At some point in the not-too-distant future, I may write a piece about the nominating process, including my thoughts on things like caucuses and superdelegates. I just want to make a kind of general point right now, however.
There’s nothing remotely democratic about how the two parties pick their nominees, and it’s basically a complete misconception to think that these processes are even close enough to democratic to be violating the spirit of democratic elections.
To give one obvious example from the Republican side, states that hold their contests prior to March 15th must award their delegates proportionately to candidates that meet a non-uniform minimum threshold. So, in one state a candidate may need 15% to get a single delegate and in another state they may need twenty percent. Then, on March 15th and thereafter, states have the option to award their delegates on a plurality-win-all basis. So, Rubio could win all of Florida’s 99 delegates by getting a single vote more than Trump, but Trump would have had to share a lot of South Carolina delegates with Rubio if Rubio had met the minimum threshold there in a proportional election.
This is just one of several examples I could provide of how the votes in one state are in no way equal to the votes in other states. Another important example that I’ll mention is how the delegates are divided up among the states. It’s not evenly, by population, as the Electoral College imperfectly attempts to do. States that voted blue last time get more delegates in the Democratic contest and states that voted red last time get more delegates in the Republican contest.
We can add in that the nomination is usually decided before most states even get a chance to vote, and certainly many of the candidates drop out quickly because they couldn’t win over voters in early unrepresentative states, which means, e.g., that Christie voters in 48 states never got a chance to cast a meaningful vote for him.
The correct way to think about these nominating processes is as a quest. The candidates embark on a long journey with arbitrary rules and random obstacles. Their only advantage is that they are given a map well ahead of time and this gives them the chance to strategize and anticipate the most obvious obstacles that they’ll find in their paths.
They can therefore come up with plans, although the very arbitrariness of the schedule and rules will disadvantage some candidates…some fatally. Rudy Giuliani can say that his plan doesn’t involve winning before Florida, but that doesn’t mean that his strategy has any hope of success. If the first primary had been held in New York, maybe Giuliani could have gotten some traction and some money to run a long campaign. Whatever his personal flaws and weaknesses, with the way the game was played, Rudy never had a fair shot.
So, it’s basically an odyssey where some heroes have an easy path and others must slay one dragon after another. Superdelegates are one dragon. Caucuses are another dragon. For candidates whose base of support is in the North, the SEC Super Tuesday primaries are even another dragon.
The reason the process works at all is because it’s a rigorous test. If you can run the obstacle course and reach the end first, you’ve shown skills in organizing, staffing, fundraising, debating, schmoozing party big-wigs, retail politicking, speechmaking, and working with media. You’ve demonstrated superhuman personal stamina. You’ve taken multiple punches and either shown an iron chin or gotten up off the mat.
It’s not a democratic process and it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a trial by fire that hopefully prepares you to hold the most powerful office in the world and also demonstrates to voters that you’ve got what it takes.
We could scrap this whole system root and branch and just have one national primary day when the whole country votes. That would tell us who had the most support on that one day, but it wouldn’t tell us who is tough enough to stand in the Oval Office.
Our system has all kinds of flaws and it can certainly be improved. But it also has merits.
You won’t understand the flaws or appreciate the merits if you think the process is supposed to be democratic in the same way as our general elections are, however.
Nominations Aren’t Supposed to Be Democratic
If so, then why the pretense by both political parties that they are? And if nominations aren’t decided democratically, then general election can never be wholly democratic either.
The movements in the 20th century to make nominations democratic was a major effort by “the people.” For Democrats it culminated in the ’68 disaster at the Chicago convention. The reforms, including federal campaign funding, that were put into place in the years following that disaster seemed reasonable enough that a challenger to the choice of the powerful and moneyed insiders had a decent chance and retained the traditional long-haul of primary campaigning throughout the country. Has worked out as well as it looked on paper. California Democrats even had a larger voice in ’68 than they did in any primary from ’76 through 2004 and that assumes that ’08 wasn’t in fact over before CA voted.
IA and NH seemed like good small states in which to begin the process because it wouldn’t cost much money to run there. That went completely out the window long ago. Both are hugely expensive and those states very much like the infusion of those dollars every four years.
The leading candidates today are Trump and Clinton, both of whom entered the race with near 100% name ID and with a national primary, those two would win for no other reason than name ID. A sorry state of affairs, but I seen many good candidates that were well qualified and would have made better Presidents than what we ended up with fall quickly in the primary contests because they lacked any home court advantage and name ID in the early primary states. Voters may want a more democratic process, but too few seem willing to do the homework required to be fully informed citizen voters.
