During this Democratic Primary season, the DNC, namely their chairman, Howard Dean, has a leadership role with the committee members in not only shaping the Democratic Party but to bring the nomination to closure at the Democratic National Convention. Those leaders of the DNC are also responsible for a lot more leading up to the general election. Leadership is about leading but those responsible for leading at the DNC failed the voters in Michigan and Florida when they penalized those states for early primaries.
In the case of Florida, a Republican governor and Republican controlled state legislature was responsible for making the decision to move the states primary early and the DNC fell for the trap and penalized the Florida voters. Because of a lack of leadership at the very beginning, the DNC rules committee had to meet this weekend and made a decision of what to do about Michigan and Florida. That decision will not satisfy the voters in those two states and it remains to be seen how that will affect the voters in the general election.
The second area of leadership failure falls to Obama. He and his supporters have already made him the nominee of his party and he has already started his campaign for the general election. However, he has recently let Senators McCain and Graham squeeze him. Those two Republican senators told the public Obama needs to go to Iraq to see what is going on. And sure enough, Obama jumped at the bait and his camp announced he would be going to Iraq. Once again, the Republicans are controlling the debate on Iraq. Does any member of congress, much less a candidate for President, really have to go to Iraq to discover that we still have 150,000 American troops there over WMD that did not exist? If Obama can be manipulated that easily and he is the Democratic nominee, the party and the nation are in trouble. A lack of experience equals a lack of leadership. And leadership is about leading, not following.
10 comments :
John said: Leadership is about leading but those responsible for leading at the DNC failed the voters in Michigan and Florida when they penalized those states for early primaries.
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You forgot to mention that the Clinton campaign agreed with and signed on to the penalties and called the primaries illegitimate.... until they needed the delegates. Howard Ickes and Howard Wolfson (paid lobbyists and Clinto campaign higher ups) penalized Michigan in the exact same manner in the last presidential election and are crying about it now. So sad and so hypocritical and what a bunch of whiners the majority of Clinton supporters are. Let's ALL break the rules in 2012. After all, if Clinton had her way, there would be no rules since there would be no punishment!!
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John said: In the case of Florida, a Republican governor and Republican controlled state legislature was responsible for making the decision to move the states primary early and the DNC fell for the trap and penalized the Florida voters.
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That's a very flawed argument for one reason. The Republican party has also penalized Florida by cutting their delegation in half. It's going to be an awfully weak argument to make that the Democrats will be punished in November for exacting the same punishment as the Republicans. If anything, you make the argument FOR the DNC, in that punishing ALL of the Florida delegation is the fault of the state Republicans. Thank you for that contribution.
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John said: ... He (Obama) has recently let Senators McCain and Graham squeeze him. Those two Republican senators told the public Obama needs to go to Iraq to see what is going on. And sure enough, Obama jumped at the bait and his camp announced he would be going to Iraq. Once again, the Republicans are controlling the debate on Iraq.
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Oh, I disagree!! The best thing that Senator Obama can do is let McCain redirect the debate towards Iraq. It's a trap that will capture the people who set it. If Obama had refused to go to Iraq, the Republicans could have painted him as cowardly and afraid to visit a war zone. By going to Iraq, it not only focuses the MSM back on Iraq, the major weakness of the Republicans and Clinton, but it defuses any issue that the Republicans could make over him NOT going. Couldn't you see the clock on Faux News ticking in your mind up until election day... such and such days since Obama declined to visit the troops in Iraq.
Hey anonymous, it was not Clinton who penalized Florida and Michigan it was the DNC that showed no leadership. Obama and his supporters have become a me too on Iraq. He better go there now or Fox News will hammer him. Pretty soon it will be we better not withdraw from Iraq because the Fox News will hammer him. Then it will be He needs to change positions on the issues because Fox News will have it on the screen every day.
Argo said...
Hey anonymous, it was not Clinton who penalized Florida and Michigan it was the DNC that showed no leadership.
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Argo,
Why did the DNC penalize Michigan and Florida and not the other 48 states, Guam, Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico? OH, THAT'S RIGHT!! They obeyed the party rules!!
So much for Clinton breaking the glass ceiling for women!! According to the Clinton camp, Hillary has told the Obama camp NOT to pick another woman as his running mate!! How's THAT for Democratic Leadership?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4j629O3uQs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=q4j629O3uQs
Leadership is also about recognizing change. There's a REALLY good article on the Readers Digest website, www.rd.com, which shows, I think, of what the difference between Obama's campaign and Clinton's, the youth vote. you can access the article on their website by using the search menu and typing in "Facebook's Influence on the 2008 Election". Here are a few excerpts and a telling statistic that I'll go into later.
