Les,
That whole "didn't get a majority" b.s. is getting tiresome. Neither did Reagan in 1980. Run-off election? Please, Les. You know the constitution. I believe you are a very intelligent person, far too intelligent to parrot the Limbaughesque rhetoric of the right.
Clinton won fair and square under the rules of our winner-takes-all electoral college system. If you want to get really technical about it, why not count the eligible voters who chose not to vote in the election as well? And if you want a parliamentary style system, you'll have to change the constitution.
Isn't it ironic, that the same people who complain that Clinton didn't get a majority are the ones who justify Augusto Pinochet's coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende on the grounds that Allende didn't have a majority of the votes?
What you're perhaps inadvertently doing is injecting the same principles used by the U.S. foreign policy apparatus during the Cold War into the domestic political sphere. So here's how the new rules would work:
If our guy wins, then it's a democracy. If their guy wins, he didn't get a majority, he cheated, or he's morally unfit to be president, and does not have a mandate to rule. So we are justified in using any means necessary--whether bombing the capital, making a deal with the Ayatollahs in Iran to prevent release of hostages, or launching an investigation into the president's personal life--to get rid of him. |
