Yes We Can! Long Island 2012His name will not appear on the ballot. But that does not mean he won’t be elected president. What it means is that he has found his perfect front man working–Mitt Romney. It becomes more apparent each time Romney expresses a thought that it is not his own. Actually the ideas he has had, like health care reform, are the ones he denies. 
Returning to the main idea, a most prominent member of the uber-wealthy class and the gambling casino set, Sheldon Adelson’s name was previously heard when Israel was a focus. Americans heard his name frequently when he was the money guy behind Newt Gingrich’s awful attempt to win the nomination. Adelson’s greater mission is to defeat President Obama in November and he will support whoever the opponent might be. Add him to the Koch Brothers and the shekels add up in a hurry in a big way.
Adelson’s wealth virtually kept the Republican primaries in the media by pumping twenty-five million bucks into the Gingrich campaign. That amounts to chump change for a casino owner whose fortune surpasses twenty-five billion–with a b– dollars. With Newt no longer a candidate, Adelson has donated ten million dollars to Restore our Future, a Mitt Romney Super PAC. There is talk that he will have contributed more than $100 million before the campaign has concluded, with lots of it coming in the final days before the election.
So much for ‘one person-one vote’. That standard is in total jeopardy given the Supreme Court’s Citizens United/FEC ruling. Recall that in 1964, a landmark Court decision held that districts of unequal size result in under-representation of some citizens’ interests and over-representation of others’. The phrase associated with that reality was that such a standard was un-republican (lower case r), but is very troublesome given the current status of American national politics. Deemed unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment Protection clause, the remedy was reapportionment of districts.
The plaintiff was Charles Baker, a Republican, from the Memphis. The Court formulated the “one person, one vote” standard for voting in America, holding that each individual must be weighted equally in legislative apportionment. This principle was formally enunciated in the 1964 case Reynolds v. Sims–”one person, one vote” was applied as a standard for Congressional districts.
How can there be one person-one vote when clearly a very small number of people can throw countless dollars into an election campaign? What are the justices thinking? They have managed to turn elections into betting parlors, right up Adelson’s alley. Step right up. Put your money down. Buy an election.
Maybe the Supreme Court justices misread the Reynolds v. Sims decision. Might they be thinking it equated dollars and votes rather than people and votes?
Add voter suppression, voter apathy, a lack of Romney clarity (talks a lot, says very little that’s meaningful or honest) to the Adelson/Koch frighties bloc–and the possibility of an Adelson presidency takes on a real sense of possibility. Not that he would occupy the White House. No, he’d just be a guest at the inn, spending just enough time to place his bets.
If this does not motivate us to get off our collective, complacent behinds, I don’t know what possibly could.
Perhaps Adelson will take a serious look at Barack Obama’s commitment to Israel. Read Rahm Emanuel’s opinion piece in the Washington Post:
Days into my tenure as mayor of Chicago, with my focus on keeping our city’s streets safe, our schools strong and our finances stabilized, I expected my attention to be in the Midwest, not in the Middle East. But as an American and the son of an Israeli immigrant, I have a deep, abiding commitment to the survival, security and success of the state of Israel.
I am among the many who know that the Israeli people yearn for peace. They have taken risks for peace in spite of dangers. They will again, when they have a viable partner in the process and a region that recognizes a Jewish state of Israel with secure and defensible borders.
President Obama, like every student of the Middle East, understands that the shifting sands of demography in that volatile region are working against the two-state solution needed to end generations of bloodshed. The fragile stasis that exists today cannot hold.
Israel’s survival as a Jewish, democratic state is at stake because of many factors, including uncertainty brought by the Arab Spring, growth in the Palestinian population, unilateral efforts to create a recognized state of Palestine and technological advances in weaponry.
That is why, from his first days in office, the president has invested so much in encouraging meaningful negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. His goal has been one shared by a succession of Israeli and American leaders: two nations, the Jewish state of Israel and Palestine for the Palestinian people, living side by side, in peace and security.
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