Why caucuses are im****tant to party politics, for more please see below.
In article <4832f990$1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
blue_collar_worker <bcw@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Obama is not a real winner. Caucuses are not democratic because they
>require persons to go to a meeting place and vote using the rules set
>up for the caucus that vary from State to State. Older voters and
>blue collar voters have difficulty finding the caucus locations and
>going through the long process. As a result a very small number of
>people determine a dispro****tionate number of delegates. For
>instance, Alaska has about 650,000 people. But less than 1,000
>attended caucuses to give Obama 9 delegates. 1000/650000 x 100 =
>1.53 That means only 1.53 percent of the population of Alaska gave
>Obama 9 delegates! This was a 75 percent win for Obama!
You've been making this specious argument for Hillary for weeks now.
And today I saw a re****t which confirms it is part of Hillary's
campaign strategy to belittle the caucus vote:
. . . while speaking to several hundred people in a high school
gymnasium, Clinton picked up her campaign's argument that Obama's
victories in states that had caucuses instead of primaries are
somehow less significant because turnout was lower.
(But then you are just a mercenary, a paid ****ll as I have pointed out
occasionally in the past couple of months ever since you came on the
scene and posted dozens posts daily spewing forth ludicrous things,
making crude charges against Obama with every possible crime you could
imagine, as if they sound even remotely plausible. But then you are
just a mercenary and you do what you have to do. And that's why your
posts sound artificial and lack persuasion.)
In fact, black folks who overwhelmingly sup****t Obama and have
provided him with his winning margin are hardly the caucus type.
Most black women have to work and are dead tired afterwards and still
have to make supper for the family when they get home. And that's
why, in my opinion, obesity is such a rampant problem among black
women.
On the other hand, the typical caucus type are middle-class women and
retired folks. They have the time and political awareness to be party
activists and to caucus.
Hillary's margin comes from women and white males (and of course
females) who are poorly educated and are thus susceptible to smear
Hillary and Bill Clinton and their paid ****lls like you have been
spreading.
The reasons why Hillary isn't where she would like to be are many,
among which are her track record in terms of the most unpopular
sentiment Americans hold today, our neocon-driven foreign policy which
irrationally favors whatever the rightwing Israeli government wants
for the Middle East and which requires engaging America in endless
pre-occupation of wars, her low-ball racist campaign tactics even as
her rivals have been treating her with kid-gloves for fear that they
would offend the women voters, and how cynical use of the Clinton name
to fatten her chance to become the next president.
The real reason for why she was the presumptive nominee for months
with practically all the governors and local party machines backing
her from the start and with a huge amount of money in her campaign
chest when it started back in 2007 but has gradually fallen behind in
her chances is because she is fundamentally flawed as a candidate to
be the first woman president of the United States.
As a woman candidate who is perceived to be smart, at least a lot
smarter than the Bushes and Ronald Reagan and at least as smart as
Bill Clinton, who is aiming to lead the consistently pro-affirmative
action political party, who is white (and therefore can more easily
overcome the residual racism in America), and who is automatically the
choice of women and socially progressive Americans, Hillary was
rightly perceived as unbeatable, except for her Iraq war vote and her
going-out-on-a-limp vote to enable the president to attack Iran when
he sees fit.
So, it is not surprising to see that Hillary was so confident that she
was expecting to wrap up the race by early March, after the California
primary. And in fact she was so confident that her original strategy
downplayed the need for her to win the caucus states.
And the neocon war lobby was so confident that they will have a
torchbearer in Hillary that George Bush himself and the neocon war
architect Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness, have given
published interviews indicating their confidence that Hillary will
continue the occupation war in Iraq and attack Iran when the time
comes.
According Sarah Baxter,
Bush believes Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and has
privately advised her not to voice antiwar rhetoric on Iraq that
she may come to regret, according to a new book, The Evangelical
President, by Bill Sammon. "It's different being a candidate and
being the president," Bush said. "No matter who the president is,
no matter what party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and
seriously consider the effect of a vacuum being created in the
Middle East . . . they will then begin to understand the need to
continue to sup****t the young democracy."
. . .
Perle believes that Clinton might be prepared to order military
strikes against Iran if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes
Tehran's nuclear programme to the brink. "If President Clinton is
informed in March 2009 that we've got ironclad intelligence that if
we don't act within the next 30 days it's going to be too late, I
wouldn't begin to predict what she would do," Perle said. "Nobody
wants to act before it is absolutely essential . . . but things can
change very quickly."
