CGNorena Weekly

Super-delegates are Hurting the Democratic Party

People keep saying that the super-delegates to the convention could hurt the Democratic Party. They are wrong; they have already hurt the party, simply because they are dividing the party into two different parties, the party of Hillary Clinton and the party of Barack Obama.

Some pure souls have managed so far to remain unsullied by the emotions of the moment, but most democrats are truly afraid of the possibility that some super-delegates they never voted for, whom they do not even know, some professional party bureaucrats, would vote for Hillary simply because they got a very persuasive phone call from either Bill Clinton or from some nationally well-known feminist. Obama’s supporters are really upset by that possible travesty. Hillary’s supporters are kept in a constant frenzy by the words of Bill, her Machiavellian hubby. Some of them swear that they would leave the democratic party for a few years, would refuse to vote in 2008, and would indeed abstain from further financial assistance to any democratic candidate in the foreseeable future.

Whether these anxieties are reasonably based upon reality or not, the media (newspapers, magazines, radio and television combined) are indeed very eager to promote them to keep their clients nailed to the “latest developments.” News in America are indeed as marketed as prescription drugs or toilet paper. Each primary or caucus, from Iowa until Wisconsin two day ago, are presented as the decisive ones, until they happen. Then, it is the next caucus or the next primary, whether it is in Delaware or in Hawaii, that will shape our future and the future of the civilized world for the next hundred years, to use McCain’ s favorite time frame.

The institutional device of “super-delegates” is simply a bad idea, whatever the original intent was. Even the name is offensive: delegates who are superior to those simple-minded voters who had to walk a few miles in the snow of Wisconsin to cast their vote; delegates who can vote any way they choose without accountability of any kind, without ever reading the papers about the results of the primary in their own district; delegates who knew whom to vote for even before people deliberated for a long time how to vote. It is not the people who decide, but only those of superior intelligence and political expertise. Where are you, Tocqueville?

I do not mean to say that abuses of this kind are normal in our system. We firmly believe that most super-delegates will honor the will of the voters (either nationally or the voters in their own district), seek the good of the party, and behave as the honest men and women they are supposed to be. It is not that the system is abusive; the problem is that the system is readilyto abusable.

One ardently hopes that voters will take matters in their own hands; that by the end of the primary season either Hillary or (most likely) Obama will have such clear advantage in votes, delegates, and primaries won that no super-delegate at the convention would ever think of changing the democratic verdict. Unfortunately, the House of Clinton has publicly announced that Hillary is ready to claim both Michigan and Florida, a flagrant change of the game rules after the game is over. Her ambition and his art in cheating are no doubt capable of anything. That would be a tragedy for the country, and would not open the doors of the White House for wife or husband. Black people, white democrats (like myself), women who voted for Obama, young and old voters, Obama Latinos and Obama independents, will in large numbers refuse to vote. McCain will reign undisturbed for a third Bush-term until the end of the Iraq war, a hundred years from now.

Open letter to David Brooks:

In your article “When Reality Bites: Imagining a Democratic presidency,” (New York Times, 2.12.08, A 23) you predict that, if the democrats win the November election, the apparent unity of their “unconstrained unreality” will be tragically torn asunder by the brutal but unavoidable decisions regarding the withdrawal from Iraq and the painful choices of future domestic spending.

Your prophetic statements (your record as a prophet is a mediocre C-) prove beyond any doubt that you have not escaped the morbid poison of the Bush elite to which you have always belonged in spite of your baroque flourishes on paper and your nervous tics on television. The decision to withdraw the troops from Iraq –a decision supported by many generals and veterans of the war—is going to meet, you say, with the opposition of powerful Arab leaders (can you name a few?), with outraged and “highly photogenic” colonels screaming “betrayal!” (this is getting sick); with independents (except those, I suppose, who have joined Obama) who would “furiously” oppose the insanity of ending local efforts in reconstruction projects and the training of Iraqi troops “just when they are producing results.” (a Bush mantra we have heard many times before). Do you ever read the newspaper where you write, Mr. Brooks?

To cap all these dire predictions you announce that a quick withdrawal from Iraq would be followed by “a bloodshed” to go “on the new presidents’ head.” This is plain nonsense: the bloodshed, Mr. Brooks, has being going on for five years now. The Bush administration has been very careful to censor the news about Iraqi civilian casualties, but according to Johns Hopkins University estimates there were about half a million civilian casualties one year ago! So there is plenty of blood to cover the head of Mr. Bush, your head, Mr. Brooks, and the heads of all those photogenic colonels you seem to like. People who object to the withdrawal of our troops keep repeating that Iraq would become “chaotic.” What has it been if not chaotic since 2001?

