To all who still hold out "hope" for Hillary Clinton to be nominated as Prez or VP or are just so pissed off that you will do anything to harm Barack Obama and Joe Biden and in doing so, also hurt this country.... PLEASE stop!
Hillary Clinton wants all of us to back Barack Obama and Joe Biden. The longer this puma nonsense goes on, the more it will damage Hillary Clinton personally, politically and professionally.
WASHINGTON - Hillary Clinton is expected to release her delegates and urge them to vote for Barack Obama...
...
"She is going to strongly encourage everyone to support Obama," said a party official made aware of Clinton's plans.
A while back I had made a big stink about the primaries dragging on, because of the damage being done to the Democratic Party by having two massive egos battling it out until August. But after doing some reading and looking at the last couple of big wins for Hillary Clinton, the latest apparently being in Kentucky, I've come to the conclusion that the former First Lady should stay in this race as long as she thinks she can get the nomination to run for president. A large part of this has to do with the corporate media having participated in the drive to push her out of this campaign, "for the 'good' of the party and the nation."
The pressure being applied to Clinton to get out of the race is both unprecedented and unjustified, a solid case made by Eric Boehlert at Smirking Chimp.
Looking back at history, it's hard to find evidence of the same media response to Ronald Reagan's failed 1976 presidential campaign. Taking on President Gerald Ford, Reagan lost more primaries than he won, and Ford won a plurality of the popular vote, but neither man had enough delegates to secure the nomination. So the campaign went to the GOP convention, where Ford prevailed. The bitter battle did nothing to damage Reagan's reputation (in fact, it did quite the opposite), in part because the media did not collectively suggest the candidate was acting selfishly or irrationally. Instead, Reagan walked away with a reputation as a resilient fighter who stood up for his conservative values.
And what about Sen. Ted Kennedy's doomed run in 1980? He trailed President Jimmy Carter by more than 750 delegates at the end of the primary season and insisted on fighting all the way to the convention, where he tried to get committed Carter delegates to switch their allegiance. The press did not spend months during the primary season ridiculing Kennedy, in a deeply personal tone, for remaining in the race.
And what about Gary Hart in 1984? He and Walter Mondale split the season's primaries and caucuses evenly, and neither had the 2,023 delegates needed to secure the nomination. Superdelegates eventually determined the winner. (Sound familiar?) Mondale had many of them locked up even before the campaign season began, so after the final primary between Mondale and Hart was complete, it was obvious that Mondale was going to be the nominee because Hart could not persuade enough superdelegates to change their mind and support him.
When Hart took his crusade all the way to the convention, the media did not form a posse and decide it was their job to get Hart to quit for the good of the party. (And the press certainly didn't form a posse in March to start pushing Hart out of the race.) Nor did the press collectively suggest that Hart had an oversized ego that had turned him into a political monster.
That new media standard has been created exclusively for Hillary Clinton.
It's very difficult to argue with this line of reasoning. Granted, there is a legitimate case to be made for pressuring Clinton to drop out; her threat to use nuclear weapons against Iran marks her as dangerously unstable, like John McCain. For that reason alone, she should have done the honorable thing and announced the end of her campaign. That she hasn't is indicative of her inherent selfishness trumping any and all sense of decency.
But leaving that aside, and doing the delegate math, there are few if any legitimate reasons to expect her to leave the race when all indicators are that she may yet pull off a win at the Democratic National Convention in August. The ongoing bloodbath between Clinton and Barack Obama is still likely to result in a battered and financially broken nominee losing to Republican John McCain in November. But that was going to happen anyway, regardless of which Democrat ultimately gets the nod, because of the insistence by both candidates on running to the political right instead of embracing the progressive base.
The only reason left, therefore, is hatred of Clinton that goes beyond all reason. Not that she hasn't brought a lot of that upon herself, mind you, but still, there's no justification for it. (As Paul Krugman pointed out in a February New York Times column, Clinton Rules are certainly in full effect.) And there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it all. Whatever the source of this hatred, it is that more than anything else which drives the agenda to push her out before convention time.
