Imagine, if you will, that there were neither primaries nor caucuses this year--that the Democratic nominee for president was picked by the superdelegates and the superdelegates alone. That instead of being allowed to vote for your nominee, one was assigned to you by a committee, composed entirely of the Party establishment, meeting at a secret time at an undisclosed location.
Welcome, my friends, to South Jersey.
For those of you not fortunate enough to live in the Garden State, or are otherwise unaware of the goings-on, a quick recap:
In April, Rob Andrews, the Democratic congressman out of New Jersey's 1st District--cue Colbert: "the Fightin' First!"--opted not to run for re-election to the House and to rather mount a primary challenge for ol' man Lautenberg's Senate seat.
As part of Andrews's pact with the South Jersey Party bosses, his wife Camille was installed as a "placeholder" on the ballot for Andrews's House seat, with the understanding that she would drop out after the primaries. As huntsu wrote over at BlueJersey:
Rob Andrews admitted back in May that his wife Camille Andrews was just a placeholder for the NJ1 Democratic nomination, and was placed there to avoid a serious primary by folks interested in running for the seat. Instead of a primary, Camille would turn down the nomination and put the nomination in the hands of the County Committee members from the district.
I can picture in my head just how it must have gone down...
- Fat Cat #1: "Camille drops out, and we'll just pick whomever we want."
- Fat Cat #2: "But won't the voters be upset?"
- Fat Cat #1:"What're they gonna do, vote for someone else?"
- "BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA."
So now the Committee for the Disenfranchisement of South Jersey Democrats, ahem, excuse me, I mean the county Democratic committee members will assign to us who we get to vote for, and in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, these few hundred people are, in effect, choosing our next representative. There has been no word as to when they will meet, or where.
Now, here in South Jersey, we're accustomed to getting the short end of the stick. We're even slowly growing to accept the fact that we will not be represented in the US Senate, where we have not had representation in over fifty years.
But, come on, our House representation too?
Personally, I'm sick and tired of the way Democratic politics are run here. I'm sick and I'm tired of the entrenched party establishment, rather than the voters, choosing my representatives for me. This mockery of the democratic process has received astonishingly little coverage in the press. And I'm not really sure what to do about it.
I want to try to organize some sort of movement here in the 1st to get a candidate of the people on the ballot rather than a candidate of the moneyed Party establishment, but I'm not sure what to do and I'm not sure how to start.
But I do know that I would rather have a people's candidate who might wind up losing to the Republican in the fall than vote for some establishment lackey and, in so doing, acquiesce to this brazen affront to the values of democracy.