Please consider this example of Morris-think:
NO - LET THE PEOPLE RULE
Dick Morris
Thursday,November 9,2000
I AM not a liberal or a conservative, a Democrat or a Republican. But I am a democrat. I believe deeply and abidingly in the absolute right of people to choose their leaders. This fundamental principle may be at stake if the final recounts put Vice President Al Gore ahead of George W. Bush in the popular vote but leave him still lagging in the electoral college. If Gore gets more votes than Bush, he ought to be the president. Period.
The Electoral College is a pleasant anachronism which has survived by virtue of its habitual reflection, and frequent amplification, of the popular vote. When the college serves to mask, rather than elaborate, the will of the people, we must look to the popular vote to choose our president.
Some will argue that rules are rules, and both candidates accepted them when they ran in the first place. While our Constitution does prescribe that the electors choose a president, the Declaration of Independence speaks of the sovereignty of the rule of the majority.
It is not as if we confer upon the electors any authority or discretion. We don't even know their names. They don't even appear on our ballot. We elect them to reflect our will, not as New Yorkers, Californians or Floridians, but as Americans.
While the constitution assures the Electoral College of control over the process of choosing a president, there is also no provision restricting the electors to the choice of the voters of the state that sent them. Indeed, racist southern Democrats repeatedly have refused to back the candidate of the national party and used their discretion to vote for third candidates.
When we used to choose as vice president the runner up for the top job, it was expected that one of the winning party's electors would "throw away" their vote for another candidate so that the party's nominee for president could win in the Electoral College.
I believe that it is the Electoral College's clear duty to enact the will of the people. I believe that George Bush has an obligation to democracy and to the heritage of popular will to ask the electors to do so.
Predictably, Democrats will be outraged by a Bush Electoral College win and Republicans will hail it as the accepted system. But I speak not from party but from the basic idea that we are a democracy and that the people's view must be adopted.
The era in which we regarded ourselves as residents of our state rather than as citizens of our nation should have ended with the Civil War. How can a candidate for president seriously place his hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the laws of the United States when, in taking office, he betrays the most basic of its principles?
Change the system, but honor it for this election? That's a cop out. The system we have is called democracy. We don't need to change it, just follow it.
Should we be subject to the national nightmare of thwarted popular will, we can only hope that our leaders see beyond their ambition and legal entitlements and bow to the sovereignty of the will of the people of the United States of America.
MitchellC, discostu: are you two in agreement with Mr. Dick?
Actually, after 9-11, many Democrats were grateful for the Bush Electoral College win.