Maybe we should junk all this and return to letting our “betters” tell us who is the nominee. The results would rarely be much different from what we get and it would save those that try to be responsible a lot of aggravation, time, and money.
Exactly. There’s an element of democratic choice – otherwise Jeb! Bush would still be relevant – but it’s nowhere near what the public wants or expects. Every now and then the system spits out a Trump or Obama or Bill Clinton that was considered a long shot before voters spoke. But even that requires access to the kind of money – now over $1 billion – needed to run a successful campaign. And for every candidate that comes out of left or right field, there are far more, like Hillary or G.W. Bush or Al Gore, that are all but assured of the nomination before anyone has voted, or establishment favorites like Romney, McCain and Kerry, who were well-positioned to outlast candidates with less institutional backing. The gulf between how candidates are nominated, and how voters want them to be nominated, is pretty vast.
I live in a relatively late caucus state. I have never in my life had a meaningful chance to influence a party nomination, and as with this year, the process often spits out two major party candidates that, even if one is less evil than the other, I could never in good conscience vote for. (This year will be a good example.) The great accomplishment of Trump – never mind how odious his act is – is that he has galvanized a nationwide revolt of the Republican Party base against its betters. But since, on that side, every prior nominee since Goldwater has been the establishment favorite, it took a long, long time for Republican voters to make themselves heard. And that’s the Republicans. The Democrats, with their super-delegate system specifically designed to keep a non-establishment candidate from winning, are even less democratic. What we often get as a result are party nominees (Hillary Clinton, Romney, McCain, Kerry, etc) that outside of tribal identity there’s little real enthusiasm for. And the result, assuming a (mostly inevitable) Clinton nomination this year, is that the passion in the presidential election will be directed toward voting for or against the Republican candidate. Clinton, whatever her merits, won’t be driving the narrative. That’s what happens when voters are ignored.
This idea that loosely affiliated totally disorganized individual units (voters) have ever had the decisive voice in picking party leaders is not just wrong but not even a sensible goal.
The problem is the pretense that this process is supposed to be that.
The “people” must get organized and affiliate to seize power. This is the basic rule of people-powered politics.
This is pretty much just gibberish designed to defend super delegates.
The reason Obama won is because this:
“This idea that loosely affiliated totally disorganized individual units (voters) have ever had the decisive voice in picking party leaders is not just wrong but not even a sensible goal.”
is pure and simply wrong.
Obama won because he kept the Superdelegate contest close or at least slowed it down long enough for him to build steam during the primaries and caucuses.
Sanders totally blew off the Superdelegate contest and lost a chance to have real staying power during this nomination fight.
He thought like many progressives online do that just being right and yelling the loudest would guarantee victory. The Democratic Party is made of many different constituencies and one of them is the Superdelegates. A candidate needs to compete for all the groups to win not blow off a big part of them like Sanders did.
Do you really think many of those elected Superdelgates were ever get-able by Sanders ahead of the primaries? Obama was vouched for by the Kennedy wing.
How would I know, Sanders never even tried.
He might have been able to slow them down.
You can’t win the nomination by not fighting for every group within the party.
I think this is a very good point.
It reminds me, in certain ways, of my changing perpective on how medical school works. When I was younger and friends of mine were going through the earlier parts of the process as students — working the emergency rooms; taking grueling exams all the time; being held to merciless, punishing standards; living on no money and no sleep; dealing with awful, authoritative teachers and doctors (for whom they had to do everything); routinely doing heroic, lifesaving work for no credit — I thought of it as a needlessly sadistic, punishing routine. But now that I’m older and I see the results, I understand the point: amongst the many acquaintances who entered that mill, only a few emerged…and they’re the ones who are now doctors; who have the personal qualities that uphold the incredible trust we place in them (and the rewards they get). It’s such a serious business that we don’t want anyone near it who doesn’t want it so badly that they’ll go through all of that, or who doesn’t have the personal conviction and fortitude and strength of character and superior ability to survive it and come out triumphant.
And that’s what the Presidency should be like, too, as you’re saying. (It’s too bad that a nation that recognizes this has maintained this ridiculous post-Reagan fantasy that it’s a job best given to the inexperienced and un-lettered, however. Hopefully the events of the next year will help to finally purge that away.)
Obama has his skin color, Clinton her gender. So how does that play at medical school? The emotional salad of politics and running a government can in no way be approximated to the scientific rigor of medical school and professional practice–at least I hope not, otherwise I won’t ever be able to trust a doctor again.
