Our Primary/Caucus Votes

[Akash]

Aren't your hands already full with rolo? :p

[flipp525]

How funny, you're just miles away from me right now. Too bad you can't come out for a drink tonight

[Akash]

Hey Flipp, I'm at Obama's North Virginia campaign headquarters in the City of Falls Church. Sorry about the Virginia crack -- I actually thought it was a cute story and that it said something really wonderful about voter enthusiasm. And I had totally forgotten that you lived here, so it wasn't a dig at you.

Actually Virginians have been quite wonderful thus far. What a warm and welcoming people! I'm here with a journalist from The Nation -- we're here for a few more hours and then it's back to New York.



Edited By Akash on 1202852739

[flipp525]

Where in Virginia are you? And you do realize of course that there's Northern Virginia and then there's the rest of Virginia, don't you?



Edited By flipp525 on 1202832690

[Akash]

Hilarious! I'm in Virginia right now, and apparently on Super Tuesday, there was a major voting problem -- lots of people were showing up to vote and had to be told that while lots of states were in fact voting on Super Tuesday, "we're not one of them." LOL!

I don't wanna make a bad joke about the average Virginian but well...yeah. I'm glad to many people are so enthusiastic about voting this year though!

[Akash]

THE NATION
CLINTON'S SHAKEUP INDICATIVE OF LARGER SLUMP ...
Posted by Ari Berman at 02/11/2008

Imagine if Barack Obama had lost four contests in a row over the weekend and appeared likely to lose three more on Tuesday. He wouldn't just be replacing his campaign manager. His candidacy would, for all practical purposes, be done.

Such are the perks of being the frontrunner. Hillary Clinton can lose seven states in a row and remain in the race, with a very plausible shot at still capturing the nomination. After all, the Clintons are at their best when faced with adversity. But it will take more than replacing a campaign manager to counter the incredible momentum Barack Obama has begun to accumulate.

After all, Patti Solis Doyle--the exiled campaign manager--"had played a role that was more operational than conceptual," the Politico reported. Axing the campaign manager at this late stage, in a move that was in the works since New Hampshire, is similar to Clinton's argument for what went wrong in Iraq--it wasn't the war itself that was the problem but the way it was executed. A similar "incompetence dodge" narrative has now been spun about her campaign--the problem was how the message was assembled, not the message itself.

If Clinton was serious about fundamentally reorienting the campaign, she would have shown her chief strategist, Mark Penn, the door months ago. After all, it was Penn who packaged Clinton as a corporate-friendly, poll-driven technocrat, long on experience and short on inspiration.
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters?bid=45&pid=283475

[Akash]

Well honestly, the whole damn primary/caucus thing is undemocratic, not just the superdelegates. But anyway...

Published on Monday, February 11, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
The Superdelegate ‘Firewall’
by Sean Gonsalves

At the heart of the Democratic Party’s nomination process is a decidedly undemocratic creature known as the superdelegate.

What are superdelegates, aka unpledged delegates? Key word: unpledged.

Superdelegates - mostly members of Congress, governors, party officials and grass-roots activists - can back any candidate they choose. While ordinary delegates are technically committed to a candidate, superdelegates can change their allegiance whenever they feel like it.

Former President Clinton, for example, is a superdelegate - hence his vital importance to his wife’s bid for the White House. The Washington Post reports: “Clinton, former president Bill Clinton…and their allies have been working aggressively for months to court the superdelegates, drawing on old loyalties to open a huge advantage for the senator from New York in total delegates amassed.”

Al Gore’s 2000 campaign manager and superdelegate Donna Brazile, describes the essence of this elitist practice. “One person, one vote? Forget about it. Some votes are worth more than others. You have to know the rules.”

Those are the “rules.” And this is the way the game is being played: “Of the nearly 300 superdelegates who have committed to a candidate, out of a total of 796, Clinton leads Obama roughly by a 2-to-1 ratio, according to numerous counts. The lead is so substantial, her campaign asserted before Super Tuesday, that even if Obama pulls ahead in pledged delegates after Feb. 5, (as he did) Clinton will probably retain a modest edge in the overall delegate tally.”

