Wednesday: Obama’s loss is a matter of trust

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.