Clinton Will Break the Democratic Party to Save It
You See, Obama has to be Cleared Away by the Hand of Hillary! like the McGovernites of Old. Now She will have to Burn this Party.
By Mark I Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | Barack Obama | Democratic Party | Hillary Clinton | Howard Dean — Comments (35) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
The Huffington Post has an update to their story of this past weekend saying that the Clinton campaign has confirmed that it plans to use a May 31st meeting of the Democratic Party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to try and seat the entire Michigan and Florida delegations at the Democratic National Convention. The Clinton campaign estimates that seating of the entire delegations from the two disputed states will give her a pledged delegate lead of around 55 delegates over Sen. Barack Obama.
In a statement released in response to the story, the campaign did not deny that it intended to exercise what the Huffington Post characterized as the "nuclear option." It only objected to the notion that the plan was a secret one.
There is no secret plan....The Clinton campaign has been vocal in stating that the votes of 2.5 million people must be respected. Hardly a day goes by when a Clinton official doesn't publicly declare that the votes of Michigan and Florida count and that the delegations from those states should be seated.
If the campaign follows through on this, it may be left to the ultimate superdelegate, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, to decide the Democratic nomination. Denver is going to be fun.
Read on…
Sen. Hillary!™ Clinton controls the Rules and Bylaws Committee with at least 50% of its members supporting her. So it seems that she would have the inside track to getting the ruling she desires. But her performance in today’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, as well as some upcoming contests, is crucial. Clinton needs to win big in Indiana and lose close or upset Obama in North Carolina. Less heralded but no less important to her strategy are contests in West Virginia next week and Kentucky in two weeks. Clinton stands to win lopsided victories in both of those states, perhaps by as much as 30 points in each.
Assuming that comes to pass, Clinton supporters will have plenty of evidence that the controversy surrounding Obama’s relationship with his church’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and comments he made about “bitter” small town voters have damaged his appeal with a key Democratic voting bloc: rural, working-class whites. She will have won Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia, and Kentucky, rust-belt states with similar demographics, all after the revelation of Wright’s anti-American sermons. Throw in her victory in the general election bellwether state of Ohio, and it makes for a fairly convincing argument that Clinton stands a better chance in November than Obama against Sen. John McCain.
Obama supporters won’t take this lying down, of course. They could protest the decision to the Credentials Committee of the Democratic National Convention, which will meet after the primaries and before the convention opens in late August. The full make up of the committee is dependent on the outcome of the primaries. And true to everything about the democratic primary to date, it is complicated.
One hundred sixty-one of the committee’s 186(!) members are allotted to each campaign in a ratio equal to the performance in each state contest. Those results would necessarily mirror pledged delegate counts. Under the current scenario, Obama would have a majority of the 161 seats on the committee. But the process also means that the final makeup of the committee can not be determined until the primaries are over. In any case the split between Obama and Clinton supporting members will be razor thin. Moreover, should the Rules and Bylaws committee vote to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, there could be a battle over the make up of the Credentials Committee itself. Michigan and Florida would in theory be entitled to seats on the committee, boosting Sen. Clinton’s representation and enhancing the chance that the disputed delegation would win final approval.
As if that wasn’t chaotic enough, the remaining 25 members of the Credentials Committee are appointed directly by DNC Chairman Howard Dean. One presumes that he would be able to swing his bloc of votes on the committee to whichever candidate he believed would make the better general election opponent for McCain. In his time as DNC Chair, Dean has espoused the philosophy that the Democratic Party should be a 50-state party and compete across all demographics. But he will have to choose which traditionally Democratic demographic is most important to the future of the party: working-class whites who are increasingly siding with Clinton and vulnerable to being picked off by McCain; or African-Americans who side with Obama in overwhelming numbers and have voted for the Democratic presidential nominee nearly 9-1 in recent elections.
Efforts to resolve the dispute over Michigan and Florida have not been fruitful. Clinton has not made life any easier for Dean by reneging on her pledges not to appear on Michigan’s ballot and not to campaign in Florida. Her insistence on seating the two delegations in their entirety is the better principle for the Democratic Party to follow, however. It avoids alienating voters in two critical states for the general election. That is especially true for Michigan, where Democratic governance has led to a one-state recession and an embarrassing spectacle in Detroit. In the end, Dean will have to decide if the Democratic Party is a party built to win now or to carry a governing coalition into the future. By the end of this month, we may know if the party’s presidential nominating process will leave it hopelessly broken, or just greatly weakened.
