Kirjahaku

The Twenty-First Ballot was first published in 1969. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This account of a bitter struggle with in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) party in Minnesota is an interesting story in its own right, and, viewed from a wider perspective, is a valuable documentary on the American political process. The author recounts the events leading up to and climaxing in the party's deep split over the nomination of a candidate for the 1966 gubernatorial election. The nomination was accomplished only after twenty ballots were taken at the party's convention. The twenty first ballot of the book's title derives from a campaign slogan which urged that the voters, not the party, would make the final decision. The intraparty battle was waged between a faction which backed the nomination of the incumbent governor, Karl F. Rolvaag, for a second term and a group favoring the nomination of the incumbent lieutenant governor, A. M. "Sandy" Keith, as the gubernatorial candidate. Basic to the struggle was the conviction among supporters of Mr. Keith that a new "image' was needed to win the election of a party's obligation to an incumbent. Mr. Keith was nominated. However, Mr. Rolvaag challenged the nomination by entering the primary election. He defeated the party nominee and won a place on the general election ballot, only to be defeated, in the end, by his Republican opponent.The book is illustrated with eight pages of news photographs of the principals and events of the story.The details of this unusual sequence of events reveal much about the workings of party politics at the important state level. The book will, therefore, be of interest not only to the general readers but to students and teachers in political science courses.

This controversial book describes how the New Elite-a self-selected class whose members believe they know what's good for the rest of us-has been systematically attacking our tradition of majority rule. The capture of our political parties by extremists, campaigns based on anger rather than issues, laws created by unelected judges, congressmen immune from defeat, and an alienated and ignored electorate-all these represent a calculated effort of a new class to replace the public will with its own. Who are the New Elite? They are, Lebedoff asserts, the self-proclaimed "smartest people in the land," a test-score "meritocracy" that believes that the consent of the governed has been made obsolete by the SAT. If presidential hopefuls such as Howard Dean appear to represent this new class, or to disdain traditional values, he will be rejected by a public less fearful of Bush's ties to the elite of wealth than by dominance of the anti-democratic new elite. The New Elite is as much about perception as substance, Lebedoff further claims, citing Al Gore's defeat to George Bush as representative of the rejection of someone who sounded like a member of the new class. Dean faces the same problem-maybe more so, because the real fight is not between liberals and conservatives but between those who believe in majority rule and those who believe in rule by experts. By revealing the causes of our retreat from democracy, The Uncivil War helps us learn how to regain the right to govern ourselves.