BLUMENTHAL: "Isn’t this a democracy?"

[nostamj]

<snip>

Since the birth of the American party system, presidential candidates have always gone directly to the sovereign people, who are the only source of legitimacy and power, to make their case. After the Democratic Convention, Kerry traveled from New England to the Pacific Northwest doing just that. Not one of the hundreds of thousands who attended his open-air rallies had to pledge allegiance to him, and he encountered organized Bush hecklers as part of the price. At Bush's rallies he is the packaged president as pseudo-populist. But these controlled environments reflect his deeper view of the presidency as sovereign, preempting democracy.

Floundering in the polls, without a strategy for Iraq, unwilling to say the name of bin Laden, he is always secure in the knowledge that the cheering multitudes before him have been carefully selected. Strutting and swaggering on the stage as though he has conquered the crowd, he plays to true believers. But a 55-year-old social studies teacher from small-town Michigan who would not bend her knee had her ticket to see her president ripped up. "Ask President Bush" has crystallized the essential underlying question, framed succinctly by the greatest American poet of democracy, Walt Whitman, who wrote, "The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2004/08/19/ask_bush/index.html