There is a post on alegre’s corner that every Democrat should read. It’s written by Pacific John who, along with Michelle Thomas and John West, was one of the forces behind the 300 Delegates petition to get Hillary’s name in nomination at the convention.
I believe that if more Democrats knew what went on with the delegate count manipulation and intimidation of those delegates at the convention, there would be more PUMAs. Those of us who were in Denver know that delegates were contacting us around the clock, frantic and worried about the tactics the DNC was using to get them to switch their votes. The media was swarming the PUMAs but every time we brought up the pressure the delegates were under, they stuck a mike in our faces and asked if Hillary was out to ruin Obama’s convention.
Well, it wasn’t Obama’s convention. It was *ours*, the Democratic voters convention. And when all of the committees had finished their business credentialling and ruling, the number of delegates separating Obama from Clinton was 17. As Pacific John points out, it was actually less than that because the Credentials committee upheld the ruling giving Obama 4 of Hillary’s Michigan delegates. And all that sturm and drang about “The ROOLZ” that took away half of FL and MI delegates? Tossed out the window at the convention. Those two states were seated with full voting powers- after their ability to determine the nominee was nullified at the RBC hearing in May.
It was all a big game of chess. A coup engineered by the DNC to deprive Clinton of the nomination and to install Obama. And if any Democrat out there is still voting for him because they think Obama is a Change! agent, they ought to think over whether overturning the will of the electorate is the Change! we need. If he runs his campaign like Genghis Khan, it’s unlikely that he will govern like the Dalai Lama.
Heidi Li Feldman has an excellent series of articles about progressive populism and the direction of the Democratic party after the election. But we also need to do a retrospective analysis of what went wrong with the this incarnation of the Democratic party. In Surely the DNCC Jests, Heidi shows how the roll call vote was subverted to award rather than elect Barack Obama. Six state were crucial to securing his win: NY, NJ, MI, OH, FL and PA. The final count can be found at the DNCC page.
If you are a regular Joe Bagodonuts and you are only following the nightly news, you might look at these numbers and think Clinton lost fair and square. Obama’s delegate count puts him ahead by 3:1. What the DNCC won’t tell you is that the pledged delegate count prior to the roll call vote put her well within striking distance of winning the election. So, why didn’t she win it, given that she was the most electable candidate?
The answer lies in the Superdelegates. It was the superdelegates that decided this election. The pledged delegate count seems almost engineered to cover up for this fact. Of course, it took a lot of arm twisting and threats to make sure the pledged delegates caved. Ricki Lieberman sent another compilation of first hand delegate accounts describing how the delegates were hounded. Here are a couple that give us some insight as to how the process was highjacked:
CONNECTICUT: “For 17-18 months I have been working on and for HRC I could not figure out what was wrong with the politicians in Ct something was wrong I just couldn’t put my finger on it. Then many months ago I revc’d a call from a women who is very active in the Dem party in Ct. She had told me at that time that the politicians in Ct were getting threatened by Dodd with their political careers if they did not support/vote for BO. Of course I tried to verify this info but could not, though people did admit to hearing that. Then at a fundraiser I held in Ct for HRC I was told this again to my face by an elected Dem town chair person and elected HRC delegate. Prior to the convention two elected HRC delegates switched and announced their support and vote for BO, one a mayor the other state representative.”
KENTUCKY:A campaign volunteer: “I was there in Denver and witnessed Ky delegates being berated and strong armed. Lots of people in the Kentucky delegation witnessed an Obama delegate screaming at a Clinton delegate and saying she was a racist because she wouldn’t change her vote. For the first time in my adult life, I am ashamed of being a Democrat.”
MAINE: “I was approached by a member of the Maine delegates on Tuesday night and was told that if I didn’t vote for BO I would regret it. I then said to them that I came here representing a lot of Hillary supporters and would vote for her every time I could. I then said I have nothing else to talk to you about so please leave me alone.”
For the roll call “We where sitting right behind ARKANSAS. When it was their turn for the roll call the women that was talking was the widow of the head of the democratic party talking. She was reading what was written to be said. She stopped because she couldn’t believe what the note said. A man stepped in and said the Arkansas votes where all for BO. Cell phones started to ring in front of me.
