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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.
Topics: Politics |
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