reduction in illegitimate voting brought about by the electoral reform push that followed the Gore debacle that allowed the people of South Dakota to be heard for the first time ever!
Your fair state is another example of the problem that I'm trying to illustrate.
Do you think that Hillary would have a chance at all to gain a Senate seat, if it weren't for the entrenched Democratic voting apparatus in New York City? If it weren't for New York City, do you dare to bet for a second that she wouldn't have run off to a Chicago or Los Angeles to run, no matter who was currently seated there? It wasn't the citizens of New York State who elected her, but rather the entrenched Democratic stronghold that is the City!
Maybe we're both only seeing half of the picture... I approach the vote of the general population very hesitantly—first and foremost because the Democratic party has been so adept at blatantly manipulating the popular vote for so many years, and secondly because I feel that the population, corporately, is not fully aware of the way our Government is intended to work.
I'm also not saying you're completely wrong, either, but am merely trying to express the problem in the terms that I see it. (After all, we're the product of our learning, are we not?) You are most certainly right, in some cases, to say that the people retain Senators that they think are "useful" to them, though I shudder to think of the kind of person who would willingly vote for a McCain or a Feingold.
All of that aside, the corruption side of voting took a severe beating after the 2000 elections, and I think that we'll continue to see these people fall from power as elections become more honest. At least, that's all I can hope for.
However, for better or worse, a lot of conservative voters continued to vote for Daschle in spite of his doctrinaire liberalism, year after year.
The massive corruption involved in cultivating votes on Indian reservations in that state wouldn't have been pivotal if a substantial majority of SD voters hadn't-for whatever reason-considered Daschle to be a plausible U.S. Senator, in the same way that they thought it acceptable to elect that moonbat Abourezek-Daschle's mentor-for so many years before finally ousting him.
The argument about populism does cut both ways.
While Hillary Clinton is the epitome of the Dem. machine candidate, it could be argued that she would have never been elected to the U.S. Senate if it had been left up to the state legislature here, although the subordination of the Democratic Party in this state to the political aspirations of the Clinton machine began way before the 2000 election.
Judith*cough*Hope!
By the same token, you can use the same argument for popular elections, which is one of the reasons that Tom Coburn and Jeff Sessions are also in the United States Senate, in spite of the opposition they've faced throughout their political careers by members of their own party.