There is a cause and effect relationship for what happened during the primary season and the disaster that the Democrats find themselves in now. We can see how the primary season was corrupted in the Democratic Convention, which in a way is just a giant caucus. Two forces seem to have been at the heart of what went terribly wrong. The first is the superdelegate system itself. I think it is too facile to say that their flipping has everything to do with money. The total amount of money given to these superdelegates was substantial but on an individual basis, it’s hard to see how Frank Lautenberg benefits from the $10,000 dollars or so that he got from Obama. It takes millions of dollars to run a senate campaign in NJ and Frank is pretty old. Who knows if he’ll even run another term? What is even less plausible is the rational for voting for Obama based on the fact that the DNC was going to withhold funds to downticket Dems in certain states, like NJ, CT and NH. I’m not denying that they threat wasn’t made. I am questioning the logic. How would an Obama presidency get anything done if it had lost Congress due to some pre-election pique? Or was the Obama campaign saying that it would have let Congressional candidates lose if Clinton had been the nominee?
No, the problem with the superdelegates is that a vast majority are middle aged white guys who have no experience with the rank and file not falling in line. We all got behind Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. They weren’t particularly exciting candidates but they were ours so we sucked it up and voted for them. Middle aged white guys don’t have the experience of having women directing things. Their life experience is one of women in subordinate positions. Women in power are few and far between. Mostly, we submit.
Then there are the zealous Obama supporters who were born or raised during the Reagan era. Their parents were Baby Boomers. These children are suffering from Affluenza. They’ve been given everything. Oh, sure, student loans are expensive but for the most part, boomer parents had the money and means to raise their children without want. They sacrificed a lot for their kids and so it should come as no surprise that the kids still expect sacrifice. These golden children think rather highly of themselves. It never crosses their minds that we will not instantly comply with their demands. So, they got a little red in the face when they demanded that delegates switched. So what?
Obama took full advantage of this. He could have let the roll call proceed and honored both Clinton and her voters. In fact, given the closeness of the delegate count, his pretension of being the presumptive nominee is one for the history books. With Florida and Michigan restored to full votes, he was not entitled to call himself presumptive nominee. But that didn’t stop him and his crew from strong arming and scripting the convention down to the last detail. It didn’t stop him from engineering a humiliating loss for her on the convention floor as her delegates were flipped and Nancy Pelosi rammed the whole procedure through.
And now, the DNC and the Obama campaign are surprised that women are abandoning them and that Obama can’t raise enough money for the general. I’m surprised that they are surprised. What we have witnessed is an abuse of our caucus system, fradulent primaries and superdelegates substituting their will for the will of the voters. And all of this was done with Obama’s approval because it was more important that he win than whether the party survived his candidacy. He was even willing to let Congressional candidates lose if he couldn’t be at the top of the ticket.
Those of us who are holding out aren’t doing it because we’re racists. It’s not because we are wedded to Hillary. She’s right about never looking back to what might have been. We have to move forward. But we will never support a man who has so utterly destroyed our trust in him and the party apparatus that put him in power. Not only have they failed to exercise leadership and control but they have put victories for downticket Democrats in question as well. They have subverted the process to the point that we may lose the slim margins we hold in Congress while we end up with a Republican running the White House.
How can we EVER trust Barack Obama for this catastrophe? There is no way at this point in time for him to earn that trust back. Nothing but emergency measures with major corrections will fix this election cycle. And such measures will only underscore the precarious position the Democrats have put themselves into.
When trust is gone, it takes a long time to get it back and it isn’t going to happen before November.
Last Wednesday morning, a vote was held in Denver in the hotels of the state delegations. Later that afternoon, a “roll call” was held in the convention center and Barack Obama was hailed as our new nominee. The funny thing is, those of us who remember what the primary results were in some of our states could not reconcile our memories with the way our delegations actually voted. If you lived in AR or NJ, your vote was reallocated to Obama even though your state delegation should have gone overwhelmingly for Clinton. On what basis did the state chairs make the decision to reallocate the vote? Presumably, the vote earlier in the morning allowed this to happen and it should be a relatively easy thing to look at those ballots and say, “Ahhh, here’s the problem. Hillary just didn’t get the votes she needed.”
Except, no one has been able to see those ballots.