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hard work and legitimate responsibility every time.
"I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." - The last recorded words of Adam Smith.
The purists in the GOP want the GOP to lose because it's not conservative enough. That's an issue of ideology.
Hillary isn't doing this because the Democratic Party isn't liberal enough. She's doing it because she's convinced this may be the best opportunity of her life to take the White House, and she wants that real bad.
Obama winning the nom and getting McGoverned into well-deserved obscurity, or Obama winning the Presidency and inflicting another Jimmy Carter term on America.
"I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place." - The last recorded words of Adam Smith.
but that won't guarantee that the delegates go her way. Obama could take a play out of the Paulista game plan and rig the state conventions.
Now also found at The Minority Report
In the old days, the state delegations were chosen by the party state chairmen, even though they were nominally pledged to one or another candidate on the first ballot. That made it easier to arm-twist them through the state apparatus.
But with today's "reform" rules, the delegates are hand-picked by the candidates themselves. Obama's delegates are all his very own Obamamaniacs, many young or black, and Hillary's delegates are mostly middle-aged white women who love her. That makes old-fashioned horse-trading much harder, because identity politics takes over.
So the delegates who are pledged are very unlikely to switch. They have personal loyalties to the candidate who picked them.
- if that wasn’t chaotic enough, the remaining 25 members of the Credentials Committee are appointed directly by DNC Chairman Howard Dean.
I think it's amusing that in addition to having the primaries rigged by 'proportionality' to produce a stalemate that is settled by party officials posing as "superdelegates," the party of Every Vote Must Count™ has a second mechanism that produces a statemate on its credentials committee that is settled by members appointed by the DNC Chairman.
To channel Leona Helmsley, when it comes to Democrats, "Voting is for little people."
Drink Good Coffee. You can sleep when you're dead.
Every estimate I've seen optimistically gives Clinton an extra 120 pledged delegates if Michigan and Florida are seated. She currently trails by around 160 pledged delegates (around 40 if Michigan and Florida are seated). In order for her math to work (i.e. her ahead by 55 delegates), she would have to net around 90 delegates in the remainder of the contests. Given that there are only 404 pledged delegates yet to be elected, that would mean taking more than 61% of the remaining pledged delegates. Even taking a bare majority in pledged delegates would require her taking around 55% of remaining pledged delegates after seating Michigan and Florida.
Does anyone thing that either of these is likely, especially given that 115 of those 404 are from North Carolina, where she is likely to lose, rather than gain, net pledged delegates?
I don't doubt that Hillary has something up her sleeve, but she's going to have to do more than merely seat Florida and Michigan to take the lead. She needs to force Obama to implode.
It seems clear that her strategy at this point is to cast as much doubt on Obama as possible even while making comments that favor McCain. This keeps the Democratic presidential nomination open to her in 2012; if Obama wins the presidency her first credible shot is 2016, and that seems unlikely.
Crazy primary season, when a Republican crazy supports the Democratic front runner and the Democratic second place prefers the Republican.
The biggest mystery to me is why the media (left and right alike) are so slow to acknowledge what is blatantly obvious: these primaries don't matter. Obama will lead in pledged delegates on June 4. Clinton's only chance is convincing superdelegates to overturn the vote.
The media couldn't put a fork in Huckabee fast enough when it became clear that he was a long-shot at best. Why not the same for Clinton, or at least an acknowledgment that her only means of winning does not involve winning primaries?
If she weren't Hillary Clinton, the media would have declared this thing over with after Super Tuesday like they did the Republican race. Can you really imagine the media going along with John Edwards or Joe Biden challenging Obama this long?
Also, the media's pro-McCain (perhaps better: anti-Huckabee?) bias was palpable enough to be embarrassing. They couldn't wait to break out the shovels for him.
Though I was a big Huckabee supporter, the difference was that although McCain didn't technically lock up the nomination until Texas/Ohio, he had a much bigger delegate lead over Huckabee than Obama ever has over Clinton. And the way we do our primaries, it was very, very difficult for Huck to overcome that lead barring the entire party uniting behind him against McCain. And that wasn't going to happen. Once Romney dropped out and the fiscal cons went grudgingly to McCain, it was pretty hard for Huck to get any more traction.