Could it be genuine fear that she might actually manage to get the nomination? More than that, could it be absolute terror at the prospect that she could actually win against McCain in November with a large enough margin that the outcome wouldn't be in doubt (thus preventing the GOP's electoral fraud machine from claiming a "victory" that can be spun in the media as credible)? I don't see why, seeing as how even if she becomes president there is no reason to expect she would do any better or worse than Obama -- or, for that matter, McCain.
The answer is right in front of me. I'm just not able to see it.
Stop me if you've heard this one. Yesterday MyDD reported that the Obama campaign had wiped over nine hundred delegates in California from its list of chosen representatives for the national convention in August. Ostensibly, this was done to ensure only Obama loyalists would represent the senator from Illinois at the Democratic National Convention. No big deal, right? After all, Hillary Clinton's campaign did a similar purge.
The problem is this: while Clinton trimmed only fifty or so delegates, down from an initial 950, Obama wiped roughly half of 1,700. Furthermore, whereas Clinton appears to have carefully screened the delegates to be excluded, Obama's purge list appeared random -- activists with solid credentials and who worked tirelessly to campaign for their candidate were eliminated, while those who did little or nothing got to stay on the list to go to Denver.
But here's where things get more ominous. As MyDD points out, Obama campaigner Marcy Winograd -- a woman with more than a few political credentials to her own name -- seems to think the main targets were anti-war progressives.
By dusk on Wednesday, the California Obama campaign had purged almost all progressive anti-war activists from its delegate candidate lists. Names of candidates, people who had filed to run to represent Obama at the August Democratic Party National Convention, disappeared, not one by one, but hundreds at a time, from the Party web site listing the eligibles. The list of Obama delegate hopefuls in one northern California congressional district went from a robust 100 to an anemic 23, while in southern California, the list in Congressman Waxman's district almost slipped out of sight, plunging from a high of 91 candidates to 17. Gone were strong women with independent political bases.
After completing the application process and finding my name on the official list of registered candidates, I received an email from the California Democratic Party today (Wednesday) at 4:48 p.m. informing me that the final approved lists of delegate candidates had been posted and that I should check the website. (I assume the same email went out to all the delegate candidates.) I clicked over to the website and found that, lo and behold, what had been a list of 90 candidates had been eviscerated down to only 17, and that my name was gone. I immediately checked the Obama candidate list for the 33rd District, where a friend and fellow Obama die-hard was also running for a delegate spot. His name was gone, too, and a list that formerly contained 83 names was down to a mere 20.
The ostensible rationale for the cutting of delegate candidates is to prevent "Trojan horse" delegates from making their way to the Convention floor and then switching allegiances. The vetting and removal of delegate candidates is expressly allowed by party rules. But could the 30th District really have had 73 such turncoats, and was I really one of them? I was a Precinct Captain for the Obama campaign for the California primary; I've donated several hundred dollars to Senator Obama's campaign (the first politician I've ever supported financially); and I've boosted the campaign in numerous posts on this website...
It's hard not to be cynical. Remaining on the list of approved candidates is the slate of candidates (longtime campaign volunteers) that the Obama campaign has officially endorsed, as well as several names recognizable from local politics. These delegate candidates aren't to be faulted for being longtime political activists, but the cynic in me wonders why those names remained while the "nobodies" on the list disappeared. The Obama campaign owes those of us who were cut a fuller explanation of the decision process.
MyDD's 'campskunk' clearly believes that this is not accidental, that the Obama campaign wants "people who will go to the convention and vote for Obama, no matter what. It's not about the issues, it's about the candidate. If these delegates have strong dedication to particular causes they might be persuadable, so none of those types are allowed."
But the purge of California delegates, and the fear that anti-war activists among those sent to represent Obama in Denver come August might defect, may run even deeper than anyone suspects. According to the New York Sun, Obama's phony anti-occupation position stands a good chance of being exposed for the sham it is.
A key adviser to Senator Obama's campaign is recommending in a confidential paper that America keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq as of late 2010, a plan at odds with the public pledge of the Illinois senator to withdraw combat forces from Iraq within 16 months of taking office.