Tom Foreman of CNN.com provides a super brief history of the superdelegate. “A few decades ago, Democratic leaders felt that sometimes, Democratic voters were choosing poor presidential candidates: campaigners who couldn’t win elections, or even if they could, they didn’t please Democratic kingmakers.”

“Jimmy Carter, for example, was an obscure candidate who developed so much popular appeal that he essentially forced Democratic Party leaders to accept him as the nominee, even though not everyone was thrilled by it.”

“They made the superdelegates: a super class of super Democrats, each of whom could vote at the convention for a candidate of choice - in effect, giving each of these Democrats the power of tens of thousands of average citizens.”

So, with delegates-on-steroids as the Democratic Party “rule,” it explains why Obama can be getting more votes and ordinary delegates while Hillary Clinton leads in overall delegate count. This is what the Clinton campaign refers to as their “firewall.”

Think 100-yard-dash (I ran track in the pre-metric system days) with Clinton starting 20-yards ahead of Obama. To mix metaphors - that’s not exactly a level playing field. But like Donna said: those are the “rules.”

Lots of journalists are starting to wonder about superdelegates - to the point where the Democratic National Committee held a teleconference on Friday to answer some of our questions.

The idea of superdelegates was born out of a desire to avoid a “brokered convention” in which no candidate wins the party’s nomination on the first ballot. The last time that happened was the 1952 Democratic Convention when 11 names were nominated in a nail-biter that included Adlai Stevenson, who became the party’s third-ballot nominee.

This year, the winner will need 2,025 delegates - half the total number of delegates who will be seated at the upcoming convention. And though the DNC isn’t keeping an official Clinton-Obama delegate score, they did say there were still 1,435 delegates up for grabs.

Another interesting number was also revealed: Of the 796 super delegate slots, 76 of them have yet to be picked.

No future speculations were entertained during the Friday’s Q & A session, which, of course, will only fuel more speculation, especially during an election season with tremendous popular appeal.

What if Clinton and Obama are neck-and-neck on the delegate count going into the convention and the superdelegates aren’t just a deciding factor but THE deciding factor? What if the Clinton super delegate “firewall” trend continues and these super delegates end up crowning Hillary king, even though Obama gets more votes?

True, all the candidates knew the “rules” going in. So, Hillary’s delegate advantage can be considered “fair play.” But if this undemocratic “rule” should happen to beat a more popular Obama, there’s going to be lots of folks, inside and outside the party, rightly crying foul.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/11/6980/



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[Sonic Youth]

Oh and so does Truthdig. Hmm...The Nation, The New Yorker, Counterpunch, TruthDig, Democracy Now...pretty much all the REAL progressive/liberal political publications are choosing Obama over Hillary. I think that says something.

No, they're saying nothing. Like Obama himself, they're saying nothing at all. How disappointing. Even the progressive columnists have been invaded by the Obama-snatchers.

Those columns don't give a single reason as to why he'll be a fine president and what makes him attractive to progressives. Oh, they say why he'd be preferable to HILARY, although I'm not seeing much compare-and-contrast going on. But what are the reasons in and of themselves? Sheer says he has an enlightened agenda. What IS it??? Obama won't tell us, so why can't you? Is he really a second Kucinich? Does he support gay marriage? Haven't heard that one yet. (In fact, he's suggested the opposite.)

Where's the column from the progessive detailing WHY progressives should be proud to vote for him? Otherwise, I call "cult of personality" to those who accuse Clinton's high-profile feminist supporters of the same thing.

And where's the speech by Obama giving his plans and describing his policies? All I'm hearing is platitudes... and they're going hand-in-hand with columns by progressives saying little about HIS substance. And I think that REALLY says something.

[Akash]

Oh and so does Truthdig. Hmm...The Nation, The New Yorker, Counterpunch, TruthDig, Democracy Now...pretty much all the REAL progressive/liberal political publications are choosing Obama over Hillary. I think that says something.

