George Will is essentially saying Obama's election is unconstitutional

Seriously. He disguises it in flowery language, gives some historical perspective that I'm always a sucker for, but ultimately arrives at the conclusion that Obama was elected in a way the Founders never intended and, if you read between the lines, concludes the method in which he was elected is unconstitutional.

His contention? The selection of the presidential nominees was to be controlled by the constitution.



Not being a constitutional scholar myself, I can't argue that point. But being a skilled contrarian with an uncanny grasp of the obvious, I can't help but conclude Will is saying every election for at least the last 100 years was, well, unconstitutional.



Good speakers can't be moderate?



umm... George, none of those candidates were rewarded with the presidency (which is what your piece is about and not that it really matters they were/are gifted speakers.

All in all, a really bizarre argument Will is making here.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/167572/output/print

I've watched him on George Snuffalupagus's show and he has very much praised Obama not just for style but for substance.

George - suck.it.up and behave like a grownup. This happened because America is sick of your party, the party of Lincoln has become the party of depraved humanity. Now go work on yourself, and straighten up your sick friends while you're at it.

when his guy was selected because he was popular enough with enough people who wanted to sit down and have a beer with him. " The Founders’ intent... was to prevent the selection of a president from being determined by the “popular arts” of campaigning..." That piece of information is rubbish.

Remember the Founders also refused to deal with the slave issues; They wanted the Senate to be full of learned men selected by other learned men.

They chose not to give women the right to vote and were forced to enshrine the Bill of Rights.

The Founders were very concerned about a largely illiterate elecorate and was very concerned that they could easily be beguiled by the passions of the moment. Read the Federalist Papers, particulary Federalist #10 on the impact of Passion and you will begin to see the reasons behind bicameralism and a weak presidency.

The title of his alternative article was, "The American electoral system and how it still works".

When they've lost everything else, when all of their theories about how "conservative economics and policy are the best" are proven to be lies and failures, and when the majority of the people finally wake up and reject the lot of them, they fall back on the lies of how the Founding Fathers were somehow unanimous in their beliefs and how things don't fundamentally change given 240 years.

They're playing political chess with our lives and the WORLD by exploiting a critical number of racist, ignorant, greedy, brainwashed, religious zealots, telling them what these fools believe is true, to make sure they can still game the system in the favor of the rich at the direct expense of the poor.

I hate these guys. But more than most of them, I hate George Will (and the late William F. Buckley Jr.) and his pseudo-intellectual, condescending gobbledegoop which is 50% an effort to make him positions sound more reasoned than they actually are. His drivel is then quoted and echoed ad-nausaum as some kind of half-assed academia in the conservative media, surely to be gobbled up verbatim by unknowing teenagers which is then used as a filter for their view of reality.

All of his quoting the Framers/Fathers whatever doesn't erase the basic facts: that we have to tax the rich more than those who aren't LUCKY enough to make/have so much money and that it's the government's JOB to help the poor, be it with their education and their health.

God DAMN these people.

It's pretty damned clear. I have no idea how one could twist this around into claiming that Will thinks Obama's election was not Constitutional.

Will states Obama's campaign was a novelty, that he used his candidacy to validate his qualifications, and that others will likely imitate the process in the future. This implies no one else ever has taken the route to the White House that he believes Obama did. That is totally about Obama.



Were they?

He holds up Obama's campaign as a shining example of how oratory has taken such a huge place in modern campaigns, but I don't see in the article substantiation that Will is claiming that Obama's election in not Constitutional.

For being raw identity politics and vehemence, with no substance.

Will has repeatedly complimented Obama for better resonating with the concerns of the day, regardless of whether he agrees with all of Obama's ideas. He's been consistently slamming the Mccain campaign, especially on Palin, since early Sept.

:shrug:

and then asserts as his justification (citing the author James W. Ceaser, who bloviates on the ludicrous idea of "Anti-Americanism" - http://www.travelbrochuregraphics.com/extra/a_genealogy_of_antiamericanism.htm ):


and thus concludes with:


essentially insisting that since, in his and others' opinions, that Obama "completed" some "long march away from the 'Founders' intent, then his election, having not followed the "intent" of the Constitution, should be considered anti-(un)constitutional.

Since he chose to ignore reference to any repuke candidates who also followed the current "modern" political process, most notably his idol 666 Ronald Wilson Reagan, and even ignored the Bush dynasty and their role in the process, then as usual, his faltering reach towards some nonsensical argument to justify the demise of lunatic fringe conservatism by "blaming the other guy" for some diversion from this nebulous "intent" (while not considering that 2008, rife with electricity, telephones, radio, television, satellite, and internet, in is NOT 1808) is yet another epic fail.