Obviously it doesn’t, because that’s outside the purview of the point Booman’s making, which I’m agreeing with.
This is very tiresome. The original post is extremely clear: despite the clear drawbacks, all of which are referred to or outlined, there’s a specific advantage to staging an arbitrary, grueling set of obstacles for candidates…and I pointed out that the same principle obtains with medical students.
Of course the two two scenarios are not comparable in other ways, but they are directly similar in the way Booman discusses. I don’t know why the simplest points have to get blurred and distorted.
I suppose in every field someone has to prove their mettle. Individually the essences of the fields make them differ strongly, that’s why I find the parallelism farfetched. Politicians lie, I hope my doctor dosen’t.
I think a more direct problem is that the public often makes it literally impossible for politicians to tell the full truth during their campaigns. And during their legislative sessions and public appearances and the rest of it.
A public poll from near the bottom of the California budget crisis, around 2010, sticks with me. The public was asked if they wanted to close the truly massive budget hole with all revenue increases, a mix of revenue and budget cuts, or with cuts alone. Somewhere around 85% of those surveyed answered “mix” or “all cuts.”
The same people were then asked to consider whether they would approve of cuts in the twelve largest sections of the budget in money terms. The same people rejected cuts in 11 of the 12 budget sections, many by very large supermajorities.
It’s preposterous, what the public asks of politicians. The only way politicians can maintain popularity and respond to what their constituents want is to fib to them to some degree. Telling the unvarnished truth to those California voters was the best ticket to getting voted out of office quickly, to be replaced by a fibber.
And we haven’t even gotten into campaign financing.
Yes, perhaps a better media and better civic education could alleviate this problem. It certainly wouldn’t do away with the problem.
Don’t we all have “skin color” and “gender”? I’m curious why, out of all the presidential candidates in recent history you singled out President Obama and Secretary Clinton?
I agree, everyone has skin color and gender, how could I ever say otherwise?. I refer to two specific individuals who competed for the Democratic nomination in 2007: either the first woman president or the first black one. Now we’ve had the black one, the female one is still working on it. That’s why, they sort of play leapfrog. Maybe next time we’ll get the psychodrama of the first Jewish president. Sanders just doesn’t have the personal personality hangup for it.
I like the obstacle course analogy. Paradoxically, I’m convinced the current nominating process gives organizers / activists from outside the institution of the party a bigger voice than a more democratic process would.
It’s also paradoxical that the insider track is still the best bet for the nomination, but then the Martha Coakley phenomenon happens and you lose the general election.
The party’s goal is to nominate someone with the best chance to win the GE, but the winner of the obstacle course doesn’t always match the zeitgeist of the country or even of the party rank and file. I don’t think so much that the process needs to be more democratic as that it needs to better reflect interests of the people voting – who somehow get lost in it all.
This probably only applies to the Presidential level, someone like Coakley would never make it through if her primary was similarly run in MA.
My fear right now is whether Hillary is like Coakley on the national level. Democrats who vote in primaries and caucuses like her, or at least find her acceptable. For much of the country she’s a choice that’s, at best, unexciting.
the problem with Coakley wasn’t necessarily her policies, it was the fact that she didn’t run for the office she thought that MA was super liberal and would never elect a Republican. She was wrong.
I don’t see Clinton ever believing she doesn’t need to run hard in the general and I don’t see her not running hard in any scenario
In that sense, maybe Coakley is the wrong analogy. I’m saying that a large portion of the base is not motivated by a Clinton candidacy, and that an election that’s otherwise highly winnable may be lost as a result.
No, Coakley is the perfect analogy.
This. Precisely.
Coakley assumed once she had the Dem nomination the election was a foregone conclusion and ran a terrible, barely there campaign that was a road map to disaster even without her infamous, tone-deaf, boneheaded Red Sox gaffe. Dragging in big names to work for her at the last minute did nothing but highlight her scrambling desperation at that point.
It didn’t help that she comes across as a bloodless technocrat, which can work with voters when you’re running for Attorney General, but not so much for an office like senator, where constituent services are a significant part of the job. Ditto in spades for governor, in which race she again lost to a Republican in bright blue Massachusetts.
This part: “… some heroes have an easy path and others must slay one dragon after another.”
Contradicts this part: “If you can run the obstacle course and reach the end first, you’ve shown skills in organizing, staffing, fundraising, debating, schmoozing party big-wigs, retail politicking, speechmaking, and working with media.”