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"...Nationally, among all likely voters, McCain entered the spring with a slight edge over both remaining Democratic candidates. Among Millennials, however, the poll shows Clinton with a ten-point lead over McCain -- about the same advantage recorded by Kerry in 2004. That's a bad enough sign for McCain, who did so well with young voters eight years ago. But when he is matched up against Obama, the pot boils over: Obama is well in the lead, with 55 percent to McCain's 33 percent. This is a historically unprecedented generational appeal for a national candidate and shows that an aspirational campaign based on hope and a better future hits the Millennials' sweet spot.
Horse race numbers go up and down, but the poll also shows that Millennials are more oriented to the Democratic Party than their elders, and are more liberal in outlook than previous groups of 18- to 29-year-olds. And they are backing up these ideological inclinations with their votes.
By a 32-point margin, Millennials say they voted in the Democratic rather than Republican primaries in 2008 and chose Obama over Clinton 56 to 36 (57 to 43 in caucus states). Had this trend been replicated by any other age group, Obama would easily have been nominated. For that reason, many pundits predict that the youth vote could evaporate for Democrats if Obama is not nominated. But RD pollster John Della Volpe is skeptical. "For nearly three in five Millennials," he says, "the end of the Bush Presidency is what it's about."
A whopping 94 percent of Millennials say they're likely to vote in future elections for the party they vote for this year. Millennials' leftward drift began in 2004 and continued in 2006. That year, college towns in Virginia and Montana pushed Democrats to narrow victories -- giving their party control of the Senate -- after Republican incumbents ran afoul of student sensibilities. Montana Senator Conrad Burns called his housepainter "a nice little Guatemalan man," while Virginia Senator George Allen called a student of Indian descent "macaca." His opponent's camp posted the slur on YouTube; Allen never recovered...
... Previous polling of this generation has unearthed intense interest in global warming, the great environmental issue of the era, and in multinationalism in foreign policy, which clearly reflects disapproval of the Iraq war. Liberals seize on such findings to predict a tidal wave, led by young voters, toward Democrats...
...For now, we are left with a picture of a generation motivated to improve the world and enthralled by Barack Obama in the way that earlier generations were dazzled by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Both of those Presidents inspired Americans to unite for the purpose of confronting huge national and global challenges. Not coincidentally, theirs are the names most often invoked on the campaign trail by the 2008 candidates.
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Now, something that was in the print version but that I couldn't find online, 18% of ALL voters consider themselves as liberal, vs 32% who call themselves conservative. However, when polling millenials, the numbers reverse, with 35% calling themselves liberal and only 22% calling themselves conservatives. How smart was it to attack the "left wing liberals" of the Democratic party? They're the ones who can turn the Washington establishment back into a Democratic haven and banish the Republicans back to a fringe party.
Last post but a good read and I hope we can all take solcae in it. I know I did.
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One Voice Can Change A Room
by cishart
Wed Jun 04, 2008 at 11:17:06 PM PDT
I was reminded of my priorities last night.
I've felt a lot of anger toward Hillary Clinton over the last few months. I'd been an ardent Clinton supporter in the past and defended her for years, even as the red flags continued to mount, but by the time she gave her "I have a lifetime of experience I will bring to the White House, Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House, and Senator Obama has a speech he made in 2002" soundbite, I was done with her. Over the intervening months as she seemed to carefully play on the fears and silent racial bias that infects so much of this country, I grew more deeply angry. When the nomination became all but a mathmatical certainty and her intransigence became more firmly entrenched, so did my dislike of her.
But this isn't an anti-Hillary diary.
cishart's diary :: ::
It became clear Tuesday afternoon that there was going to be no concession from Hillary that night, and I left for my Obama gathering my teeth clenched in the knowledge that she really wasn't going to allow him his moment. He and his supporters weren't going to have even one night to celebrate, to revel in the magnitude of what had just happened. I wanted to be giddy, to cheer with my fellow supporters over an historic nomination, but it just felt... incomplete. It should have been more.
I got to the meeting and began the process of hugging the people I knew and introducing myself to the ones I didn't. Someone came up and grabbed my arm. "Mr. C___ was looking for you." I didn't know a Mr. C___, but I had helped organize the night's festivities (we were going to eat dinner, watch the primaries and discuss the upcoming voter registration drive) and I guessed he must be one of the people I'd called. She pointed him out to me -- an elderly black man in a bright orange baseball cap -- and I wound my way through the crowd to introduce myself.
"Mr. C____? I'm [cishart]. You were looking for me?" He was every bit of 80 years old, a thin man with weathered skin and a dignified air. He smiled at me, one eye blind and clouded over, the other bright and sparkling. "Are you the one that called me about the meeting? I just wanted to know if I'm at the right place." I assured him he was and we chatted for a moment before I wandered off to say hello to others who'd come in.