In fact both Hillary's rivals have given her the pass for never
mentioning her duplicitous positions on Iraq and never mentioned what
Ted Koppel has re****ted that Hillary has met with senior Pentagon
officials and reassured them that if she would be president and still
be president in 2016, there would still be sizable American troops
deployed in Iraq then.
Ironically, she was still appealing to the pro-war sentiment when the
democratic rank-and-file are so against the war, when the economy
which has been unmistakably dragged down by the war is so stressed
out, and when she is behind in the nomination race.
But I think that she has little choice. Although theoretically
Hillary has all the numbers on her side, she has a tremendous Achilles
heel by being a damaged good from the Clinton White House of the
1990s. It's not that the democrats didn't love the Clintons; it's
just that in the age when neocons have found their way into keeping a
close leash on practically every ambitious D.C. politician. These
neocons control the major media outlets. They not only control what
disinformation to dish out to the American public but at the same time
also hold the dirt on everybody that they can dish out what they want
when it will serve their interests. Naturally, the more dirt they
have on you, the more pliable you become for them.
So, all the smart politicians were on the neocon war lobby's side when
the Bush-Cheney White House decided to invade Iraq. being as smart
and seasoned a politician as Hillary, she wanted to plug that hole,
making sure that there would not be surprises sprung on her in the
course of the campaign. That's smart, according to the conventional
political calculus of American national politics. And just like Bush
told a published interview, Hillary was seasoned enough to know that
she needed to say certain things to her constituents on the campaign
trail but once she is in the oval office, she would, in his words, do
the right thing and continue the regime change policy he has set in
motion for America v. the rest of the world.
So, Hillary has thought that she could just mutter at minus 40 decibel
level her opposition to the Iraq war when she had to but avoided any
discussion of it as much as possible. She thought that campaigning
was just a chore like taking a bunch of unpleasant exams in college in
order to earn a diploma.
But she misjudged the mood of the country. The party she is seeking
to lead is backboned on the more educated, more progressive, and
independent American voters who can think better for themselves, and
are less easily manipulated.
In fact, they are the more likely activists in today's political scene
than anyone else.
And although the Clinton campaign has not acknowledged it, it must
have thought that Hillary's sup****t among party activists who are
the driving forces in party caususes isn't that strong.
Some analysts have blamed the campaign for consciously ignoring the
causus in her campaign strategy when they *****s her fall from grace.
But Hillary may never have had much chance in that area and her
campaign recognized it. (If caucuses were easy fruit for the picking
she would have gone for it no doubt. But if it requires a lot of
resources and if hers are finite even at a huge advantage over her
rivals from the start, at least financially.)
And that's why I think that Hillary is a flawed candidate for the
feminist cause, at this time, at a time when the neocons have so much
inside control in Wa****ngton D.C. and when they have so much control
over Hillary from her association with the long and glaring political
life of Bill Clinton.
I feel sorry for the women who feel so sad that if they didn't have
Hillary this time, even as she is such a damaged good, that they may
not see a woman president in their lifetime.
I think that they are overly pessimistic and overly emotional.
Hillary will not be what they need and certainly not what America and
the world need right now. With a Hillary presidency, wars will keep
going and all the woes, the economy and gas prices will keep coming
back to haunt us. Such a presidency will not have the money to pay
for meaningful social reforms it has promised. Every dollar that is
further spent for any war is one less dollar for social security
Hillary is just playing the doting mother who spoils the child on the
retired folks and the so-called blue-collar white workers.
Hillary is not winning because she could not win the caucuses. And
for a political party, rules are made to encourage party activism
which in turns promote the ideology of the party, the set of
principles the party is founded on and continues to sup****t.
A party cannot simply arbitrarily cater to the whim of the campaign
tactics of an individual who tries to benefit him- or herself. And
winning, although is nice, is not everything. Changing your rules
because someone from your party might win is bad for the long term
survival of the party. In particular, we know that there has been
outside forces which have been actively disrupting the voting process,
such as operation chaos and endless smear, that have grossly distorted
the metric which measures success, by which party rules are based on.
Finally, when 100 votes are to be assigned between two candidates X
and Y, and if Y has reached the 51-vote mark as the ballots are
continuously counted and announced, even if not all 100 votes have
been cast, it does not mean that X will have any chance. X won't
because he or she will have at most 49 votes to him- or herself, and
possibly fewer. Or to borrow from the fabled rabbit-and-turtle race
where the speedy rabbit took a nap as turtle finally crossed the
finish line, to insist that the race organizers must wait for the
rabbit to wake up and finish the race because she insists that she has
the right to finish the course doesn't alter the result. And if
everyone has gone home before the rabbit wakes up and runs to the
finish line, it is not an act to diminish the rabbit and his bettors
and sup****ters.
