Is Rove behind Obama
I love this conspiracy theory! I hope it spreads on the left.
Bamboozling the American electorate again
The strategy involves G.O.P. crossover voting to take out Clinton, marketing newcomer Obama, stripping battleground delegates, and (if necessary) inciting a riot at the convention or declaring martial law...
(Print out article as a PDF File or skip to a section: Delegates/Conventions - Rezko Affair - Bush coup?)
Revised and Updated March 28, 2008
Evidence of a covert campaign to undermine the presidential primaries is rife, so it's curious that the Democratic Party and even some within the G.O.P. have ignored the actual elephant in the room this year. That would be Karl Rove. Long accused of rigging the two previous presidential elections, this master of deceit would have us believe that he's gone off to sit in a corner and write op-eds.
Not so. According to an article in Time magazine published last November, Republicans have been organized in several states to throw their weight behind Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic rival of Hillary Clinton. At least three former fundraisers for President Bush flushed his coffers with cash early on in the race, something the deep pockets had not done for any candidate in their own party. With receipts topping $100 million in 2007, the first-term Illinois senator broke the record for contributions. It was a remarkable feat, considering that most Americans had not even heard of him before 2005.
The Time article went on to explain that rank and file Republicans were switching parties this spring to vote for Obama in the Democratic primaries. Though not mentioned in the piece, a group called Republicans for Obama formed in 2006 to expedite the strategy, and the Obama campaign launched its own "Be a Democrat For a Day" campaign in 2007. (A campaign video distributed in Florida, Nevada and Vermont explains the procedure.) Many states have open primaries, allowing citizens to vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In Nebraska, the mayor of Omaha publicly rallied Republicans to caucus for Obama on February 9th. In Pennsylvania, Time reported on March 19th that Obama was running radio ads in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia calling on voters to register as Democrats.
The tactic, called crossover voting, appears to be part of a Rove-supported effort to deprive Clinton of the nomination. Republicans For Obama, for one, was not bashful in an email appeal linked to its home page before the March 4th contests. "Since Texas has an open primary," the appeal read, "Republicans and Independents should sign in at their polling place and request a Democratic ballot. They should then vote for Barack Obama... Just think, no more Clintons in the White House!"
Rove has certainly done his homework. Even with the full monte of election-scamming tools available to him - phone bank sabotage, fake polling data, swiftboating, waitlisting, electronic voting equipment, Norman Hsu, etc. - he would be hard pressed to defeat Clinton in November. That's because she's popular nationwide and has promised an immediate troop withdrawal from Iraq. If the contest isn't close, the vote-rigging won't matter. Several influential Republicans admitted as much in a February 11th story for Politico.
If, on the other hand, Obama wins the nomination (or even the VP spot), Rove's prospects brighten considerably. Largely unvetted by the press, the senator carries considerable baggage from his stint as a state legislator, particularly his 17-year relationship with Chicago slumlord Tony Rezko. Until the controversy over his pastor broke recently, most journalists had paid lip service to the particulars of Obama's past. And major media outlets continue to portray him as a fresh new face in American politics, a candidate whose speeches call to mind MLK and JFK, even Abraham Lincoln. The author of the November Time article, Jay Newton-Small, offered the following explanation to account for the bizarre love affair G.O.P. voters say they're having with an African American senator on the other side of the aisle. "It seems a lot of Republicans took to heart Obama's statement in his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that 'there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.'"
Is he kidding? The conservative publication National Journal claims Obama's voting record is the most liberal in Washington, even moreso than Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich. Not everyone agrees with that assessment by a long shot, but it's nevertheless hard to picture the voting pattern implied here: Nixon - Reagan - Bush - Dole - Bush - Obama. Yet this through-the-looking-glass rationale is widely shared by journalists, pundits and politicians across the political spectrum, many of whom advance the equally suspect position that Clinton, the first viable female candidate for president, represents the past.
Last year, at the same time she commanded a huge lead in the national polls, political analysts and professional strategists retained by CNN and other broadcast networks began hammering across the notion that "the voters don't like her". The adjectives "unlikable", "divisive", "untrustworthy" and "polarizing" used to characterize Clinton have been repeated over and over in the same manner that "biological warfare" and "weapons of mass destruction" were employed in the lead-up to the Iraq War. In both cases, the terminology traces back to a cadre of right-wing, neoconservative ideologues who keep the studio seats warm at Fox News. "There is no candidate on record, a front-runner for a party's nomination, who has entered the primary season with negatives as high as she has," Rove told Reuters last August. (In February, Bush's former senior political advisor joined Fox as a part-time election analyst.)
Obama himself invariably recites Rove's "high negatives" comment in press interviews whenever discussing Clinton. His often bitter criticism of her, along with other "Washington insiders", who he says want to "boil and stew all the hope out of him", represents a staple of his core political message. The other half of the stump speech, commonly known as the I'm-a-uniter-not-a-divider pitch, is reminiscent of the Bush 2000 campaign, which Rove managed. Perhaps that's not surprising when you discover that one of Obama's speechwriters is Ben Rhodes, the brother of Fox News VP David Rhodes. (Marisa Guthrie, of BC Beat, reported this connection.) The latter Rhodes has been with the network since its inception in 1996. You may recall that on election night in November 2000, it was Fox that called Florida for Bush, even though the other networks declared Gore the winner after citing the exit polls. How Fox knew the polls were wrong in advance of the vote count has never been explained.
