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 ...
part owner of the Orioles? Nuff said.
Correction - a black leftist racist thug with lots of foreign money, the MSM drooling and quivering on his behalf, and powerful “friends” behind the scences. Oh, and ACORN.
So George Will produces a profoundly conservative essay, and he gets bashed by most of the posters on this thread.
The irony never ceases!
You obviously didn't read the story.
It's very clear all that they read was the headline, and assumed he was bashing the McCain campaign. The grandiose display of ignorance amazes me sometimes.
"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."
George bashed the McCain campaign during the campaign, which is when it mattered.
Some fought for originalism. George Will did not.
Spot on, Boyz! HEAR! HEAR!
That's like Ray Nagin crafting workable evacuation plans for NOLA after Katrina hit.
Coming after his non-stop trashing of Sarah Palin, who adheres rigorously to her state Constitution even when it runs counter to her personal views, I find his Constitutional ethics quite situational and come into play only when his priggish sensitivities are offended. Otherwise, he'd probably be quite happy to have a monarchy here.
Yeah - I have to agree with this particular essay. It’s easy enough to say without declaring he’s my personal savior, which he isn’t.
OK, but what does that have to do with not reading an article, and responding to it as if it says something that it does not?
I agree that his trashing of Sarah Palin was offputting, to say the least, and, oddly enough, he has always seemed to be sort of a closet admirer of the British system as opposed to our own but, nonetheless, on his fundamental point here he seems to be on target. On a personal note, when I was involved in a significant law suit years ago trying to stop the creeping “partyism” whose fruits we are now seeing and its harm to the Constitution, he claimed great interest and requested information, but wrote zero when to do so would have been helpful.
I would say that it takes a lot of gall to suggest that the guy who authored McCain-Feingold (limits on political speech, perhaps the most unconstitutional things there is) has any grasp of originalism.
He’s had how much time during this election to discuss “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 doesn’t realize his contribution to what he’s complaining about- that’s a true elite!
We are talking Palin, not McCain.
Oh, I stand corrected.
That’s true of much of the punditocracy here in Washington. Thank God for the Internet and forae such as this one.
But being a conservative elite pundit is so psychologically self-destructive in DC: the day one becomes a courtier is just a tiny step in an endless series of constant humiliations and compromises of principles.
:-D )))
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