Election Confusion

Is it me, or are elections getting more confusing lately? I should have paid more attention in high school when they taught us the difference between a caucus and a primary, but unfortunately by the time I graduated, the only thing I remembered from Social Studies was the pledge of allegiance, and how to make a bong from a roll of toilet paper. So I'm reading my BIF's (best internet friend Marigolds) posts from the last couple of days, and I'm racking the recesses of my mind, trying to remember the difference between a caucus and a primary, and the only thing I can come up with is, in Iowa, there is a caucus, and people gather in rooms where elderly ladies bring homemade cake, and candidates are selected in a very civilized manner. A primary is where you stand outside at your local school or church, in the snow, waiting for ballots, and you don't get to have cake. To me, the cake sounds pretty good, especially if it is made from scratch by old ladies, and if you think the candidates are saying pretty much the same thing, why not just vote for the best cake?

And for some reason, this year, much is being made of Super Delegates. I don't remember anything from high school about Super Delegates, and so I am left to imagine men who look like accountants, with round glasses and little hand-held calculators, dressed like Spiderman, who will swoop down on an undecided population, and make up our minds for us. There is the electoral collage, which is a group of people dressed in cap and gowns, who make sure that the state of say... Texas, doesn't decide who gets to be president, just because a lot of people have the misfortune to be residents. Come to think of it, maybe all of those folks in caps and gowns are not doing a very good job, because Texas seems to have produced a couple of Presidents who have not been kind to the rest of the nation.

It seems like a strange way to run a Democracy.

I called my mother tonight. There has been a serious amount of snow dropped on my hometown of Chicago these last few days, and I wanted to make sure she had food in the fridge, and a large bag of M&M's (she prefers Peanut), in case the snow lasted a few days. Her biggest complaint about the weather, was being unable to get to church for Ash Wednesday. I assured her that all of those masses on holy days that she insisted we attend when we were younger, were like extra credit, and that in the Book of Spiritual Things, she was way ahead of the rest of the class. We began to talk about politics, she was troubled that Mitt Romney had dropped out of the race. Her take on his failure to secure the nomination was that he was too perfect. He was rich, he had a good family, he was way too good looking for anyone take him seriously as a candidate. She, like her liberal-doomed to-hell- lesbian daughter, was seriously excited about the way the primaries were shaping up, and I almost had her convinced to vote for a Democrat in November, just to take part in history, to actually elect someone other than the standard flavor of white guys that we have had to choose from in the past. She almost bought it, when I lied and told her that Barak Obama might be a secret Catholic, and had been an altar boy in his youth.

Maybe everyone, old and young, Democrat and Republican, is excited about the prospect of having an election that is closely contested, and may actually reflect the will of the people. I hope it doesn't come down to the guys in Super Hero costumes, or a bunch of Supreme Court Judges deciding something as important as our future. Because as messy as democracy is, it is preferable to a dictatorship. As poor as our decisions have been in the past, we have survived our own bad judgment, and maybe we need this chance to get it right.

Let Americans decide how to clean up this mess we have created out of our own free will.

Let Freedom Ring.

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