But to avoid bruising the feeling of Hillary's sup****ters whom the
Obama sup****ters will likely need for him to win, we are being very
very gentle.
This in fact points out a part of the problem when we run a woman
candidate for president simply because theoretically she has a chance
to win.
Everybody is tiptoeing around the candidate and treating her with kid
gloves even though she is a known damaged good because we are supposed
to be ``gentleman'' enough to want to be gentle to the woman, even
though she is swinging mud and hitting below the belt, and even though
she is crying to ``totally obliterate another country when it has
shown no sign to attack this country. And they don't dare to
explicitly criticize her for her blatantly racist/divisive campaign
strategy but only mutely referring to ``the tone'' of her campaign.
And things really get ludicrous when Geraldine Ferraro continues to
indulged herself in the notion that she could be blatantly racist
about Hillary's opponent but she would now insist that Hillary's fall
from grace is due to misogyny.
. . .
Asked if the former first lady could blame her loss on gender,
Ferraro said, "She might, but I certainly will and other people
involved in watching the campaign will."
. . .
Ferraro stirred up a firestorm in March with comments attributing
Obama's stunning rise in US politics to his race.
"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,"
Ferraro told a California newspaper. She resigned from Clinton's
campaign finance committee shortly after.
Obama has come to where he is today not by black sup****t alone. He is
where he is today because of the anti-war sentiment of the country and
he has gotten it right from the start. He has a lot of sup****t from
the young, educated, and financially less dependent Americans, male
and female alike. And furthermore, he has shown that he could work
with all the white men and women in Wasington, D.C., or else he would
not have gotten the sup****t he did from Jay Rockefeller, Robert Byrd,
Lee Hamilton, Sam Nunn, and all these traditional white males, as well
as several female legislators and Warren Buffett on Wall Street.
By the way, I have not been an Obama sup****ter from the start, due to
the fact that his anti-war stand isn't as comprehensive and
unambiguous as others, like those of Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
And I am no misogyny and have consistently voted for women in national
politics, including the presidential race. I don't have to mention
their names but I would not hesitate to mention that the one woman I
have voted for president was not a major party candidate. And I have
no reason to be a misogyny because I grew up knowing that it is the
women in my family, two aunts, one a pediatrician without whom I would
not have survive, according to my mother, and the other who cared for
me when my mother was absent and I was injured, my paternal
grandmother, and not the least is my mother, whose influence on my
outlook is unbound. They were there for me when my father and
grandfather were not. And probably for this reason, I have always
been a feminist at heart.
But I also have noticed the expensive metal-detectors set up at the
entries of family courts while many municipal courts don't have them
and understand that restraining orders are routinely dished out to
guys by judges and commissioners when women request them, hardly any
questions asked. And I have encountered a few really in-your-face,
Geraldine Ferraro and Condoleeza Rice type who are both unabashedly
dishonest and care nothing about the injuries they would inflict on
you, even the innocent women around you, even though their accusations
are total lies.
It is this kind of thing that the women's movement need to keep in
kind when they calibrate their strategy next time around, which may
not be far in the future.
So, crying foul for Hillary and smearing against Obama is grossly
dishonest at this moment. And it doesn't help the feminist cause.
lo yeeOn
========
By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer 23 minutes ago
. . .
Later, while speaking to several hundred people in a high school
gymnasium, Clinton picked up her campaign's argument that Obama's
victories in states that had caucuses instead of primaries are
somehow less significant because turnout was lower.
Clinton also revived her pitch that many of the states where he has
beaten her, like Alaska, Idaho and Utah, matter less because they
would not be competitive for Democrats in November. Anybody "who's
really analyzing this" should come to the same conclusions, she
said.
"So I'm going to make my case and I'm going to make it until we
have a nominee, but we're not going to have one today and we're not
going to have one tomorrow and we're not going to have one the next
day," Clinton said. "And if Kentucky turns out tomorrow, I will be
closer to that nomination because of you."
===
Clinton decries ***ism in the White House race
by Kate Beddall Tue May 20, 11:17 AM ET
WA****NGTON (AFP) - Hillary Clinton called ***ist attacks on her
campaign "deeply offensive" Tuesday, as female sup****ters sprang to
her defense, saying she speaks for all women and should stay in the
Democratic race to the bitter end.
In what appear to be the waning days of her historic White House
bid, the former first lady spoke out for the first time about what
her sup****ters have long condemned, including derisive T-****rts,
novelty items and commentary focusing on her gender.
