The New "American Revolution," 2015/2016

By BATYA MEDAD
This was first posted on my personal blog, Shiloh Musings, as   The New "American Revolution," 2015/2016 http://shilohmusings.blogspot.co.il/2015/08/the-new-american-revolution-20152016.html
Two hundred and forty 240 years after that first American Revolution, which carved out a new country populated mostly by a motley group of transplanted Europeans in an enormous continent far west of England and Europe, there's a new revolution taking place. The electoral system developed by those first revolutionaries in the 18th century didn't give too much power to ordinary citizens. Democracy as we know it did not exist then.
First of all, only men could vote. And there wasn't a direct vote for the President/Vice President ticket. And there certainly weren't primaries. Today in the United States, the new president is inaugurated late in January, even though elections are held early November. Actually, the inauguration used to be in March. That's because each state had to vote first and then instruct its representative whom to vote for in the Electoral College. Only after the that stage was there an elected president.

The Electoral College is a process, not a place. The founding fathers established it in the Constitution as a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.The Electoral College process consists of the selection of the electors, the meeting of the electors where they vote for President and Vice President, and the counting of the electoral votes by Congress.The Electoral College consists of 538 electors. A majority of 270 electoral votes is required to elect the President. Your state’s entitled allotment of electors equals the number of members in its Congressional delegation: one for each member in the House of Representatives plus two for your Senators. (NARA)
Nowadays, the process remains, even though it's easy to count the popular vote within hours of closing the polling stations all over the country. In theory there can be a President who received fewer votes than the other candidate, because the Electoral College system awards only full amounts per state. To me this system is unwieldy and undemocratic. I don't understand why it still exists. But a change in the electoral system isn't the true aim of this post. 

I see this upcoming Presidential Election as a People's Revolution in the USA. The public is showing a strong disregard for mainstream, conventional politicians. A year ago, or even six months ago, all the pundits took for granted that the candidates/nominees would be Democrat Clinton II versus Republican Bush III. You can't get more conventional than those two. And even those Hillary Clinton is biologically female, from her ill-fitting pants suits to policy her sex is irrelevant. And I'm referring to Bush III as Bush III, because it's so clear that if he wasn't a Bush, he would never be considered "presidential material."
Granted there's still more than a year left before the 2016 elections, but I don't know if besides being the only two candidates surviving a plague that wipes out all of the others, there's a chance that Bush III aka Jeb and Hillary will develop enough popularity to win enough primaries to get nominated.
The conventional political pundits are still trying to predict the falls of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Trump is no stranger to headlines and controversy, the builder is not an expert in building political machines. Sanders, on the other hand, is used to being considered on the ideological fringe as a politician and wasn't known nationally until after his campaign began gathering momentum.

The primaries system has given the American voters, the ordinary citizens, a power they never had before. And now in 2015, we see that they have rejected the political machines in both major parties.  Eight years ago, the Kennedy women anointed Barack Hussein Obama as Democratic candidate and pulled the political rug from under Hillary. That was the tipping point for Obama's success.

This year, ordinary citizens from the  the Right and Left have chosen their favorites, neither of whom have strong backing within their respective parties. And, yes, I do consider this revolutionary, The New "American Revolution," 2015/2016.

The 2016 Presidential Elections are sure fun to blog about!