right? mcgovern had been nominated and everybody freaked out. so there was this wrenching back. the rules that get written to kind of guide them t nomination process end up being a way to essentially adjudicate this battle between the sort of party establishment and grass roots and we are seeing a kind of stalemate, i think, right now being drawn between those two forces. congressman cohen, you lived through 2008. right? i m here. you managed to survive. that must have been difficult because remember, we had the whole super delegate question. super delegates, you are a super delegate because you are a member of congress. super delegate. you left your cape in the greenroom. the idea was to create this sort of check. right? on the party s base. there would be these sort of people with knowledge of the political process of what you need to win. idea winning would be the ultimate goal. the activists are all concerned about issues which is important
elitist place that says the problem is the they are having too much effect on the political process and the party bosses aren t controlling things enough. that strikes me as the anti-democratic. i wouldn t say rabble. the more the extremists, and you can t we have to win and come to the center. president obama knows that. the republican party leaders know that. the activists don t. they are looking at the word more, not looking at the picture winning the white house. so what you could have in tamp is just a you know, bunch of folks walking off of a peer into the gu pier in new mexico. when i was a lad, i seem to remember in the 70s, 1975, people sitting around in leisure suits and people consider themselves goods liberals saying that there was a serious drift among the considerable segment of the democrats. too far to the left and there was a problem and that something needed to be done about these extremes taking over those democrats who weren t part of
also, achilles heel of john kerry was the quote, i voted for it before i voted against it. i am not even sure i m saying this now as analytical argument on the left. i m not sure the party establishment is not any more trustworthy. i think that the on to the mayflower. they have to shift because they were the crazies. because they wanted a voice in how they were going to be governed. what we are seeing now is that, you know, infused with technology, social network, twitter, youtube. any way that consumers are getting engaged and change this process. i think that is for the good. any time you have them in the back making the decision and coming out with a nominee, that s a really bad thing. they are no more thoughtful than the rest of us let s ask an actual gatekeeper. michael steele joins us from washington as chairman of the republican national committee, he oversaw the changes and the rules of this year s delegation. call me crazy. how are you doing?
the fact, very much like we saw in iowa, of with the delegates, that was a split decision. so that was a good example of romney winning the popular vote but the the delegates were awarded on a congressional district basis which meant that, you know, santorum won more congressional districts. the reality of it is that, you know, this process will lend itself to people sort of second-guessing it and looking at it but i think the congressman s point and point that was mr. weed s point when you get to the actual allegation of delegates which won t happen until you get to the convention you will get a better sense of where they are. you have caucuses that will be running and not have primaries until late spring, early summer. so this notion of who has the number, unless you have a runaway train in terms of someone taking all the numbers, this is going to stay close for quite some time. chairman steele, the question that we talked about getting other voices out there, one of those
bill was always bipartisan. this year extremely partisan. no democrat in the house voted for the transportation bill and but dead on arrival and will go with the senate bill. house bill was too far out. you had the tea party people that spent too much money and the some of them were against the bill when it came out. they wouldn t accept any democratic alternatives and mass transit and it was an ideolog fight. you see that in the committees all the time. a committee process in which there was a bipartisanship that wasn t the kind of bipartisanship i m talking about. day-to-day of working together relationship. ranking member and the chairman would work together to bring about a bill and each member would work through the ranking member or through their chairman to get their legislation into it and you get a bill that everybody that supports particularly in transportation that happen didn t happen, didn t happen here. you are blaming the democrats with the dixiekrcrats.