Finally, I find almost incredible that a Bush admirer — as you indeed are — will have the insolence of rubbing on the face of the 2009 new president his or her pain in bravely attempting to bring back to life a nation left in historically high financial distress by all the lies, all the deceptions, all the criminal mistakes of the Bush cabal. Candidates to the presidency know well that reality in 2009 will be, as you put it, “unkind.” The democratic center and the democratic left, which are not as divided as your wishful thinking pretends them to be, sooner or later will come to, if not to solve all the problems left behind by a disastrous administration, at least to heal part of the wounds and to live in peace with the rest of humankind. The days of unilateral hegemony are over, hopefully never to return again. It’s too bad, Mr. Brooks, that this time you have missed the train that takes history to destinations for which apparently you are getting too
old.

Super Tuesday 2.5.08: the Aftermath

Democrats and Republicans decided that on February the 5th twenty-two state primaries (or caucuses) should bring the presidential election process to some firm conclusions. The polls closed last night, tornadoes ripped five southern states, and we still have no idea who will be the nominees of the Democratic or the Republican parties for the national election in November.

Republicans made some progress, albeit a very controversial progress. McCain, who has won some primaries, thinks and says that he is now the fron-runner to be the nominee of his party. But the party has several wings and the wings seem rather disconnected from each other.

The conservative wing of the Republican Party includes the neo-cons of the Christian Right, a bunch of people concerned about “values” who so far have been rather reticent and apparently detached from the whole earthly thing of trying to get people to vote. One thing is certain: they do not like McCain and McCain in no way echoes their opinions. McCain, the American hero in a Hanoi prison, is not particularly known for his Christian fervor. He is rather known for his delusional Bush-like fervor to end (some ten years from now!) the Iraq war with on old-fashioned American victory. He still can sponsor moderately liberal bills with friendly democratic senators and has the reputation of being a man of integrity (no small praise these days!).

There are two other candidates who might seek the vote of conservative Christians: one is the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, and the other, Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas. These two totally different personalities have something in common: they are both former Christian ministers: Romney was a Mormon missionary and Huckabee, a Baptist pastor in the South. But, while Huckabee plays the guitar and has a harmless sense of humor, Romney is seen as an ambitious millionaire more than willing to morph his political positions to suit his political opportunities. Almost everybody speaks well of Huckabee; Romney is just plainly not liked by many voters. Today he finally decided to “suspend” his campaign, a campaigns that was rapidly turning into a senseless waste of his millions. It was not a promising business.

Who, at the end, could be the Republican nominee? Super Tuesday did not help at all to sketch his profile (no women in the contest). If the Christian Right gets into an attacking mode. McCain is out. Will the Republicans try to cash in on Huckabee’s guitar and common sense or still try exploit Romney’s inexhaustible checking accounts, good looks, and business experience? It depends to great extent on the name of the Democratic nominee, to whom now we turn our attention.

The problem with the Democrats is that they have two front-runners, both of them with very justifiably spacious egos. One is, for the first time in history, a woman with a long ‘experience”; the other, a powerful speaker who is, also for the first time in history, a black young man from Illinois, Kenya, Chicago, and Harvard. Both of them have now a similar number of delegates. Neither one seems ready to yield to the other, a possibly disastrous situation for the party and the nation. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama could divide the party and surrender the election to the Republicans. There is a faint hope that one of them will in the next few primaries — some in the South (Mississippi) and some in powerful states (Texas,Pennsylvania, Ohio) – and earn a significant advantage in the number of delegates and quality of the voters (= diversity in age, gender, race, professional standing, etc). In that case, an unlikely one, whoever decides the issue at the convention (super delegates) would have less of a problem in persuading people like you and me that the choice was fair and in the public interest. But this is a rosy scenario compared to the other scenarios that are not impossible at all: division of the party, defections in large number, absenteeism from the polls on election day, and even Taiwan-style brawls.

One last hope is that some thing will happen in the last days before the convention capable of persuading everybody that it is in their own self-interest to chill out and maybe even to sacrifice the applause of the moment to the magnificent promises of a not very distant future. What that event before the convention might be is anybody’s guess: maybe Obama sweeps all the primaries still to be decided (particularly Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas); maybe Obama and Hillary will decide to be part of the same ticket (in which order?); maybe respectable super-delegates succeed in convincing them to accept a deal. In that case, McCain might have to wait for another sixteen years, at least. Enough time, one hopes, to rebuild the Supreme Court with men and women who do not look at all like Roberts or Scalia. The alternatives to these possibilities are too ugly to be mentioned in this family blog.