"It's been deeply offensive to millions of women," Clinton said
told The Wa****ngton Post in an interview, in which she pinned blame
primarily on tolerant attitudes in the media.
"I believe this campaign has been a groundbreaker in a lot of
ways. But it certainly has been challenging given some of the
attitudes in the press," Clinton said of the contest that will
crown either a black or a female presidential nominee for the first
time in history.
Clinton said she did not believe the campaign had been tainted by
racism, adding that racism is apparently less tolerated in US
society than ***ism.
"There should be equal treatment of the ***ism and the racism when
it raises its ugly head," she said.
"It does seem as though the press at least is not as bothered by
the incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by
people who are nothing but misogynists."
Female sup****ters of Hillary Clinton have sprung to her defense,
insisting she should stay in the Democratic primary race to the
end, June 3.
"Not so fast," read a full page ad in The New York Times Tuesday,
amid calls for Clinton to bow out sooner to help unify the party
after a divisive contest between Clinton and Illinois Senator
Barack Obama.
"Hillary's voice is OUR voice, and she's speaking for all of us,"
said the ad, purchased by a group not affiliated with the Clinton
campaign called WomenCount.
"We want Hillary to stay in this race until every vote is cast,
every vote is counted, and we know that our voices are heard."
Obama meanwhile inched closer to claiming the right to be the
party's standard bearer in November, with voting in Kentucky and
Oregon Tuesday likely to give him a majority of pledged delegates,
according to aides.
"A clear majority of elected delegates will send an unmistakable
message -- the people have spoken, and they are ready for change,"
Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe said in a fundraising email
Monday.
Geraldine Ferraro, who as the Democratic party's vice presidential
nominee in 1984 is the only woman on a major US presidential ticket
to date, said ***ism had been "rampant" in the presidential primary
campaign.
Asked if the former first lady could blame her loss on gender,
Ferraro said, "She might, but I certainly will and other people
involved in watching the campaign will."
"Latent ***ism has been around this country for a long time. In
this campaign it was rampant," Ferraro said on NBC's Today show.
"There is a real difference in this country. It is not okay to be
racist. It is just not. It is almost acceptable to be ***ist,"
Ferraro said as the Democrats fielded the historic choice of the
first female or the first black presidential nominee.
Ferraro recalled a Clinton rally in New Hamp****re when someone in
the audience held up a sign saying "Iron my ****rt."
"Suppose somebody at that Barack Obama rally said '****ne my shoes.'
The person would have been swamped by the media saying, what, are
you a racist? Hillary barely saw press on this. It is not only the
Obama campaign. It is how the press has handled this."
Ferraro stirred up a firestorm in March with comments attributing
Obama's stunning rise in US politics to his race.
"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,"
Ferraro told a California newspaper. She resigned from Clinton's
campaign finance committee shortly after.
===
Monday, 8 October 2007
George Bush smooths path for Hillary
BUSH administration officials are paving the way for a smooth
transition to a possible Democratic presidency as Hillary Clinton
consolidates her position as the overwhelming favourite to win her
party's nomination for the 2008 election.
Clinton has powered her way to the top of the Democratic pack,
establi****ng a 33-point lead in one poll last week over Barack Obama,
her nearest rival.
She raised $7m more than Obama in the last quarter and attracted more
individual contri-butors than the Illinois senator, proving her
popularity with grassroots Democrats.
With Clinton looking the near-inevitable nominee, Bush officials intend
to hold her to her promise to be tough on defence and national
security. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is hoping to establish a
bipartisan consensus on defence that will last beyond next year's
election.
In the clearest sign of a ****ft in gear, Gates is to appoint John
Hamre, a former official in President Bill Clinton's administration, to
chair the Defense Policy Board once led by Richard Perle, a leading
neoconservative advocate of the invasion of Iraq. The board's job will
be to prepare for the transition to a new administration in 2008,
according to a Pentagon spokesman.
Hamre, who was Bill Clinton's deputy defence secretary in the 1990s,
has been highly critical of the conduct of the war on terror. In The
Wa****ngton Post last year he wrote: "The policies that led to
Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, secret renditions and warrantless wiretaps
have undermined America's towering moral authority."
In common with Gates, Hamre is sceptical about the value of the Iraq
troop surge. He recently served on a bipartisan commission on Iraq
chaired by James Jones, the former Nato commander. In evidence to
Congress last month, Hamre said: "Absent political reconciliation, it's
hard to see how this [the war] ends well."