George Will is a paritisan of the first order, but he despised McCain and ridiculed the McCain campaign endlessly.

It is quite clear in the full context of the article that Will see Obama's election as the next step in the evolution of the Presidential selection process. He may or may not be lamenting the transition, but Obama in his mind is simply the next clear jump away from the original process.

If Will wanted to suggest that the election of Barack Obama was unconstitutional, he would say so. He is not a shy man.

I have been reading Will's commentaries over the past year and he has been bemoaning the outcast state of his party - but only on the fringes.

I vehemently disagree that he "would say so". He has NEVER come right out and said anything without couching his words and hiding them among a blizzard of nonsensical SAT test adjectives. He's a JOURNALIST and his entire piece is citing a RW author to use to make his argument. And this particular RW author produced such beauties as that on "Anti-Americanism" that I linked to above, which as you should have noted, was a topic that became a core message out of the Republican party, with the spouting of idiocies about who resided in "real America" and were "real Americans", and where there continues to be a line of propaganda regarding Obama's origins, ideas of patriotism, and intent.

Except for Obama's masterful use of the technology of the day (that Will is fully aware of unless he considers himself a luddite), Will's convoluted argument does not justify his assertion that Obama suddenly "completed" some process "away from" intent. Campaigning requires communicating to the public. Yet Will's use of an "intent" argument about the Presidential election process itself, which is essentially pointing to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_Intent">"original intent" theory, would then suggest that what Obama has done was "illegal".

:hi:

Maybe I'm being a little paranoid here, but the phrase "long march" in politics makes me think of only one thing, the retreat of the Chinese Communists to regroup during their civil war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_march

On the other hand, conservatives are lazy thinkers and often just grab any phrase floating around in their brains... like "he gets the train to run on time". Weird that phrases used by monarchists, nazis and other totalitarians are lurking just below the surface.

Will was one of many conservative commentators who immediately began tearing Mccain apart in September.

His comments in that OP article have much more to say about Mccain/Palin's campaign, than Obama's.

"McCain, who at 72 is 22 years older than Alaskan statehood, is 27 years and six months older than his running mate, who was 8 when Joe Biden was elected to the Senate."

"But is there any evidence that she has thought about such matters? McCain's selection of her is applied McCainism -- a visceral judgment by one who is confidently righteous. But the viscera are not the seat of wisdom. "

"McCain's campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence"

"For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are 'corrupt' or 'betray the public's trust.'"

"Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either. "

The rabble won't be convinced, but they never are...

to start vying for leadership of his utterly dysfunctional party. The abject denial of his party's demise is extraordinary.

Here you have a bloviating journalist stumbling around attempting to define the Constitution and never acknowledging that his next President IS a Constitutional lawyer. Will is no longer his generation's "young fogey", but is now a certifiably irrelevent OLD fogey.

I'd rather have a party of George Wills as the opposition than Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly.

He the type of guy that allows the baseball owners to lie about their finances to him then writes a totally fantastic one sided book about baseball finances. He is in other words a total partisan hack that happens to write well.

intellectual. He only seems so in comparison to the brain-dead waste land of his fellow conservatives. Sure, he owns a thesaurus and, as I understand it, has a staff to come up with cute quotations and historical examples for him. But his arguments are gibberish and partisan twaddle.

This has been my opinion of him for a LONG TIME. He has a pleasant voice and tone, and, to be honest, is a pretty talented writer, who again, delivers his bullspit in a very palatable manner.

BUT, the key word above was BULLSPIT.

If I have read him 100 times, I came away 99 times thinking what a flowery pile of crape that was. And, yes, partisan.

We lose sight of it, cause the overwhelming majority of water carriers for the right wing are bombastic blowhards like Hannity, Beck and Inghram. But, there is a nasty little group of "intellecutuals" like Will who are able to spin their arrogance in a higher level of rhetoric.

with the argument about the modern conservative "intellectual" writers and commentators like (the late) Buckley, Will, Noonan, Novak, Williams, etc. Problem is, these folks sat back while a new, "anti-intellectual" breed took over their party. The Limbaughs, the Savages, the Hannitys, and Coulters. I ironically listened to Rush's very first show in 1988 when he booted Lynn Samuels out of her slot on WABC that day. His satirical style gradually evolved to reflect his rebellion against his own intellectual family to champion the "anti-intellectual", promoting his own success as justification that one didn't need to serve in the military nor needed a pile degrees after their names to make it in America.

