We all remember Gov. Bev Perdue’s comment that maybe we should forgo elections next year so Congress can really get some work done for the country.
Perdue and her flacks insisted it was a joke, or a sarcastic remark, but audio of the statement contains no hint of either. The best case scenario is she’s just no Johnny Carson. The worst case? To be pointed to as an example of the tendency of Democrats to badmouth democracy when things don’t go their way:
Liberalism has been schizophrenic about democracy for about a century, alternating between deploring anti-majoritarian features of our system such as the electoral college and the filibuster, or maligning populist democratic majoritarianism when it delivers uncongenial results, such as California’s Proposition 13 or last fall’s midterm election beat-down of the Democratic Party—an election that increasingly looks to be a harbinger of more wipeouts ahead at the hands of ingrate voters. So right now liberals are in one of their periodic anti-democratic moods, most remarkably expressed by North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue’s thought experiment last week about suspending congressional elections for two years so that Congress can “help this country recover.”