TRUTHDIG
Obama, Clinton and the War
Posted on Jan 29, 2008

By Robert Scheer

It should mean a great deal to progressives that in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination Sen. Ted Kennedy favors Sen. Barack Obama over two other colleagues he has worked with in the Senate. No one in the history of that institution has been a more consistent and effective fighter than Kennedy for an enlightened agenda, be it civil rights and liberty, gender equality, labor and immigrant justice, environmental protection, educational opportunity or opposing military adventures.

Kennedy was a rare sane voice among the Democrats in strongly opposing the Iraq war, and it is no small tribute when he states: “We know the record of Barack Obama. There is the courage he showed when so many others were silent or simply went along. From the beginning, he opposed the war in Iraq. And let no one deny that truth.”

But that is precisely the truth that Sen. Hillary Clinton has shamelessly sought to obscure. Her supporters have accepted Clinton’s refusal to repudiate her vote to authorize the war, an ignominious moment she shares with other Democrats, including presidential candidate John Edwards, who at least has made a point of regretting it. It was a vote that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, 3,940 U.S. service members—five more on Monday—and a debt in the trillions of dollars that will prevent the funding of needed domestic programs that Clinton claims to support. And it doesn’t end with Iraq. Clinton has been equally hawkish toward Iran and, in a Margaret Thatcher-like moment, even attacked Obama for ruling out the use of nuclear weapons against Osama bin Laden.

Clinton’s apologists include Gloria Steinem and too many other feminists, who should know better than to betray the women’s movement’s commitment to peace in favor of simplistic gender politics. It is disturbing, not because they conclude that Clinton is the best candidate, but because they refuse to challenge their candidate to be better. Does it not matter that Clinton’s key foreign policy advisers are drawn heavily from the ranks of the neoliberals, who cheered as loudly for President Bush’s war as did the neoconservatives? Are they not concerned that Richard Holbrooke, who exploited his experience and access to secret information during the Clinton presidency to back Bush’s Iraq invasion, is a likely contender for secretary of state should she win?

Sandy Berger, a key Clinton adviser, played a major role in convincing Kennedy’s congressman son, Patrick, to vote for the war authorization against what the younger Kennedy said was the advice of his father and his own better instincts. According to a Knight Ridder report at the time, “Patrick Kennedy said the most persuasive arguments for attacking Iraq came from members of the Clinton White House,” including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who is often described as the foreign policy expert closest to Hillary. Patrick J. Kennedy refuses to be burned twice and now supports Obama.

Yes, if Hillary Clinton is the candidate, she probably will be better than the Republican alternative and, as Ted Kennedy made clear, deserving of our support. But isn’t it troubling that she can’t hold a candle to Sen. John McCain when it comes to fighting Pentagon waste or pushing for campaign-finance reform to curtail the power of lobbyists? Isn’t it disturbing that Sen. Clinton has received more money than any other candidate of either party from the big defense contractors, according to a report on the Huffington Post? Why have the war profiteers given her twice the campaign contributions that they sent to McCain, if not for the expectation that she is on their side of the taxpayer rip-off that has seen the military budget rise to an all-time high? It’s for the same reason that the bankers, Wall Street traders and other swindlers who produced our economic meltdown fund Clinton.

Hillary Clinton has made “experience” key to her claim to the presidency and tells us she will do the right thing from “day one.” The reality is that her extra four years in the U.S. Senate hardly provides better experience than Obama’s eight years in the Illinois state Senate battling for progress with the nation’s most hard-boiled politicians. And if she lays claim to her husband’s presidency, then she must also take responsibility for caving in to big media with the Telecommunications Act, selling out to the banks with the Financial Services Modernization Act, and killing the federal welfare program—a political gambit that deeply wounded millions of women and children. Her political career began with the Senate and she hit the ground running, but, as her craven support for Bush after 9/11 shows, it was in the wrong direction.

http://www.truthdig.com/report....the_war



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[Akash]

A new article from The New Yorker about why Obama is a marginally better choice than Hillary (and one that doesn't pretend the Clinton years were all rosy).

