Leaving Nothing To Chance

The New York Times reported on November 22, 2007 of the curious case of Paul Singer, 55-year old founder of the hedge fund Elliott Associates, who was one of the earliest fund-raisers for Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani, and then a policy adviser to Rudolph. In 1996, according to The Times, "he paid $11.4 million for $20million worth of discounted, government-backed Peruvian bank debt" and, after court challenges, ended up with $58 million. Bono, the International Monetary Fund (which termed Elliott a "vulture company"), and others have criticized similar transactions for strong-arming debt-strapped nations to divert money from social and economic needs to repay investors. Not surprisingly, Elliott considers himself a conservative libertarian and has contributed to various conservative causes including the Club for Growth (which has attacked former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee for raising taxes, aiding education, and other acts considered obscene by the economic right).

And $175,000 to the corporation Take Initiative America- California, which in turn donated the money to Californians for Equal Representation.

"Californians for Equal Representation"- sounds so benign. In fact, it is the group bankrolling the Repub initiative to place on the California ballot a referendum changing the apportionment of that state's 55 electoral votes from winner-take-all to the winner of the vote in the particular congressional district. In any Presidential election not a GOP landslide (in which case the issue is moot), California would go Democratic, but the Times estimates that a revised system could bring the Repub nominee as many as 20 electoral votes. (I have no idea what methodology the paper used; I suspect significantly more could be won by the GOP while losing the overall state vote.)

And the effort appears rather transparent when, as TalkingPointsMemo indicates, four other individuals (Anne Dunsmorth, Charles "Chep" Hurth III, Jonathan Wilcox, James Lacy) currently or formerly, directly or indirectly, involved with the Rudolph campaign are enmeshed in this Repub-led effort to steal the 2008 election.

Does this sound vaguely familiar? No doubt more Californians in November, 2004 went to the polls intending to vote for Gore-Lieberman than for Bush-Cheney. And it's likely that George W. Bush, who lost the popular vote nationwide to Al Gore, actually received fewer votes in Floria than the Vice-President. Consortiumnews.com quotes The Washington Post as commenting Gore "'did at one point call on Bush to join him in asking for a statewide recount' and accepting the results without further legal challenge, but that Bush rejected the proposal as 'a public relations gesture.'" Most likely, if, as the Gore campaign advocated, there had been a recount in the four contested counties, Bush would have won; a recount of only the "undervotes", Bush would have won; a recount of the entire state, Gore would have won.

In 2004, as Robert Kennedy Jr. noted in rollingstone.com here, a fair election in Ohio would have awarded that state's electoral votes, and hence the election, to Senator John Kerry.

So what should a host of the next Democratic debate, eager to ask a question which would yield revealing and significant answers (and yet as usual, leaning over backwards so as not to seem in any way, to any degree, pro-Democratic) ask the candidates? How about: Many Democrats believe that the Presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 were stolen, respectively, in Florida and Ohio. Now there is a campaign to change the law in California, a Democratic state, to award its presidential electors on a proportional basis, which could deal a death blow to the Democratic nominee. What steps would you take on election day to ensure an election whose outcome no Democrat would fail to recognize as legitimate?