Candidates Aren’t Who We Are
By TomInReston | June 1, 2008
Like the 243 other political super-junkies on the planet, I spent virtually the entire last day of May 2008 glued to C-SPAN’s coverage of the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee.
I won’t comment now on the outcome. It was, in the end, pretty predictable and as fair as it could be. I’m much more interested in the aftermath.
In particular, I saw a woman on CNN’s post-meeting coverage, crying uncontrollably, upset that the Clinton campaign wasn’t given all it wanted by the committee. This was the kind of emotional display you might expect had she lost a loved one, or been part of a truly tragic catastrophe.
I’ve seen this many times. The hard work of campaigning for a candidate creates bonds that make losing any battle very personal.
For those of us who participate almost every day in party politics, where primaries at every level create situations in which someone you admire and work for comes up a bit short, this kind of personal identification with a candidate we often see. But for us it remains something of a mystery.
In the end, that may explain why the DNC members on the committee were able to fashion a compromise that — like most compromises — didn’t completely satisfy everyone, while candidate supporters on both sides could be saistfied with nothing less than a full endorsement of their position, no matter how self-serving.
Those of us Democrats who work at the party level eventually come to understand that politics is about ideas, not candidates. It’s a practical view that puts ideas and policies at the top of the pyramid and views candidates as the vessels for delivering those ideas and policies. In the end, we may, and do, judge candidates on their ability to deliver those ideas effectively by means of their campaigning skills, fund raising ability, and organizational prowess. However hard we work for one candidate or another, in the end we work with the tools the primary or caucus voters give us.
It can’t be personal.
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Lost in the Narrative
By Tom | March 15, 2008
If you watch much political coverage on television — both cable and broadcast — or read the usual print pubs, you can’t escape the fact that all these folks are on the same page.
Lately, it’s been the idea that somehow the intense battle between Clinton and Obama, and the attendant attacks from both, are somehow tearing the party apart and may ruin the Democrats’ chances for winning the presidential election.
Let me clue you in on something I never hear. No matter who the Dems nominate, a huge majority of the party and a rather large part of so-called independents will vote against a continuation of the current disaster.
Will some stay home on election day? Maybe. But I’d guess very few. Nothing will unite Democrats more than the threat of a third Bush term in the person of John McCain. Nothing.
I’m eager for the end of the nomination process. I can’t wait for the Democratic candidate to fully focus on what McCain represents and rip his straight-talking maverick image to shreds.
And while I love the idea of young, inspiring, energetic Obama taking on the old, lackluster, war-mongering, ethically challenged McCain, I’ll be just as eager to support Hillary and will relish her combativeness when it’s turned on the morally bankrupt Republican machine.
Either way, it’s gonna be fun.
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Back After Hiatus
By Tom | March 15, 2008
It’s one of the cardinal rules of blogging… post often.
Circumstances made that impossible.
Sorry.
Will do better.
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Happy New Year. Time to get my country back.
By Tom | January 1, 2008
Asked what form of government the Consitutional convention had produced, Benjamin Franklin is said to have answered: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
I don’t do resolutions at the start of a new year.
However, I am beginning this year with a decision and a promise to myself, to my family, to my friends, and to the universe: In the next 12 months, I will accept Dr. Franklin’s challenge. I will do everything in my power, even to the risking of life and limb, to reclaim my country from the vile hands who are trying to wrest it from our grasp. I will enlist and lead all who will join me in this effort and I will marry my efforts to those of the thousands who also engage in this essential undertaking.
“When patience has begotten false estimates of its motives, when wrongs are pressed because it is believed they will be borne, resistance becomes morality.”
–Thomas Jefferson to M. deStael, 1807
I, and we as a nation, have been patient as the present administration and a servile Congress have step-by-step weakened and undermined our very system of government — and our protection against abuses by that government. In the days after a calamitous attack, patience was perhaps called for. But as Mr. Jefferson noted, that initial patience has been misconstrued as willing consent. Now abuse is heaped upon abuse, simply because those who wield state power believe they have our permission (or believe we will submit, in any case).
This will not stand.
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Memo to Democrats.
By Tom | November 18, 2007
I’ve now seen most of the Thursday night Democratic candidate debate, and I’m now officially tired of at least one of the many narratives. While in principle, compromise and bipartisanship is fine, it is no virtue to meet the current Republicans halfway.
These are the Republicans who start from the proposition that torture is fine, that dropping habeas corpus for anyone the President designates is right, that putting small-time drug dealers in jail is great, but corporate lawbreakers should be given immunity. These are folks who lie and cheat, barring legitimate voters from the polls with one hand and ignoring war profiteering and outright theft on the other.
It takes two sides to create a “new politics,” and I can promise you that Republicans have no intention of participating on anything like equal terms. Their idea of compromise — the only compromise they’ll accept — is capitulation by Democrats.
I’m not working for or voting for that kind of “compromise.”
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