In spite of all my fears, deep in my heart I still have faith in my adoptive country. ¡ Si, se puede!

I am personally addicted to the editorial pages of the New York Times, or rather, I was until yesterday, January 25, 2008, when the newspaper hastily decided to endorse Senator Clinton and Senator McCain as the Democratic and Republican “best choices” to regain the White House in 2008.

I have no qualms with McCain: he indeed seems preferable to the other losers on the Republican side☺. I still abhor to see his name as a possible President simply because he sounds as hawkish as Bush himself. Make McCain President and you will see caskets of American soldiers coming back from Iraq wrapped in the American flag for years to come, all in pursuit of an elusive victory in a war we should have never started in the first place, a war that makes millions of Muslims into possible suicide bombers. A President McCain would prolong for years Bush’s bloody delusions. There is just no way to end “well” a war that began as a flagrant violation of international law. The only way out is to leave as soon as possible, a decision that most American people have already made.

My main objection is to the Times’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton. The paper argues that “firstness” is not a reason to choose. It is not. The prospect of a first woman nominee (as Hillary has often reminded the voters) is, I am happy to admit, almost as “exhilarating” as the prospect of a first African-American nominee. But not exactly the same. The nomination of a woman empowers half of the American population, but that had to some extent (certainly not enough) being previously done by the Sufragettes and the 1920 Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. As a result, many American women have run for national office 99ncluding he presidency), although only Hillary would be the first one to succeed. That would be magnificent.

The empowerment of an African-American male empowers all American Black and all American black women. In that light the likely success of Obama in the national election would be a world-class historical first to bring to a close for ever the shameful disregard of the human equality professed by Jefferson and all the signatories to the American Constitution, two hundred and thirty two years ago.

One practical way to apprehend the different scale of both “firsts” would be to imagine the visit of the newly elected American president to some world capitals. The visit of President Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill would cause some traffic jams in Paris or London. But both of them have faces that are familiar to the European crowds. Hillary’s smile would certainly something very special to the occasion.

But imagine for a moment that Obama, his wife and daughters, the President and the First Family of the United States, arrive in Bangaladore, Manila, or Nairobi in a state visit: everybody present would intuitively know that they were witnessing history in the making, the dawn of a new world.

More importantly, the American people themselves would realize that history had taken a radical and much needed break with the recent past. Hillary and her husband, marvelously talented individuals as both are, are still part of a past some of us would like to forget. Hillary would not come alone into the White House. Besides her own baggage, which is heavy anyhow, she would bring along her very intrusive husband. If his irritating behavior during the South Carolina primary can be taken as a token of his leading man complex, Hillary’s “experience” in the White House could be “again” embarrassing to her and to the country as a whole.

Furthermore, one of her irritating character-traits is the obstinate reluctance to admit that she was ever wrong, even when she voted to support Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. There is no power on earth to make her see that such admission would enhance her standing among American voters. Whether such obstinacy is still masterminding her important decisions is going to be tested very soon. Everybody knows that Bush is attempting to prolong his nefarious legacy by, firstly, making permanent his obscene tax cuts for the very wealthy, and, secondly, by signing some kind of a treaty or compact with the Iraqi administration of Prime Minister al-Maliki securing the presence of American troops in Iraq far beyond Bush’s term in office, for as many as hundred years, as McCain, the American hero, has recently suggested.

All of these potential dangers can quickly be avoided by simply making Obama the President of the United States. Obama knows very well that Iraq is neither Germany nor Japan (where American garrisons have been since the end of WWII), but rather a part of a region of the world where the imperialistic and colonial west has been for years after oil and for control of the Suez canal (among other selfish reasons). Iraq is surrounded by Muslim nations that have no love lost toward the United States. The presence of American troops in Iraq is a constant irritant to Muslims everywhere in the world. It’s in fact a terrible threat to our national security. America has to prove to the world that the colonial period is gone and that America is not an empire but a friend in perfect solidarity with all suffering humanity. Hillary’s vague declarations about the number and the mission of American troops after a partial withdrawal from Iraq, is too reminiscent of Bush’s ominous rhetoric to be welcomed back into the White House. Let’s start from scratch, bring Obama and Michelle to Washington. It’s a different world!