The Clinton faction was unsuccessful in their attempt to use the party platform process to ban the use of caucuses in future presidential contests. It was an effort to delegitimize Barack Obama’s victory and it went along with a bunch of other unseemly behavior.
Tensions between Obama and Clinton forces were evident at the Convention Center here, where the meeting took place. Clinton’s supporters sat together in the audience, wearing campaign buttons and T-shirts bearing her name. One person hissed when Obama’s name was mentioned.
Among the activists serving on the committee, there were also signs of a split.
Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the head of a private holding company and a member of the committee, took the microphone after the caucus amendment was defeated to register a protest.
After the meeting, she said she still hadn’t made up her mind about whether to vote for Obama because she didn’t “understand how a person comes to the U.S. Senate and — before they’ve done one thing there — decides they can be president.”
“I have serious questions about Barack Obama and what the Democratic Party is doing,” she said. “I have serious issues with Barack Obama.”
I can readily understand why a Rothschild that is the owner of a Holding Company might be a little reticent to choose Barack Obama over John McCain. But I don’t think it makes for good press for the Clinton camp.
If we were building a state’s primary system from scratch, would any intelligent person propose the use of caucuses?
I think not.
hells yes. If it were up to me only registered Democrats that are willing to spend three hours caucusing would get to decide who the nominee is.
My objections to voting by mail or online are based in my belief that voting should require effort. You should have to get off your ass and go down to your local firehouse or village hall to cast a ballot. For voicing that opinion I’ve been called an elitist and other pejoratives.
The caucus system, however, is chaotic and unfair. People with time on their hands, for whatever reason, have a much easier time attending for those three hours.
ever notice how third parties go about choosing their nominees? The point isn’t to make it a pain in the ass to participate in the political system but to have people that believe in the party platform selecting the nominee. Only then to you take your choice to the public at large. We’ve got this idea that the very selection of a party banner holder needs to be done at the ballot box and decided by maximum participation (including non-party members).
There are strategic reasons to do this, but it is not undemocratic not to do it.
non party members and I don’t understand why you think those who show up at a caucus necessarily believe in the party platform. Come to think of it, at the time of the caucuses, there IS no party platform.
Caucus voting forces a candidate work instead of being lazy..like you’re entitled to win based on name recognition or whatever. A person who is lazy and cannot win a caucus state, relies on backroom deals and a political machine for power.
Where caucus force you to build that power from the ground up.
First of all, it does not address the points made in my comment. No surprise there.
But the thing that’s really amusing is that it was Obama’s “political machine” which drove the turnout in the most important areas of the caucus states. A fact which was bragged about on this very site – that the Clinton team didn’t know how to work the caucus system and the Obama team did.
A political machine doles out patronage.
Do you not believe that the Obama machine will dole out patronage when he’s elected?
and
b.”I don’t understand why you think those who show up at a caucus necessarily believe in the party platform. Come to think of it, at the time of the caucuses, there IS no party platform.”
The whining over the role of caucuses in Democratic primaries is stupid and it’s wasting time we don’t have.
So let’s review–again: All this drama does is highlight that the Clinton camp was too lazy, arrogant and/or clueless to do their homework, especially given that said campaign included people familiar with the caucus process and overall Democratic party rules.
Billy boy and his
sycophantssupporters didn’t have a problem with caucuses before, because if he did or they did, they would already be history.But of course, who needed to do their homework when the establishment Dems were all wrapped up in their favor? As well as the media narrative, crucial voting blocs, etc.
Look, sorry about your arrested coronation and all, but there’s an election to win.
Another non-response response.
Who’da thought?
Facts being stubborn things and all.
But, if you want to highlight the stupidity of dismissing huge swaths of people as “not important,” ignore the rules until the 11th hour, and generally whine about a process that they could not master but should have, then be my guest. It still doesn’t change what that campaign did. Most importantly, it showed who they are. I believe them–and I believe you.
Now…there’s an election to win. For more pity parties over crushed coronations, exit stage right.
My only concern is that people who are interested may not be able to get their ass to a caucus for reasons that have nothing to do with commitment. A nighttime job. Health/disability. Responsibility for caring for someone else. Etc. Some kind of absentee ballot? This was my first primary in a caucus state, and I liked it. And people here really like it. But we need to deal with the situation that people who are informed and want to participate cannot for reasons that don’t reflect poorly on them.
Just when I think I’m over being pissed off by PUMAs and camp Clinton’s tactics, and ready to let bygones be bygones, I see a quote like Rothschild’s or the crap coming out about Penn’s memos during the end of the primaries.