Since Reagan came into office in 1980, I was, by means of monitoring these people, "schooled" on their philosophy that hinted at Libertarianism - "less government", "fiscal responsibility", "minimal taxation to encourage economic growth", "natural law and original intent of the Constitution", and "family values". The problem was that because this particular school of ("Reagan") thought is very much in the minority, this group had to form coalitions. And those coalitions brought in factions that had agendas that were the antithesis of the intellectual's "core message". By aligning with the neocons, their goal being the eventual democratization of the world, this required not only going against the "isolationalist" and "4th Amendment-is-supreme" Libertarians, but required spending enormous sums of money to carry out the democratization efforts. Thus out goes the "fiscal responsibility" piece and the "original intent" piece. And by aligning with the religious social conservatives, this again throws out the "natural law"/"original intent" piece regarding imposition of religion on a populace and distorting the meaning of the 1st Amendment. Basically, the "government off our backs" Reagan crowd were forced to live with the "Homeland Security" government-intrusion-into-their-lives Bush/Cheney crowd. The irony being that Reagan represented the "anti-intellectual" based on his family's background, but was a sock puppet for the "intellectuals" by catering to them and endlessly quoting them and embracing their agenda, and Bush represented the "intellectuals" by his family background, but became a sock puppet to the "anti-intellectuals" by catering to them and energizing them, but then not going far enough.

And thus the "intellectuals" chose to compromise their position to maintain this "Big Tent" party so that they could achieve their fantasy of a "permanent majority", which inturn has lead to the demise of intellectualism and the rise of the anti-intellectual Palin wing - a group who has felt themselves marginalized by the intellectuals, the latter of which who tried in vain (but under the media radar) to push back against a tide of increasingly narrow ideologies that went beyond the intellectual's "core" beliefs.

In essence, we are witnessing a class war among the Republicans.

And since these intellectuals stepped back and allowed this to happen - apparently "in the interest of party unity" - then they lose all my respect. And their under-handed swipes at the Democratic Party such as what Will does here (in referencing Obama to argue what has supposedly gone wrong with the whole election process) and similarly what Noonan has also done in her editorials throughout the year and more recently on TV as a pundit when she simultaneously lambasts her own party but continues to take swipes at an innocent member of the opposition party, tells me that they are cowards and aren't ready to really address the source of their problem rather than the whine about the symptoms.

and, hence, the campaigning they would do, even the FRAMERS were guilty of party influences ----- Federalists Vs. Anti-Federalists. Political parties evolved from the very beginnings, despite the FRAMERS' rhetoric. I think Will is just hypothesizing about a political environment which has really never existed in this country!

No f*g eloquent smart ass n*r shall be elected president.

I see George has joined Idiocracy. On Fucked News this morning they were all over the communist take over of america by the f*g eloquent smart ass n*r. (I could only take a few minutes, I just went in to see the malfunction.)

On a serious note, Newsweek published this crap?

Pound sand George

They started hating him when he started bashing McCain, too. Now he needs his audience back.

:evilgrin:

He's not saying Obama's election was "unconstitutional." He's saying that the process by which presidents are chosen has evolved away from the process envisioned by the founders. But the founders' "vision" doesn't define what is or isn't constitutional, unless you're willing to suggest that ending slavery was "unconsititutional" or giving women the right to vote was "unconstitutional" since both of those acts were not envisioned by the founders. As Will notes, "Presidential politics, although of paramount importance, is a game without settled rules. More than two centuries after ratification of the Constitution, there is no stable system for selecting presidential candidates." Thus, while the founders may have envisioned a particular system, they did not make it immutable. Indeed, the process was changed by constitutional amendment in 1804, at a time when a number of the founders were still alive. Will himself acknowledges that the process envisioned by the framers began changing even before that and has had, in his view, at least six iterations.

I think Will is wrong to decry the current system. But its a stretch to suggest he's saying Obama's election (or that of anyone else) was unconstitutional.

Because of the fact that he says the process has become "unconstitutional", this is going to be used to further the idiotic argument that Obama shouldn't be allowed to take office. This will be read in the same ligt that the asinine "Obama is a furriner" diatribes are read.

He says its evolved contrary to the process envisioned by the framers. Again, that is not the same as saying it "become unconstiutional" any more than elections have "become unconstitutional" because of the enactment of the Voting Rights Act which also is something not envisioned by the framers.