A little later, I was deep in conversation with a woman about my age who was there with her husband. Her husband happened to be chatting with Mr. C. so the four of us ended up sharing a table for dinner. I sat down next to Mr. C. and his face lit up. "I want to show you what I've got," he said, and reached into a plastic pouch to pull out a thick stack of forms and a yellow highlighter. They were voter registration forms he'd picked up that day from the board of registrars. He flipped through the stack, showing me where he'd gone through each one, highlighting the required sections. "I'm ready to get to work," he said.
The four of us chatted over dinner about all things Obama, about how excited we were, about how much work it would take to swing Alabama for Obama. We talked for awhile about the best places in the city to plan voter registration events. Mr. C. patted the stack in front of him. "I'm planning on handing these out in churches and to people I know," he explained. "I'm not about to help McCain get elected by giving them to people if I don't know how they're going to vote." Still, a little later, he said to make sure I called him whenever we were planning a registration drive. "I'm looking forward to working hard this summer."
Eventually the conversation turned to Hillary. We expressed our anger over how she'd run her campaign, the damage she was doing and how ungenerous she was being. Well, three of us did. Mr. C. had gone quiet. The other woman and I talked about how much we hated the media's impression that Hillary controlled a block of white, middle-aged women. As white, middle-aged (ish) women, we found that particularly annoying. Occasionally people at other tables weighed in with their agreement, but Mr. C. still stayed quiet.
A few minutes later, the couple across from me moved over to chat with someone else. I was finishing the last bit of my meal when Mr. C. spoke for the first time in several minutes. "I like Hillary," he offered quietly.
I turned to face him and his eyes were troubled. "Me and my family," he said, "we've always been close with the Clintons. They've done a lot for us." He paused. "I'm not going to say anything bad about her."
I didn't know what to say. Looking into his eyes, I knew this man had seen and experienced things I could never fully comprehend. He had been a black male, in his prime, in the South, during the civil rights movement. He had lived his life, raised his family and taught school in Alabama in a time when simply being a a black man in the South could be deadly, much less a politically active black man. This man had heard and experienced Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in ways I could only try to understand, and it was clear that he felt the full import of Barack Obama's nomination down to his bones.
And yet he couldn't, he wouldn't be bitter about how it had all happened. He wouldn't let himself be angry over the things Hillary did or didn't do or say in this campaign, because for him none of those things erased the very real good that she and Bill Clinton had done in the past. And he understood that nothing she said or didn't say this night could tarnish the importance of what was happening. Barack Obama, a black man, was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. The only thing that was important now was getting him elected.
As Barack is fond of saying, one voice can change a room, and if one voice can change a room it can change a group, if one voice can change a group then it can change a community, and that one voice can then change a state and change the country.
Mr C.'s voice changed me Tuesday night. It reminded me of what I'd forgotten in all my righteous bluster. That unity doesn't come from a place of anger. Unity comes from the concious choice to put aside petty differences to focus on what's important.
Thanks, Mr. C.
If anonymous was of age he should have known long ago what Mr. C was talking about. I certainly did not hear Senator Clinton express those things in the campaign anonymous accused her of. Clinton wrote a book a long time ago titled, "It takes a village" and whe was right on target. I am also puzzled why Senator Clinton should have conceded that particular night. How did that steal anything from Obama? Does the Clinton haters have that little respect for Obama.
Argo said...
If anonymous was of age he should have known long ago what Mr. C was talking about. I certainly did not hear Senator Clinton express those things in the campaign anonymous accused her of. Clinton wrote a book a long time ago titled, "It takes a village" and whe was right on target. I am also puzzled why Senator Clinton should have conceded that particular night. How did that steal anything from Obama? Does the Clinton haters have that little respect for Obama.
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She should have conceded that night because the delegates won by Mr. O that night gave him more than the number needed for nomination. It was an historic night for the Democratic Party and America, in that a person of color was nominated as the presidential candidate of a major party. Instead of congratulating Mr. Obama on a hard fought win, Clinton indicated she would take the fight on to the convention. Instead of using the night to start mending the rift in the party, she had her supporters chanting, "Denver! Denver! Denver!"
It is hard to understand anonymous dislike for Clinton. Instead of being humble by Obama"s win, anonymous is more concerned about Clinton conceding the nomination. So what if Clinton's supporters shouted Denver, Denver, Denver. They have a right to express their support. Any voter who tries to nip pick at every thing will end up turning on their own candidate when things goe wrong.
Argo said...
It is hard to understand anonymous dislike for Clinton.
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Her unflagging support for NAFTA, CAFTA, Free Trade With China, Free Trade With Columbia, the Iraq War, her vote to continue the use of cluster bombs in heavily populated areas, her support for the continued use of land mines, her chest thumping using our American lives as her shield (I'd obliterate Iran), her indebtedness to the major corporations that have a stranglehold on Washington, just to name a few.
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