¡jezeus! talk about your sore losers…the clintonista are re-writing the book on how to be a prick.
and l completely agree with you on caucuses, boo…put democracy back in the hands of the people. with the “old” primary system, you end up with the machines’ choice[s]…and we’ve seen where that leads here…salazar’s a perfect example of that.
And this kind of behavior makes women look unsophisticated, undemocratic, etc. I’m appalled and embarassed for my gender, the way they’ve put blinders on in this election!
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Lynn Forester de Rothschild
A nice lady, but a Democrat? More a Republican-lite or a Lieberman.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."A perfect Clintonista. Money first, people dead last.
barracuda perhaps? puma and cougar are already taken…
Married to Sir Evelyn Rothschild.
How would you know? This stupid woman is a priviledged, rich bitch, and you have NO IDEA what she is like.
She sounds like an idiot. I’m serious.
She’s cute enough, but being a trophy wife and having the advantage of billions of dollars in capital to run your stupid schemes does not make you nice. Just a rich bitch.
Now, just between you and me, anyone who says insanely moronic crap like this in public is one thing and one thing only: an idiot.
I am working on my conspiracy theory that the Clintons have been assets of the CIA since Yale. She’s an inside player and ultimately she’s protecting the wealthy. A class warrior on the other side. Just saying.
I’d still vote for her over McCain. But I don’t have to so I won’t.
Makes sense. And she was fired from her role on the Watergate committee for being such a liar.
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The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.
The brief involved precedent for representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding. When Hillary endeavored to write a legal brief arguing there is no right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding, Zeifman says, he told Hillary about the case of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who faced an impeachment attempt in 1970.
“As soon as the impeachment resolutions were introduced by (then-House Minority Leader Gerald) Ford, and they were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, the first thing Douglas did was hire himself a lawyer,” Zeifman said.
The Judiciary Committee allowed Douglas to keep counsel, thus establishing the precedent. Zeifman says he told Hillary that all the documents establishing this fact were in the Judiciary Committee’s public files.
So what did Hillary do?“Hillary then removed all the Douglas files to the offices where she was located, which at that time was secured and inaccessible to the public,” Zeifman said. Hillary then proceeded to write a legal brief arguing there was no precedent for the right to representation by counsel during an impeachment proceeding – as if the Douglas case had never occurred.
The brief was so fraudulent and ridiculous, Zeifman believes Hillary would have been disbarred if she had submitted it to a judge.
Zeifman says that if Hillary, Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar had succeeded, members of the House Judiciary Committee would have also been denied the right to cross-examine witnesses, and denied the opportunity to even participate in the drafting of articles of impeachment against Nixon.
… Zeifman says he was urged by top committee members to keep a diary of everything that was happening. He did so, and still has the diary if anyone wants to check the veracity of his story. Certainly, he could not have known in 1974 that diary entries about a young lawyer named Hillary Rodham would be of interest to anyone 34 years later.
But they show that the pattern of lies, deceit, fabrications and unethical behavior was established long ago – long before the Bosnia lie, and indeed, even before cattle futures, Travelgate and Whitewater – for the woman who is still asking us to make her president of the United States.
Jerome Zeifman has filed charges of war crimes before the International Criminal Tribunal against Bill Clinton
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Expletive deleted. What the hell is she doing the platform committee? Any Democrat who can’t decide between Obama and McCain isn’t much of a Democrat. And they sure as hell don’t have any business being on any kind of policy making committee of the Democratic Party. And I don’t give a damn how much money she gave or bundled for Hillary’s campaign. That’s exactly what’s wrong with the party, and with our political system, in the first place.
I’m predicting the the Democratic Convention is not going to go well. The Clintonites are going to make trouble, and we’ll all be worse off for it.
Here’s the deal as I see it:
States determine how they’ll allocate their dollars. Some states budget the money to hold primary elections, and some don’t. In the states where there is public funding for primary elections, those pretty much take place. In the states where there is no will to provide public funding for partisan primary elections, then it is left to the state party to run the selection process (almost always caucuses, for financial reasons).
Frankly, I don’t know of too many state parties (er, none) that can afford to stage a full-scale state primary election. Thus, in those states where there is no public primary election funding, the caucus becomes the fallback position. I’m not aware of any state party that prefers a caucus system; rather, they conduct them out of necessity.
So that being said, it seems massively unfair to criticize the state parties for the caucus process when they are merely picking up the pieces left by the failure of their state governments to provide for primary elections.
State caucuses represent a huge project for the local parties in those states where they are held. Rather than condemning those state parties, it seems like good Democrats everywhere should be saluting them for a difficult task that has been well performed.
[This is my personal opinion. I work for the California Democratic Party (California is a primary state), and my comment does not reflect the opinions of the CDP.]