That's why the primaries matter, since they can help sway the superdelegates to one side or the other. Obama can't do it with the superdelegates either.
Neither can win with pledged delegates won in voting contests - it will be the supers who will decide the nominee, regardless.
No two sets of numbers match, nobody has the first clue of what's really going on, and everybody's irrationally confident that they know how it's going to end.
No, I'm not excluding myself - but don't think about that too hard; it'll just hurt your brain, too. :)
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
and I've got two weeks before the summer session begins. What else will I rack my brain with between now and then if I don't try to figure out what the numbers are, why they differ, etc?
Not that they'd help for long, but what the heck.
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC. I've been usurped!
going to see the other two also saw about two more that are coming out that I will go..Adam Sandler and Mike Meyers...two funny movies.,
Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion
the last time Indy went after a non-biblical artifact we got the Temple of Doom. That plus Shia Lebeouf...
if hillary can seat Florida by itself she gets under 100 delegate deficit. Once it is down to 90+- delegates, the supers can take over after she rakes him up and down for two months..it is not impossible. Although highly unlikely. Which is why Operation Chaos is the best thing we can hope for, keep her winning all the remaining primaries and going to Denver..
"Small town folks get bitter after which they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment."
What I don't understand is where the Clinton campaign is getting the idea that there's anyway that she'll actually lead in pledged delegates (by 55+, no less) if Florida and Michigan are included. It seems to me that they're merely yanking that right out of their posteriors.
The picture you paint is the one that I think the Clinton camp envisions. I don't see it working, but I think that's their real strategy.
(Howard) loyalists, so they'll put down the insurrection.
"YEAAARRRRGH!"
Hillary is not going to be the nominee, but there will be some cheap, political drama which the mainstream media will try to make appear somehow romantic.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
The Clintons have done the burying*.
*Well, someone did it for them.
Now also found at The Minority Report
I'm getting more than a little tired of this BS scenario maintaining legitimacy when the numbers are clearly against Hillary.
It's like everyone's afraid of Obama or something...
Haven't you read Matthew 25:31?
(Joke! Put away the tar and feathers!)
Goats to the left. And here I am.
Neither candidate can win a first ballot nomination without superdelegates, or the other candidate quitting.
Right now the primaries are purely for show. They won't influence the winner except how they convince superdelegates to commit or change their commitment.
Obama hasn't won anything. He may be more likely to win because he needs fewer superdelegates, but he's not won it.
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"If we want to take this party back, and I think we can someday, let’s get to work." – Barry Goldwater
One of my old professors from undergrad is on the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee. I e-mailed him yesterday about this, as he's a known Clinton supporter and superdelegate. I wonder what he'll say in response? I doubt he remembers me very well, seven years later. It was a big class.
Still, it is kind of odd for me, being able to put a very familiar face to this insanity. I normally don't know people who make those sorts of decisions.
I'd be interested to hear what someone on the inside has to say on this issue.
Now also found at The Minority Report
I might be willing to convey the gist, but I won't quote a private e-mail if he doesn't expect to be quoted.
For the record, I asked him to be very, very reluctant in ramming through the Michigan and Florida delegations as current constituted, but took the time to clarify that I wasn't asking him to switch his endorsement. I respect his choice in the respect, but told him I wasn't the only swing-state Democrat who would be madder then hell if the winner of the actual elected delegates (within the rules) isn' the nominee for anything resembling skullduggery.
Don't break confidence. We all have to live after this is all over.
Now also found at The Minority Report
I can't help but envision now the ultimate worst case scenario for the Democrats:
1: Hillary manages to hold on to the convention.
2: She convinces the Rules Committee to seat the Michigan and Florida delegates.
3: In response the young hot bloods visiting Denver decide to express their displeasure in the old fashioned tradition of rioting. (There's been a lot of talk among some of the craziest troublemakers about doing this already, but I didn't think much of it really happening- unless there is some spark that can trigger outrage in enough young idiots getting them to go along with the troublemakers.)
4: The appeal committee decides to overturn the seating of Michigan and Florida.
Result:
Michigan and Florida are even more ticked off about everything. To the nation it will appear as though the Democrats capitulated to rioters. Denver and the people of Colorado will be mad at the Democrats.
It's like a three part Greek Tragedy.
I'm going to need a lot of popcorn...
National Guard gets called in to quell insurrection. Media consensus: It's all Bush's fault.
to lose in order to save the party?