Heidi Li, Murphy and our own LadyBoomerNYC have been posting about this in the last day but what is really infuriating is that those of us who were in Denver at the time tried to tell the media what was going on and there was barely a yawn from them on the subject. It’s shameful to think there isn’t one media outlet looking into what happened last Wednesday (Late sighting! There is one. See the “more” note at the bottom of the page). After all, it was only our votes that we cast in good faith during the primaries.
The party will tell us that it is a private entity and it can make up and rescind its rules whenever it damn well pleases. But it’s a public scandal when state legislatures debate and vote on the timing of the primary and state treasuries allocate funds for the primary and poll workers are trained for the primary and voters take time off from work for the primary and little old ladies get jostled in caucuses because they mistakenly believe that it is their civic duty to turn out for the vote for a private party that is under no obligation to follow its own processes. It is a public scandal when millions and millions of dollars are solicited from individuals to fund a campaign and pay for advertising, buttons, stickers, lawn signs, campaign staff, goldfish snack crackers for volunteers, canvassing materials, phone time and rallies when the result of all that effort and money is that delegate ballots get filed in the trashcan at a private party’s convention. It is a public scandal when the will and intention of the voters is shoved aside by Nancy Pelosi who substituted her judgment for the voters, for deciding that she knows what’s best for you, and that is Barack Obama, whether you like him or not.
Who is this person we “selected” at the convention? What kind of man would allow, endorse, encourage this type of behavior on his behalf? What kind of character does he have when he accepts the nomination that resulted from crushing the will of so many voters? What kind of president will he be if he doesn’t honor the intentions of the voters in the beginning? And what were Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, Jon Corzine and others thinking when they endorsed him?
What we know of the vote last Wednesday is that Hillary actually received more than 1900 delegates before the counting was stopped. We have been told that the delegate count was getting too close for Pelosi et al to explain away. We also know that some Edwards’ delegates wanted to switch their votes to Hillary but were told they were not allowed. We know that delegates, who represent you and me and their states, were threatened and intimidated to vote for Obama. What we don’t know is how close the vote actually was. We may never know because once a result is read out, and there is no protest, no media attention, the deal is done. But no one who witnessed this should feel any less outraged and those who participated in the fraud should never expect unity.
There will never be any resolution to this primary season. Barack Obama deserves to lose. Save your breath, Obamaphiles. You are not supporting a great man. There is nothing admirable about a man who accepts fraudulent vote counts on his behalf. Everything that comes afterwards is tainted. And as for the media who hyped this man to astronomical heights, don’t expect us to ever trust anything you say until you report the truth of what happened last Wednesday. We’ve never understood your hatred of Hillary Clinton. It borders on the pathological. Now, you are as responsible as the DNC and Obama himself for what happens from here. You are responsible for whatever bad thing comes of this election because the will of the voters was not honored.
There isn’t enough scorn in the world to heap upon those who are responsible for this scandal that has turned our precious country’s reputation for fair elections into that of just another banana republic. No man is worth squandering our legacy like this. Especially *this* man.
More:Heidi Li has a follow-up on the absurd story that the California delegation has been tryint to foist on an unknowing public. It looks like the LATimes is tepidly following up on the issue. Also, see this page from TheGreenPapers for the startling results of the floor vote. What was done to Hillary’s voters is disgraceful.
Rumors are swirling fast and furiously around here. I am trying to confirm the following:
The delegates voted this morning from their hotel rooms and the vote was so close that Pelosi is trying to do damage control. We don’t know what the status of the roll call is at this time or whether there will be one.
Bill Clinton refuses to stick to the script that was written for him and may not be speaking tonight.
I am trying to confirm these rumors with someone working on the delegate petitions. But I just called him a second ago and he sounds really, REALLY busy and overwhelmed. I hope he’ll call me back in a bit.
Hillary gained back 10 delegates! Terry McAuliffe is telling the delegates that they are to keep fighting.
Superdelegates: We all want to have a Democrat in the White House next year. There is only one winning Democratic ticket. That is Hillary on top and Obama as VP. I don’t know whose arm you have to twist but do whatever you have to do to make it happen.
Update2: Hillary formally released her delegates but told them to vote their consciences for the person who they felt would be the most electable and ready.
Update3: Fox News is confirming that Bill Clinton will NOT be attending Obama’s acceptance speech.
The Confluence 