I agree that a ‘quest’ makes sense, but a quest on an arbitrarily-unfair playing field–unless it is the same unfair playing field as the general–is problematic. There’s little reason to believe that it will necessarily result in the strongest general election candidate. The lack of ‘democracy’ may not be a problem, but that says nothing about the lack of applicability.
Also, how skilled is Trump at: organizing, staffing, fundraising, debating, schmoozing party big-wigs, retail politicking, speechmaking, and working with media? He’s arguably good at what? Twenty-five percent of those?
And given that the two prohibitive frontrunners are the only two celebrities in the race, I wonder if we’re not ignoring one of the bigger dragons.
Isn’t it possible that you’ve got cause and effect reversed? At least in the case of Sec. Clinton, she’s been active in national party politics since she organized Texas for George McGovern in 1972, was known for taking an active role in state politics when her husband was governor of Arkansas, and was generally known for being a “workhorse, not a showhorse” in both the US Senate and the State Department.
His is a very narrow binocular view of Hillary’s political rise. She has left a field of dragons behind her to get here.
That she’s a celebrity because she’s spent her life as a workhorse politician? No. There are plenty of workhorse politicians, but with very few exceptions, they don’t rise to the level of real celebrity.
1/3 of Americans can’t name our current Vice President. Politician does not equal celebrity. Hillary Clinton, however, is both things–Trump is only the latter, but that doesn’t seem to be hurting him. So I think it’s a bit blinkered of Boo not to mention one of the major commonalities between the two frontrunners.
Who, in your view, was the last presidential frontrunner not to be a “celebrity”?
Jeb Bush. I’m not talking about name recognition.
Obama was no celebrity when he started his run.
The Party Machine: it has no use for new and innovative parts. HRC may have gone viral yesterday.
Then how do you explain President Obama?
that’s bullshit.
Obama was new and most definitely innovative.
The party has no use for revolutionaries who can’t show them how organizing is really done.
The beating heart of the party just overwhelmingly rejected Sanders last night down in South Carolina.
They were organized.
How odd to criticize Sanders for not running an organized campaign. That’s not the explanation for what happened in SC.
While I generally agree that this is an interesting and well-written piece, there is one part of the process that must be changed: the caucuses. Everyone talks about the caucuses as a different type of contest. What they really are is a component of the nominating process where voter fraud is common, universally acknowledged, and generally ignored. In IA, the chair of the D side is an avowed HRC partisan with a licence plate that says so. And guess what? HRC won! What a fucking shock, EH? Multiple reports of confusion, errors, and all sorts of bad stuff. In NV, there were multiple situations in which HRC partisans were key parts of some situations and HRC won over and over. In many cases, HRC partisans were the interpreters. What were the interpreters saying? Hey, if you need an interpreter, that means that you don’t know that language. They can be saying anything.
Continue the process, but IA has lost the hold it had on first place by sheer venality and corruption in the process this year, and also in 2008. Eliminate ALL caucuses, and go to a strict use of balloted primaries.
Meh.
Maybe we should get rid of all primaries and make the caucuses all two-day affairs where state party business is done and people can vote for the whole 48 hours.
Screw the lowly engaged neophytes.
Let dedicated party members decide who their party leader will be. And to hell with folks who won’t register with the party and pay dues.
How’s that for an alternative vision of how this should go?
The caucuses are not auditable. They are disorganized. In many cases, the “results” were decided by chance. How certain are you that, in any given situation, the declared winner actually won? That’s the issue. In science, the issue is “reproducibility”, which means that the process must be traceable, start to finish, so that we can follow the process. Voting, if we have paper ballots, satisfies this. If there is a question about a specific result, there can be a recount. In caucuses, there are no recounts. In fact, the party in IA, despite huge evidence of corruption and false results, refuses to recount or check the result. In 2008, the R side changed their result later when overwhelming evidence of corruption surfaced.
Caucuses do not work, and when they are run, they often produce incorrect outcomes. Most importantly, we cannot audit them.
Dump them. Do the process with voting. Voting is fair, voting is more consistent with the fall process, voting is auditable.
Hell, willingness to not look at cheating is without a doubt part of that obstacle course.
But please explain GWB with this theory of nominations.
Rediculous. The whole thing. ANY scheme for awarding delegates will be unfair. ANY and EVERY one of them.