THE NEW YORKER
The Spat
by Hendrik Hertzberg
February 11, 2008

During the four or five weeks leading up to February 5th—“Tsunami Tuesday,” when voters in states with half the nation’s population participate in a not quite national primary—the emotional texture of the Democratic side of the Presidential campaign changed profoundly. For most of Year One of this insanely elongated process, the Democratic Party had been a peaceable kingdom. Its voters were proud of and pleased with the array of choices before them: proud of its diversity, pleased with its unity. A confident woman in middle age; a graceful young African-American of mixed parentage; a handsome Southerner from a white working-class family; and a Mexico City-raised, three-quarters Hispanic governor-diplomat with (for a touch of mayonnaise) a blandly “American” name—these were the Democrats’ leading contenders, supplemented by a more conventional pair of distinguished senators from the East Coast. After years of talk about “looking like America,” here was the real thing. On questions of policy, the views of the candidates were as reassuringly similar as their backgrounds were exhilaratingly different. Such disagreements as they had, none of them fundamental or bitter, were subsumed in their revulsion at the moral and strategic failures of the Bush Administration. As for Democratic voters, it was hard to find one who wouldn’t tell you something like this: “I’m supporting so-and-so in the primary, but I’ll be fine with any of them—just so we get a Democrat in the White House.”

But as Iowa gave way to New Hampshire and then South Carolina, and the contest careered toward its ultimate form of a zero-sum game between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, the mood darkened. Anger and depression, the pop-psych books tell us, are two sides of the same coin: depression is anger suppressed, anger is depression liberated. Is it possible to strobe between the two? It must be, because, as the Clinton-Obama race turned nasty, a rapid alternation was noticeable among the sort of obsessive Democrats who follow every twist and turn. This was true of people all across the deep-blue universe: passionate Obama supporters; tentative Obama supporters; Obama-Clinton fence-sitters (including the fans of John Edwards, now bereft); and tentative Clinton supporters. (Passionate Clinton supporters, notwithstanding their candidate’s shrinking but still sizable lead in national polls, seem to be a little rarer.)

The anger was mostly directed at Senator Clinton, her husband, and her campaign, for a series of what have come to be known, redundantly, as “negative attacks.” The most egregious, because so coldly premeditated, was a radio spot that took as its hook a snippet of audio from an Obama interview in which he said, “The Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there over the last ten, fifteen years.” A smooth-voiced announcer then adds:

"Really? Aren’t those the ideas that got us into the economic mess we’re in today? Ideas like special tax breaks for Wall Street? Running up a nine-trillion-dollar debt? Refusing to raise the minimum wage or deal with the housing crisis? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?"

Uh, no. Those are not the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about. But the spot’s disingenuous questions were plainly intended to deceive the unwary into assuming that Wall Street tax breaks and the like are the very ideas Obama has been advocating. With equal honesty, the spot could have said, “Denying global warming? Torturing prisoners? Appointing right-wing ideologues to the federal courts? Are those the ideas Barack Obama’s talking about?” But that might have taxed the credulity of even the unwary.

Actually, Obama was not talking about any particular ideas. He was talking about the conservative movement’s success in marketing its policy ideas and presenting itself as an intellectual powerhouse. He can be faulted for getting the timeline wrong in a way that dismissed the Clinton years—the Republicans’ “party of ideas” claim is at least thirty years old—but his basic point has long been a commonplace among Democrats. It is why liberals have spent the past decade and more trying to build a counterweight to the conservative infrastructure of think tanks and policy journals.

Obama has turned out to have a kind of political magic unseen since the Kennedy brothers of the nineteen-sixties. He has something of Jack’s futuristic, ironic cool, something of Bobby’s earnest, inspiring heat. His endorsement, last week, by President Kennedy’s surviving brother and surviving child closed the circuit. Senator Clinton’s answer to this is “I have more experience.” And it’s true. Her mastery of policy is deep and subtle; her sense of how the White House wields power is probably unequalled. But experience is a problematic argument, especially when voters are hungry for a new beginning.

