Quote of the Week...from Tom Daschle

Bipartisanship isn't an option anymore; it is a requirement. The American people have divided responsibility for leadership right down the middle.                       ---Tom Daschle

Tom Daschle, from South Dakota, was a Democratic senator representing his state and serving as both Senate Majority and Minority Leader during the early part of this century.  He hasn't always lived up to his above quote urging for bipartisanship, but his leadership in that regard easily surpassed what we've been witnessing on Capitol Hill for the past few years.  He is an example of a Democrat elected for office statewide in what are now solidly red, Republican states...and he's not the only one...

If you look at the electoral map nowadays its easy to see North and South Dakota, Arkansas, and West Virginia as solidly red...they all went overwhelmingly for Trump in the last election and only West Virginia...with John Manchin voting with the Republicans much of the time...has a sitting senator in the Democratic caucus.  Yet just a few years ago all of these states each had two Democratic senators...what happened?  There are two basic reasons as I see it...

One clear reason, as evidenced in North Dakota with past established Democratic senators Kent Conrad and Bryan Dorgan, in West Virginia with Jay Rockefeller, and in South Dakota with Tim Johnson, is that the sitting senators chose to retire and were replaced with Republicans.  But elsewhere another process was afoot: voters in these states, seeing how extremely partisanly-divided the politics had become in Washington, chose party over individual...and those individual Democrats like Blanche Lincoln and Mark Pryor in Arkansas and Daschle himself in South Dakota supported Senate control by a party that many of them opposed and were defeated for reelection by Republican candidates.  The fact that the party primary process favors more politically-extreme candidates for either party has scared incumbents from engaging in bipartisan engagement with the other side on their legislation and has resulted in a polarized Senate where more Democrats in more conservative states are marginalized when they try to tend to their constituents' interests there.  Yet most of the American people are centrist...not far right or far left...in their political orientation and feel disenfranchised by this deteriorating political trend.  If the Democrats want to regain red states they lost, their candidates and sitting politicians need to show that they are interested in the people living there and what their special concerns and priorities are...but that would necessitate making their tent a little bigger and more centrist, something that the left will not tolerate.  Democratic presidential candidates are in the same bind: in this stupidly-protracted primary season they have to show their leftist credentials time and time again to garner the nomination...and then go around during the general election talking differently...but it won't wash in Wabash...

And eliminating the electoral college won't wash either, since it would require changing the U.S. Constitution which would then require the approval of most of those small rural red states to greatly diminish their own electoral power...never will happen.  So instead of complaining about the electoral college why won't the Democrats just roll up their sleeves and get to work on the ground to win back their lost states in the time-honored American tradition? Now I was researching and discovered that twenty blue states have changed their laws to award their allotment of electoral votes to the presidential candidate winning the nationwide popular vote...originally I thought that this would put Democratic candidates at a decided disadvantage since none of the Republican-controlled red states are passing such laws.  But after initially railing against that action here (and having to revise this article), I discovered that the laws wouldn't take effect until the red states sign on as well and close that loophole...and here we have the same problem I mentioned before about the smaller states not being likely to voluntarily diminish their own national political power.  Maybe at some time a generation or two from now we'll get a consensus on this issue but until then the electoral college, voted on state-by-state, is going to be the way we elect presidents, like it or not...