Will's argument that the evolution of the process away from what the founders envisioned is a bad thing is silly because (a) by his own admission the framers orginal notion quickly lost their practicality as political parties evolved and (b)the example he uses to make his point is bizarre -- Jimmy Carter. According to Will (citing the author on whose work he bases his argument) "the candidate whose path to the presidency most resembled Obama’s was Jimmy Carter. He, too, used an intensely personal and inspirational appeal to compensate for a thin résumé." A better example would have been Reagan, who was a far better "communicator" than Carter and had an similarly thin resume (Carter served two terms in the State Senate and one term as Governor and had a military career and successful business career; Reagan served two terms as governor and was an actor). Of course, Will can't use Reagan as an example because Reagan is his hero.

The problem with Will's column isn't that it suggests that Obama's election (or Carter's or anyone else's) is legally "unconstitutional" -- its that it is mistaken in its premise that the approach envisioned by the framers invariably produces better presidents than the current approach. That's a historically unsustainable view. We have had a series of elections in recent years in which neither candidate could be reasonably considered to command "intensely personal and inspirational appeal": Ford/Carter; Bush/Gore; Bush/Kerry; Bush/Dukakis; and even Clinton/Dole and Clinton/Bush. During my lifetime, the candidates that have met that description are Kennedy, Reagan, and now Obama. Earlier in this century, FDR met that standard. And while I disagree with the policies of Reagan, he, like FDR (and, I believe, like Kennedy had he not been killed), was a "successful" leader.

THere is every reason to believe that Obama can be the next in that line of successful leaders.

That's why I put it in quotes. I'm not saying what he said is incorrect, I'm saying what he said will be interpreted as another way of attacking Obama unfairly by freeper idiots. they already believe that it is unconstitutional for a Muslim to be president, after all. I agree with your analysis of the article, but the slackwits won't be able to see enough in depth to understand it. How we respond to the coming "George Will says Obama was elected illegally!" diatribes is really what matters, though.

Which may be true.

Will gets a little arcane at times.

I've wondered if audiences go to sleep when he starts on baseball??

and the distance between here and back there is what scares him.

Will's general position has always been against populism.

George Will's only claim to fame is that he's a conservative who can use big words without tripping over his tongue. Otherwise, he's a fucking idiot.

IOW, Will is bemoaning the fact that 300 M Americans chose who would be President rather than 538 electors, which I believe WAS the method of choice of the founding fathers. The populist primaries as we know them didn't come into existence until after 1968, after the Chicago riots.

I can't help but wonder if Will was similarly conflicted with the rise of Reagan or W to the presidency -- both men who appealed because of their image rather than because of their qualifications.

His handwringing over whether or not Obama would be as ineffective as Carter was actually one of my concerns back in December, when I worried about Obama's lack of experience. I always felt Carter was a very good man who got chewed up by the machinations in D.C. After watching Obama's practically flawless display of political savvy thruout the campaign and his appointment of ruthless people like Rahm, I think Obama will be more apt to chew up the D.C. machine rather than be consumed himself. I am wildly optimistic about his presidency.

“were deeply fearful of leaders deploying popular oratory as the means of winning distinction” flies in the face of some of the most important Americanist scholarship from the last 10 years. The late Jay Fliegelman, for example, wrote "Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance," which examined American independence in the context of public speaking, self display, and the politics of persuasion. Similarly, Christopher Looby's Voicing America argues that the founding of the United States was frequently associated with "acts of voice," and that many Revolutionary writers felt that the nation had to be "spoken into existence."

This professor Will cites in his article, James Cesar, currently has a visiting appointment at the Hoover Institute, so I think we can guess his loyalties--less to nation than to ideology.

That's soooooo elitist! Aren't those...harummpph...university press books?

;-)

and we should cooperate with them?

The Founders never intended for a black man to become president. :eyes:

I fail to see what making such a point proves.

And we've since corrected their stupidity on that score.

Thanks, George Will! :hi:

We're a representative republic and always have been.

:shrug:

Underestimate your oppostion at your own peril.

*un*popular oratory", shit-talk & dirty tricks hence they've provided you your very own amendment with which to do so and you're doing a bang-up job :eyes:

to choose. I think we were meant to send our state's most trusted leaders to go and choose the President for us. But that was 1789. Now we're not so trusting. And the system allows it to be the way it has become.

Will's intelligence is in the service of a political party currently circling the drain.

Will was very quick and eager to point out that the Democratic Party was on the rocks, weakened, limping along, gasping for breath, and that X number of the last X elections went Republican, with only more conservative Southern Dems electable, etc.

This past Tuesday it appears that Will misread the trend lines.

Leaving him pouting in the corner, increasingly alone.