Anyway, an argument is no match for an aura. So the Clinton campaign evidently concluded that it had no choice but to “go negative,” and Bill Clinton was assigned, or assigned himself, the task. Some of his attempts to sully his wife’s opponent—calling Obama’s consistent opposition to the Iraq war “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen” and dismissing his South Carolina victory as a racial one, like Jesse Jackson’s twenty years ago—have been untruthful or unworthy or both. Whether or not these and similar attacks “worked” (the evidence is mixed), they certainly succeeded in diminishing both the former President and his wife. “The Clintons” used to be a Republican trope, calculated to make one or the other half of the couple look like a puppet or a victim or a co-conspirator; now it is simply descriptive. Bill Clinton’s talents are immense, and so are those of Hillary Clinton. But the events of the past few weeks have suggested that the peculiar dynamics of the Clinton marriage, which distorted the workings of the first Clinton White House in areas ranging from its failed health-care initiative to its inability to quash the Whitewater hoax, would be carried over into a second.

For some Democrats, a final straw has been the Clinton campaign’s sudden interest in changing the rules. In Nevada, where the state’s Democratic Party had provided special caucus sites for casino workers, Clinton allies tried to get them shut down after a union representing many of those workers endorsed Obama. The Democratic National Committee warned the Party’s affiliates in Michigan and Florida that if they moved their primaries ahead of Tsunami Tuesday they would lose their Convention delegates. They did so anyway, and now Clinton—whose name was the only one on the Michigan ballot and who carried Florida, where no one campaigned—is demanding that the two states’ delegates be accredited. Those delegates, added to the bulk of the unelected “superdelegates,” could conceivably put Clinton over the top if Obama arrives at the Convention with a slight edge in delegates chosen by voters—a scenario that would bear an ugly resemblance to Florida, the popular vote, and the Supreme Court, circa 2000.

Last Thursday night’s televised debate between the two remaining Democrats—a civilized and substantive conversation—has eased the tension. But politics ain’t beanbag. One of the arguments made on behalf of the Clintons is that they know how to win. They do what is necessary. They fight hard. They’ve shown they can survive the worst the Republican attack machine can throw at them, next to which the relatively mild roughing-up they’re giving Obama is downright Gandhian. But there are hard-nosed arguments for Obama, too. Nothing would energize the dispirited, disoriented Republicans like running against Hillary Clinton. And a late-entry challenge from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his billions would be far less likely if Obama became the Democratic nominee.

Obama’s Democratic critics worry that his soaring rhetoric of reconciliation is naïve. But, as Mark Schmitt has argued in The American Prospect, Obama’s national-unity pitch should be viewed as a tactic as well as an ideal. It might lengthen his coattails, helping Democratic candidates for the House and the Senate in marginally red districts and states. It would not protect him from attack, of course, but it would enable him to fire back from the high ground. And, as a new President elected with a not quite filibuster-proof Senate, he would be in a better position to peel off the handful of Republican senators he would need to make meaningful legislative progress than someone who started from a defensive crouch. Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/talk....rtzberg

[Sabin]

Would you people shut the fuck up?!?

All we have to remember is one thing...

Yes, we can.

[Johnny Guitar]

???

Some weird ideas being thrown around in this thread.

[Damien]

Even if you want to give Clinton a free pass on Iraq (and I don't -- especially considering that one-fourth of the Senate (including Kent Conrad of the Red State of North Dakota) and one-third of the House was perspicacious enough to vote against authorizing Bush, not to mention millions of "ordinary" Americans), we've gotten further evidence of her hawkish views when she supported the Kyl-Lieberman resolution.

It stated, "the United States should designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization...and place the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorists" and was widely accepted as laying the foundation for military action against Iran. (Remember this was before the myth of Iran developing nuclear weapons was debunked, so another Bush masturbatory war was not out of the realm of the possible.)

As Chris Dodd explained in opposing the amendment:

"I cannot support the Kyl-Lieberman amendment on Iran. To do so could give this President a green light to act recklessly and endanger US national security. We learned in the run up to the Iraq war that seemingly non-binding language passed by this Senate can have profound consequences. We need the president to use robust diplomacy to address concerns with Iran, not the language in this amendment that the president can point to if he decides to draw this country into another disastrous war of choice. . . We shouldn't repeat our mistakes and enable this President again."

