It's not every day that you come across the name Samuel Tilden. Which made yesterday particularly unusual as I happened upon a reference to Mr. Tilden two times in a matter of a few hours. The first was a piece in the LA Times by Andrew Gumbel called Bare-knuckle politics:
It happened in 1824, when the House threw the race to John Quincy Adams even though Andrew Jackson won more votes and more electoral college delegates. It happened in 1876, when carpetbagger Republican administrations in Louisiana, Florida and South Carolina refused to recognize the victory of the Democrat Samuel Tilden and essentially threw the election to his Republican rival, Rutherford B. Hayes.
The second was in a post by our own Saint Paul on Jack Morris' ignorance of the Electoral College:
Taking the hatchet to this foundation of American democracy is typically the province of segments of the Left still seething over the electoral college loss of Al Gore to George W Bush in 2000. Until then, nobody much cared about the electoral college, let alone considered it "the most important thing they would change in the government," save for those few still holding a candle for Samuel Tilden.
Two mentions of Samuel Tilden in one day? Rather uncanny.
The two pieces also shared something else in common: a misunderstanding or ignorance of American democracy. Since Gumbel is the Los Angeles correspondent of the Independent of London and the author of "Steal This Vote: Dirty Elections and the Rotten History of Democracy in America," I assume that he understands the electoral college a little better than Jack Morris. But when Gumbel writes about democracy and this Democratic primary, he expresses a common misconception:
At any time other than in the midst of a heated electoral battle, it's hard to imagine that Nancy Pelosi would attract much controversy by opining that the Democratic Party's nominee for president should be the candidate who wins the most votes. The House speaker has done just that, last week drawing an angry backlash from wealthy supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Most Americans -- presumably including the 26 million who have participated with unprecedented enthusiasm in the Democratic primaries and caucuses -- still view this country as a representative democracy. Take a look at history, though, and the power of the popular vote in determining the next occupant of the White House starts to look a lot less absolute.
And:
It shouldn't be this way, of course. Democracy should be about the will of the people, pure and simple, as Pelosi has pointed out.
The problem with the views of Pelosi, Gumbel, and many others is that there is no requirement that the process that political parties use to pick their candidates be in any way democratic. If the big D Democrats decide to let a select group of bisexual, pro-abortion, pacifistic, eco-conscious teachers commune together in a smoke, fragrance, and gun-free room and pick their party's next presidential candidate, it wouldn't mean the end of American democracy as we know it. The way that each political party chooses its candidates is up to that party to determine and the "will of the people" need not play any role in it at all.
By the way, further research on Samuel J. Tilden reveals that he might not feel all that comfortable in today's Democratic Party:
A political reformer, he was a Bourbon Democrat who worked closely with the New York City business community, led the fight against the corruption of Tammany Hall, and fought to keep taxes low.
Mister, we could use a Dem like Samuel Tilden again.
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