On the Democrat side, it mattered because it’s high time the voters saw how dodgy the Democrat “commitment” to “democracy” actually is.
High-minded appeals to transparency are the stuff of which Democrats are made. Barack Obama has called his scandal-plagued White House “the most transparent administration in history,” even as he resorts to circumventing the legislative process to enact policies he couldn’t get through Congress, thereby stripping voters of their ability to check the executive branch. Hillary Clinton says she has been “as transparent as possible” about her troublesome e-mail, ignoring the plain truth that she intentionally used a private e-mail account to circumvent public-disclosure laws, thereby keeping voters in the dark about her work as the nation’s chief diplomat.
Is power ultimately vested in “the people”? And do “the people” have a right to the capacity and knowledge to make use of that power? If so, then Democrats at the highest levels have sought to curtail their rights at every turn. And now it’s happened again, at the ballot box in Iowa, the state’s Democratic party and the apparent winner of the caucus having decided that transparency and accountability — “more democracy,” as it were — do not serve their purposes at this particular juncture.
America may have slid from “Democracy” (representative republic, of course) into “Authoritarian Bureaucracy” some time ago. But the Obama administration will be known as the time when the mask came off all the happy talk.