However, Hamre, who heads the influential Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Wa****ngton, also argued that America "will be
hurt if we crawl out or run out of Iraq". He believes the next
president should maintain a vital but scaled-down presence in the
country in order to oversee the training of Iraqi security forces and
to "direct operations against known bad guys".
Lawrence Korb, a defence expert at the Center for American Progress, a
Democratic think tank, described Hamre's imminent appointment as a
"brilliant move" which would mark a dramatic break with Perle's era.
"Most people think the next president will be a Democrat and Gates, who
has been around for a long time, believes it is his job to ensure that
national security is not affected," Korb said.
Clinton has been sidestepping calls to pull US troops out of Iraq if
she wins, sticking to a broader promise to begin a phased withdrawal.
In a recent television interview, the New York senator refused to state
that all US combat troops would leave Iraq by the end of her first term
in office. She voted in the Senate last month to designate the Iranian
Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation.
Perle believes that Clinton might be prepared to order military strikes
against Iran if President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad takes Tehran's nuclear
programme to the brink. "If President Clinton is informed in March 2009
that we've got ironclad intelligence that if we don't act within the
next 30 days it's going to be too late, I wouldn't begin to predict
what she would do," Perle said. "Nobody wants to act before it is
absolutely essential . . . but things can change very quickly."
Perle is generous about the appointment of Hamre, arguing that the
Defense Policy Board has a tradition of bipartisan****p. "He's an
experienced professional and a very good choice," Perle said, noting
that George W Bush had kept on George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, as
CIA chief after winning the 2000 election.
Bush believes Clinton will win the Democratic nomination and has
privately advised her not to voice antiwar rhetoric on Iraq that she
may come to regret, according to a new book, The Evangelical President,
by Bill Sammon. "It's different being a candidate and being the
president," Bush said. "No matter who the president is, no matter what
party, when they sit here in the Oval Office and seriously consider the
effect of a vacuum being created in the Middle East . . . they will
then begin to understand the need to continue to sup****t the young
democracy."
The Treasury, under Henry "Hank" Paulson, has also been appointing
Democrat sup****ters to senior positions. Robert Novak, the conservative
columnist, re****ted that Paulson last week named Eric Mindich, a
leading Democratic fundraiser, for a key role as an adviser on
financial markets. One Republican in the Bush administration wrote
disapprovingly in an e-mail: "This leads some to wonder whether this
Treasury has become the preplaced Hillary Clinton team."
Clinton's domination of the Democratic field may prompt her leading
opponents to sharpen their rhetoric against her. So far the contest
with Obama and John Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina,
has been remarkably civil.
Edwards upped the ante against Clinton last week by attacking links
between Mark Penn, her senior adviser and poll-ster, and Blackwater,
the private security firm that was accused of recklessly killing 11
Iraqi civilians last month. "We don't want to replace a group of
cor****ate Republicans with a group of cor****ate Democrats," he said.
Edwards and Obama have rarely criticised Clinton directly by name, but
David Axelrod, Obama's campaign manager, said his candidate would
rather show a "common purpose to our politics rather than divisiveness
and political point-scoring".
It was too soon for Clinton's coronation, Axelrod said: "How-ard Dean
had plenty of momentum in the fall of 2003, when everyone was anointing
him the Democratic nominee. I'm happy if the Clintons want to do
victory laps in October; I'll take ours in January and February" when
the primary votes are counted.
Obama is still hoping to win the Iowa caucus, where Edwards is also
performing well. Michelle Obama, his wife, who will be visiting Britain
on a fundraising mission next week, let slip recently: "If Barack
doesn't win Iowa, it's just a dream."
Obama upset traditional voters last week by saying that he was against
shows of patriotism, such as wearing a pin lapel of the American flag.
"I decided I won't wear that pin on my chest," he said. "Instead I'm
going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this
country great."
Peggy Noonan, President Rea-gan's former speechwriter, said the
Clintons had the Democratic party in a trance. She wrote in The Wall
Street Journal: "The Bushes are wired into the Republican money-line
system; the Clintons are wired into the Democratic money-line system.
For two generations now they have had the same dynamics in play . . .
Is this good for our democracy, this air of inevitability?"
by Sarah Baxter from timesonline.co.uk
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Posted by Scevenson at 08:45
>
>This is not a democracy! This is not a republic! This is fascism!
>In this case Fascism is a government, faction, movement, or political
>philosophy that raises the use of caucuses, above the individual and
>is characterized by a centralized autocratic party governed by rules
>for caucuses, and aggressive repression of the opposition. In
>addition to placing the interests of the individual as subordinate to
>that of the caucus, fascism seeks to achieve a national rebirth by
>promoting one person above the interests of the people.
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