The paper, obtained by The New York Sun, was written by Colin Kahl for the center-left Center for a New American Security*. In "Stay on Success: A Policy of Conditional Engagement," Mr. Kahl writes that through negotiations with the Iraqi government "the U.S. should aim to transition to a sustainable over-watch posture (of perhaps 60,000-80,000 forces) by the end of 2010 (although the specific timelines should be the byproduct of negotiations and conditions on the ground)."
Mr. Kahl is the day-to-day coordinator of the Obama campaign's working group on Iraq. A shorter and less detailed version of this paper appeared on the center's Web site as a policy brief.
If this is true, if Obama plans to back off from any and all public pledges to withdraw from the quagmire in Iraq by the end of his first term (assuming he gets a first term), then this cynical lack of faith in his own supporters exposes a far more serious crisis. The senator from Illinois, in spite of his alleged initial opposition to the invasion of Iraq, really does support the policy of American imperialism. And if he's worried enough about his true position becoming widely known that it has driven him to purge half his California delegates -- thus making the prospect of a brokered convention likelier, what does that say about the worth assigned to the anti-war movement by the Democratic Party? Not much, apparently.
Fortunately, this latest outrage by the Obama campaign has a somewhat happy ending; all of the delegates purged from California's bloc seem to have been reinstated. But if Obama thought these devoted supporters might have harbored plans to defect to Hillary Clinton's camp, he may have pushed his fear one step closer to realization.
Got a call from my county chair for Edwards. I was told a certain Clinton staffer is organizing the Edwards delegates to stay together for our April 26th Iowa district convention.
At first I didn't believe what I heard. Then after a little thought, it all makes sense.
The caucus system is an imprecise and unruly process, at best. It is all too easy for campaigns to game the process with aggressive tactics. Also, the degree of dependence on all-too-human involvement at every step of the way makes the entire process unpredictable.
With all of the pundits commenting about caucuses, often having never attended one, I thought I'd share my experience at the recent county convention. I hope y'all find this interesting and illuminating, and you can juxtapose my comments to the recent news about the results of the Iowa county conventions. Sometimes the details are left out to such a degree that assumptions are made which aren't entirely accurate.
A recent diary on EENR revealed some of those inaccuracies, so in the interest of clarity, here's my diary. Contained herein is only a fraction of the anecdotes from not only my own, but from the collective experiences of people I've communicated with in Iowa. Let it be said this diary delves into some of the least controversial of my experiences.
A journalist from Time was on the Chris Matthew's Show (not Hardball) panel today (Sun 15 March) and stated that Edwards was close to endorsing a Presidential candidate. He said that the endorsement would probably come before the NC primary and possibly before the PA primary.
All 99 Iowa counties will have their county conventions this Saturday.
The compettiton from the remaining campaigns for county delegates have been fierce, at least from where I see it. I have had two robocalls from Hillary. A letter with pledge card from Obama arrived in the mail two weeks ago. I heard that Mari Culver, Iowa's first lady who campaigned with John right before caucus has been robcalling for Obama. And today a live caller from the Obama campaign invited me to be in a conference call. I told the guy if I were to become a delegate (I am an alternate because I wanted to give other people a chance to be a delegate, and also I don't have any intention to go to state convention and beyond), I would be an Edwards delegate unless he is not viable in our caucus. Rumor has it that a lot of the alternates have already jumped into the Obama camp.
In the last three or four days, I've tried to contact the Edwards delegates in half of all the precincts in our county, telling them John wanted them to stay with him. So far, 37 out of 54 delegates I contacted have indicated they are going to convention. There are a total of 94 Edwards county delegates out of 360. Viability is 15% of 360 and is 54. I am hopeful we can be viable at the county convention.
This is the email I was waiting for and it finally came this morning: It's from the Iowa Edwards chairs telling John's delegates what to do.
Okay people. There is a diary at Kos about this so please go there and support it. Edwards wants his platform to be recognized and we need to do what we can to make that happen.