You want no convention but to have a National primary election? Yeah, that REALLY will favor insurgent candidates with no name recognition and not much $$$. I’m sure that without IA and NH, Bernie would have romped all over the “unelectable” argument. To say nothing not needing the publicity and buzz from IA.
You want to award delegates by some relatively fair measure of population? Missouri and Minnesota both have 9 congress critters. Missouri has voted for a Democrat for president 5 times since 1960, zero times since 2000. Minnesota has voted Democratic 13 times since 1960 and 4 times since 2000. How is that “fair” that Republican Missouri get as much say in the DEMOCRAT for president as Democratic Minnesota?
The pissing and moaning 4 and 6 years ago about “Blue Dog” democrats was interesting. WHERE the FUCK do you think Blue Dogs come from? DC? MA, MN???
You want progressive candidates to have a chance? Then SUCK IT UP and realize that a delegate convention to an unfairly selected set of representatives is what you have to have. Make it easier to elect or select delegates that will be progressive/insurgent. Stop worrying about fair and fix the game to slightly favor you. “Leveling” the playing field WILL favor the status quo. That’s so real, its almost axiomatic … doesn’t need to be proven.
Insurgents will not be elected if liberal, Democratic states (such as MN, MA, VT) are weighted by any measure in a fair way with reactionary, Republicans states (such as AL, MS, TN).
…love it or leave it.
As the Washington nomenklatura swings back behind the politburos of both parties.
Might as well drop the pretense and webcam the smoke-filled room so that we at least know which idiots are determining who will make the decisions that affect our lives.
That statement is a poor an incentive for voting in general elections as could be made.
It is a trial by fire that does not test all candidates equally. Some are more equal than others.
If it is a trial by fire, the best recommendation is for all the losers to stay in the campaign as long as they can operate an efficient budget and move large numbers of small donors to finance that. They at least will be available if the front-runner trips.
SuperTuesday is the first test of the ability to run a geographically national campaign – a test of how the strategic mind of the candidate and their hired staffs think in a highly multi-tasked environment. Hillary Clinton’s team flunked that test in 2008. The question that people have been asking about that failure was whether it was the times, the team, or the candidate. On Tuesday, we will know.
What is striking about downticket races is how much they are running under the radar. There is almost a total news media silence about comparisons of primary candidates. There are four candidates running to oppose Sen. Richard Burr. I can’t find out who exactly they are and what their comparative experience is. After a change of ownership the local “alternative and entertainment” weekly newspaper apparently did not do their candidate profile and endorsements this year, which at least had solid reporting on backgrounds.
My pessimism about this election is getting deeper as we go along. A convention implosion of the GOP might be the only thing that rescues constitutional government in the US. But the shock waves of that implosion would have to ripple deep to the grassroots to make a differnce. Talking about thin threads.
Our “realism” has now so corrupted our original vision (no matter how hypocritical) that not only has the mood of the Enlightenment died deader than a doornail but constitutional government is on the ropes all over Western civilization. Plutocracy has finally sucked the complete life out of it.
In this mood, not only is conservatism failed and dead, so is any idea of progressive democracy. The hope so rampant in 1968 has now become the darkness of 2016. If Obama was Lincolnesque in his determination to bind the nation together and the opposition’s seizing on frustrating that from ever happening, Clinton’s ascendancy resembles Grant and the triumph of government as a flunky of corporations.
Nominations aren’t supposed to be democratic. In what way?
I will agree with you that the nomination process is designed not to be democratic. The Republican nomination is more democratic than Democrat. In fact, the general election is also not designed to be democratic either with a Republican vote worth more than a Democrat vote. Where we disagree is that this is good and the way it should be.
Capitalism is simply not compatible with democracy. Sooner or later and I think sooner, the corporatist will completely do away with democracy ending our 240 year old experiment with it. Capitalism works best with an authoritarian business friendly government like China. Thank you Chicago Boys.
We have traded our democracy for plutocracy. The so called Conservative Movement was just a tactic for the plutocrats to gain enough political power so they could take everything for themselves. That gained a lot of power but not enough to really turn the hounds loose. They needed a Democrat for that.
The plutocrats found their Democrat in Al From and his DLC. Al From handpicked Bill Clinton to run for President under his new banner. This worked well enough to impose a level of austerity and economic rule changes that wrecked the world economy and make the plutocrats even richer, something Republicans could never get on their own. Bill Clinton converted the Democratic Party from the Party of the People to the Party of Big Money. This was the beginning of the end for the Democratic Party.