I do not think that he is saying that the 2008, or any other recent election was unconstitutional. Rather, he is making the point that in the early years of our nation's history, the majority of the "Founding Fathers" had not intended for the US to be a democracy. This is detailed quite well in many sources, including Sean Wilentz's important 2005 book, "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln." (Norton)

The Founding Fathers generally intended our country to be a republic, which Wilentz notes translates to "res publica," or "public thing." It implies a government ruled by "the most worthy, enlightened men." A democracy is, he notes, "demos krateo," or "rule of the people."

It was in approximately 1800 when those who favored a democratic state were able to bring about that change, although obviously not fully. There was resistence then as now: "Democracy, the eminent Federalist political leader George Cabot wrote as late as 1804, was 'the government of the worst.'" (Wilentz; page xvii)

This view was expressed more recently bu US Supreme Court Injustice Antonin Scalia at the January 2002 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Scalia advocated a return to the pre-1800 interpretation of the US Constition, which he declared was "divinely inspired."

"That consensus has been upset by the emergency of democracy," His Dishonesty warned. "The reactions of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it but resolution to combat it as effectively as possible." (Kevin Phillips; American Dynasty; Viking; 2004; page 108)

When one considers how many republican appointees to the federal courts subscribe to this view, it's a good thing that Obama won this election.

I read a well thought out, interesting piece on the evolution of our presidential nomination process and how it has changed over the decades. True, there was a bit of the "beware the madness of crowds" subtext in there, but he's certainly not saying that Obama's election was unconstitutional.

Is CODE for "GET THE N*GGERS!!"..

Even for a vastly intelligent man like Vidal this is excruciatingly brilliant, and much of what we need to know, and once knowing it, it renders the Right all the more Irrelevant than ever before... :)

First of all, there is a difference between nominating candidates and then electing them to the office. Nominating those candidates is not covered in the Constitution except for qualifications such as age and citizenship.

I would like very much to see that non-partisan nominating method Will lists. I suggest 12 or 14 candidates in a national primary where the top four become the candidates in the general election run-off. Meanwhile........

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/debcont.asp

The above minutes of the Convention of 1787 are based on James Madison's notes of the convention. You don't have to be a constitutional scholar to read them and see what the "Founder's intent was regarding any topic.

I have been a constitutional hobbyist for some time and I don't recall much about the presidential candidates' selection. There may be something about factional politics. I'll be looking for whatever might support George Will's assertions or the claim to unconstitutionality of Barrack Obama's election.

He apparently hasn't done his homework on presidential campaigns. He also thinks that the empty platitudes of his boy Ronald Reagan are perfectly fine...

Look no further than the election year when Thomas Jefferson was accusing John Adams of being a madman, an egoist and a dangerous scourge... that certainly was "inflaming excitement through oratory"...

Where has he been the past 8 years?

I'm sick and tired of hearing about how brilliant the Founding Fathers were. It's as if their writings were a bible that we should worship and adhere to until the end of time. Seriously, if these guys were so prescient then how come they didn't anticipate the emergence of political parties?

The Constitution was definitely a work in progress, not a complete guide to running the country. They didn't clearly spell out the role of the US Supreme Court, or the relationship between the three branches of the federal government. They worded the Second Amendment in a confusing and ambiguous way that gives courts huge latitude to interpret it as they choose. In fact, the entire Bill of Rights is horribly unclear as to whether it restricts just the federal government or all state governments, which is why the Supreme Court has found it necessary to justify applying parts of it at the state level by using the 14th Amendment equal protection clause. Probably most catastrophically, the Constitution did not spell out whether or not individual states had the right to withdraw from the union, leaving us to fight our most destructive war to decide that question.

I have great respect for the work and writings of Jefferson, Hamilton and others, but their writings should serve as a philosophical reference point for us, not dogma. We should constantly re-examine their ideas and decide for ourselves where they were right and where they went wrong. We should examine our present-day institutions, measuring them against the right ideas of the founders, and try to make them better serve those principles. However, we should also recognize those parts of our institutions that are based on wrong ideas and correct them. Likewise, we should admit that some of our institutions were just poorly thought out and should be revised based on the experience we've had over time. Our attention to philosophical questions will help us remember that the right way is not always the convenient way.

Back in 1787 there was an excellent excuse for ratifying a half-baked blueprint for the republic, namely that there were few examples in history to compare to, and most of those examples were in far-gone times and very different societies. Now we have successful democracies all over the world to compare to, as well as a 200-plus-year track record ourselves.

In short, if we don't know more about how to run a working democratic republic now than the founders did 200 years ago, we must be pretty dumb. If we're really that useless, maybe we should consider getting a king to run the place for us.

whatsoever?
:crazy:

George, Will, bizarre.