RatcliffeBlog - Mitch Thinking Out Loud

Richard Bennett and I agree, a little tiny bit, for once

Following on his original "Emergent Hypocrisy" posting, Richard Bennett responds to me:

UPDATE: Ratcliffe says I've got him all wrong . What he really wants is:

...citizens should be able to organize to address specific issues without having to embrace the top-down plans of government. That means organizing to have their own representatives on specific issues, figuring out ways to pay them (enough money flows in politics--it's an industry) to hive off some portion of a living from being involved in one's community.

It appears to me he's just described the Recall. Citizens organized to address the problem of Gray Davis' lack of honesty and leadership, and rather than relying on his top-down leadership style ("the legislature is here to implement my vision") they replaced him with a man who represented their values. They figured out how to pay for the recall by putting their own money up, and they hired campaign consultants and attorneys to remove the barriers erected by the ACLU, the Casinos, the labor unions, and the other anti-democratic forces in California.

If you like democracy, of any kind, you have to love the recall.

Finally, one shred of agreement. Huzzah, Richard, you see past the ideology to the process, though you go right back to the nonsense that was spouted by the Issa camp to justify the recall. There's nothing wrong with recalls or the initiative process in a widely informed society. When there are very few sources of news and they militate with political groups to elect someone who reads scripts but doesn't speak extemporaneously, they leave something to be desired. The recall was great -- I'd have liked to have seen it go the other way (which I am sure Bennett would declare a perversion of justice, even though it was democratically decided), since the budget crisis is the result of Pete Wilson's misguided energy deregulation policies and collusion by the Bush Administration with the energy industy, not to mention the Bush Administration's general failure in domestic policy leading to the bankrupting of the states -- but I don't contest the right of citizens to organize to get a recall on the ballot.