Hillary Clinton: More Of The Same



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[OscarGuy]

Akash, you can be forgiven for your ignorance of how most of us feel with regard to the situation in Iraq and our opposition to the loss of human life. You've been here such a short time, but from 9/11 forward, everyone on this board has been completely opposed to the way Bush and his cohorts have handled operations. Sonic even used to post the death tallies every day. We've all had some amazing compassion for those soldiers who are forced to die in a war that was unjust in the first place. So, I'm sure most of us would appreciate it if you rescinded your rather callous assessment of our personal attachment to the tragedy.

And as we had to defend Kerry back in 2004 (also before you were on this board), the Iraq resolution was NOT a declaration of war. It was an authorization for the president to use force if necessary. Was it the greatest thing to vote for? No. Was it politically expedient for some to vote for it. Yes. However, Kucinich and Paul are fringes of their own parties. Their opposition to the war was hardly of note because they would have voted against it even if they had had proof positive that war was necessary.

And who really cares what a state senator has to say about an issue. He wasn't holding Federal office until AFTER the war started, so how do we know he wouldn't have voted the same way. You say he "says" he's opposed. However, there is no definitive proof he wouldn't have. That's a fact. And since most of us think Obama's only saying what he thinks he needs to to get elected, him "saying" he was opposed is hardly something we're going to take as truth.

The war was mishandled by the Bush administration, not by anyone who authorized the use of force. Should they have? No. There were only two or three people on the entire board at the time that would have given him the authorization. But the point remains. The authorization was given. There's nothing we can do about that now.

Go ahead and vote for Reagan Jr....the man who's all charisma and no substance. I, for one, will not (and did not) give him a primary vote. If he's our candidate, I'll vote for him because I'm a good Democrat, but I'll hold my nose just like most right wing Republicans will do when McCain is running for president.

[Big Magilla]

Also, isn't it time to put this "war" issue to rest? Does it really matter when either of of the candidates came to their conclusioin that the war was wrong as long as they are on the right side now?

Magilla, please don't take this the wrong way -- I am saying this sincerely, and more as a general response, not sarcastically or as any kind of "dig" at you -- but yes, it does matter. It matters a great deal. It matters because it means a candidate like Clinton chose political opportunity over her own integrity, and the cost was many innocent lives lost (and not just American lives). And she did so while others like Kucinich and Ron Paul had the same information and somehow knew enough not to vote for it.

She isn't the only one, this is true. But she is ONE OF THE ONES, and we shouldn't dismiss it so easily as some of you on this board keep doing. Vote for her if you must, but please don't imply that it doesn't "matter." This isn't an abstract concept like debating American exceptionalism. This is about human life. Sure she's on the "right side now" but she came there when it was popular with the American people (i.e. politically convenient) for her to do so. And while she was "learning", a lot of people had to die in the process.

And how do you know then she (and others like her) won't make the same choice again in the future when it's politically salient for her (or them) to do so? These are all the reasons why it matters, Big Magilla. In fact that incredibly dismissive question -- "does it really matter" -- should be posed to the lives lost in Iraq, and to the survivors whose lives will never be the same again.

I, like many ordinary Americans, knew Bush was lying all along and I thought the Democrats, at least, should all have been smart enough to see through him, but they weren't. What are we supposed to do, throw everybody out of office who voted for the war? It would be impractical.

War is messy, this one more than most for many reasons, chief among them the fact that we don't have enough soldiers, reservists and national guardsman are being sent to Iraq in tour after tour. The suicide rate among active duty soldiers is ten times the norm. Lost limbs and shattered minds of the wounded are disabilities they will have to live with the rest of their lives. The deisbaled veteran charities I support continually ask for conbtributions now becasue the government only pays for so much.

We could blame Bill Clinton for cutting back the Armed Services in the 90s. We could blame the lack of a draft in which everybody must serve including the children of the men and women who vote to put their constituents' kids in harm's way. We could do a lot of things, but to use this issue as the primary reason not to vote for this one candidate is patently unfair.

Now, I know you have provided long lists of other reasons not to vote for her, but there are people who will not vote for her because of this one issue. One of them is Michael Moore, who said so on Larry King the other night. It's something we have to get past. We have to put someone in office who will end the war, not continue it for a hundred years.