Now we have Hillary dressed in the same gold outfit she wore to earn $600k from Goldman Sachs speeches saying Obama took even more money from Wall Street than she did. Somehow that makes it right.
What the plutocrats really worry about is the pitchforks coming out. They needed a caretaker to give the illusion of hope and change while installing their own people in key positions to insure they gained more economic power and made themselves even richer. This was the reason money shifted from Hillary to Obama. What Obama got from this was 2 years working with a Blue Dog congress to dole out some crumbs. The next 6 years was total obstruction. It could have been worse with a grand bargain plus a moderate Republican Supreme Court justice.
Hillary makes the perfect new caretaker for the plutocrats since she knows her role well taking only what the plutocrats want to give asking for no more. This is what she calls getting things done, turning cynicism into pragmatism. They even gave themselves 30% of the delegate votes needed for the nomination to ensure the Big Money Establishment stays in power no matter what.
I think the plutocrats lost control of the Republican Party with their hate coalition going out of control nominating our new Hitler but the Republicans are still in better shape than the Democrats. Why? Because their candidate reflects the will of their people. The party that fails this test will lose; it’s the way our system works.
If the Democratic Party has become so corrupt in the pocket of Big Money that they will not allow the Democratic Party to reform itself, the voters will take the most logical path when a party no longer represents their interest; they become Independent or just forget about the whole thing. I remind you that the Independents are already larger than Republicans or Democrats.
I doubt there will be much left of the Democratic Party should we have to endure 4 years of the Clinton Machine.
AustinSax, I recognize you have some good points and knowledge, and I’m largely with you on ideology. However, I don’t agree with all your conclusions and find the Big Man/Big Institution/Big Family theory you rely on to be much too reductionist and, in the end, unpersuasive and destructive.
You claim that the DLC and Al From have maintained their power within the Party and movement under other names. I disagree. There simply isn’t the evidence to show this is true. First of all, why would Al From and his organization relinquish power unless they had actually lost power and support? Why would they not continue in a Norquist-type role on the center-left?
But the evidence is even more direct.
The evidence shows that the Democratic Party, in both its full platform and by the actions and votes of its Federal representatives in all three branches of government, has been migrating leftward for the entire 21st Century. As long as there is this failure to grapple with what is really going on, objectively happening, within the Party and the movement, I will remain less than persuaded by your warnings, anger, despair and fear.
The product of government during this century has not been one which consistently reflects the leftward move of the Democratic Party. That is largely because the Republican Party and its elected leaders have moved more forcefully rightward than the Democratic Party has moved leftward. It is also because some of the leftist legislative and executive actions that Democrats have passed have been stymied by the Judiciary. The substantial infiltration of this branch by Federalist Society acolytes has often hurt our work and monkeywrenched governance. So has the infiltration of many of our important regulatory agencies. These are not problems caused by the center of power in the Democratic Party.
As an example of the Party’s move leftward: The Clinton campaign platform, and observations of what Hillary and her spokespeople have emphasized, shows a candidate who is calling for policies substantially to the left of those pursued during her husband’s Presidency, and is slightly leftward of where Hillary was as a Senator. I’m not sure you agree, but I hope you would consider my claim. There’s much to back it up.
There will be plenty left of the Democratic Party in 2020 and 2024 and onward regardless of the 2016 primary result. The belief that the Republican Party is in better shape as a result of the primary is novel. The belief that the Democratic Party primary is moving in a direction that is clearly and directly opposed by our people is not supported by the facts.
My biggest problem with the “Big Money Is Denying Us Our Party” claim is that it’s extremely disempowering. Why try if there’s nothing to be done, if supermajorities can still be denied their will on every issue? Your vision practically calls on the people to stop organizing, to give up, to lose hope.
Fuck that. I’m going to keep on organizing, even when it’s frustrating. I’ve got all my life. We’ll get enough of the bastards to make our part of the Earth better.
Are both parties cracking up?
Tulsi Gabbard resigns DNC vice chairmanshio to endorse Bernie
I’m sensing another donnybrook coming.
A very significant and courageous move. The response of the MSM seems to be to minimize the significance. Like, oh well, the DNC must be relieved to be rid of this flame thrower. But clearly there’s a lot more to it than that.
What’s significant is not only the resignation itself, but the timing (on the heels of a primary that is widely supposed to have doomed Sanders’ campaign), the reason given (foreign policy, a stunning criticism of Hillary on her supposedly strongest point and approval of Sanders on his supposedly weakest), and her stature as an Iraq veteran and Democratic “rising star”.