And the G.O.P. links to the Obama campaign don't end there. The Times of London reported on March 2nd that Obama is interviewing Republican lawmakers like Senators Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar for key positions in his cabinet, if he's elected in November. "Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary." the story revealed. "Some regard the outspoken Republican as a possible vice-presidential nominee although that might be regarded as a 'stretch'." Lugar is being evaluated as a potential secretary of state.
Presidential Race or Next American Idol?
Of course, now that the Republican nomination is locked up, crossover voting has reached fever pitch in the remaining primary states. Shortly before Texaco and Ohio, radio talk show hosts Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham both encouraged their listeners to vote for Clinton. Since the two are long-running critics of the senator and her husband, the unusual call may be simply providing cover for the larger operation on behalf of Obama. G.O.P. frontrunner John McCain spent the weekend before the March 4th primaries at home in Arizona, evidently in deference to the crossover initiative.
The Clinton camp also has to contend with a Madison Avenue-style publicity campaign helping her rival gain traction by the hour with the under-thirty crowd. Once an unknown quantity, Obama is now viewed by millions of Americans as a cult icon, the Starbucks equivalent of Gandhi. By all accounts, many have gobbled up the anti-establishment brand like fish in a barrel. Free videos touting the candidate's rock star status began appearing on You-Tube in 2007, including the racy "Obama Girl" clip. This widely publicized, professionally produced video features a bikini-clad actress gyrating her behind as she lip-synchs lyrics of veneration to the candidate.
Even a cursory review of the Obama's record in Illinois and Washington does not bear out the hype. Yet his supporters aren't fretting over the details. During an MSNBC interview in February, Austin State Senator Kirk Watson, an Obama endorser, was unable to list a single accomplishment of the candidate when asked. A week later, a Q and A session with a focus group for the Fox program Hannity and Colmes uncovered the same knowlege gap. None of those voters supporting Obama could identify any past achievement. It was Obama's present-day venture that fascinated them, the historic nature of his quest to become the country's first African-American president, along with his inspirational oratory. (Regarding Obama's record in the U.S. Senate, the New York Times published a background piece on March 9th.)
In addition to the merchandising angle, nobody would have predicted a few years ago that progressive journalists would join in an unholy alliance with the Fox News Channel to promote the novice politician with the strange proximity group. Yet here we are. Ari Berman, editor of The Nation, has been popping up on Fox programs he and his staff once regarded as 24/7 campaign commercials for the Republican Party. The fact that Obama is known to have watered down legislation requiring nuclear giant Exelon to disclose its radiation leaks to the public doesn't seem to trouble them in the least. Exelon is Obama's fourth largest campaign contributor. (See the New York Times article for more on the leaks controversy.)
In a blog posted on her website the morning after the Iowa Caucus, Adrianna Huffington lauded the Illinois senator as practically the Second Coming. Like others of her stripe, she didn't have much to offer in the way of specifics, and spent the bulk of her remarks railing at Bill Clinton, who she said had conducted himself in an interview as "arrogant and entitled, dismissive and fear-mongering".
Huffington was one of several politicos swindled by the California recall referendum in 2002, which removed a Democratic governor from office. In his place, Enron's Ken Lay successfully installed Hollywood action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger and catapulted the state's old guard of Reaganites back to power in this predominantly liberal state. Candidate Huffington dropped out of the race a few days before the election, conceding the entire affair had been a set-up to divide the vote.
That she would allow herself to be bamboozled a second time is astonishing. With a few clicks of a mouse, she might have easily learned that former Speaker Dennis Hastert and the Illinois G.O.P. fielded an ill-qualified, non-state resident named Alan Keyes to run against Obama for an open U.S. senate seat in 2004. Keyes replaced Jack Ryan, the candidate who officially won the G.O.P. primary, after Ryan was embarassed in an alleged sex scandal involving his ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan. (Jeri played "Seven of Nine" in the television series Star Trek Voyager.) The charge against Ryan was never corroborated, and Alan Keyes went on to pick up a staggering 27 percent of the vote, compared to Obama's 70 percent.
In 2007, the Chicago Tribune published an article documenting efforts by Obama himself to disqualify challengers in his two earlier state senate elections.
Rezko Affair
Here's a little more history you won't find at HuffPost or The Nation: At the time of his U.S. senate run, Obama was a relatively minor player who had lost a congressional race against African American incumbent Bobbie Rush in 2000. Obama's first significant campaign donor in the 1990's was Antoin "Tony" Rezko, a Chicago power broker and developer who he met while still in law school. After leaving Harvard, Obama hired on with a community nonprofit agency called Project VOTE, where he helped organize voter registration efforts. He later joined the law firm Miner Barnhill & Galland, whose clients included Rezko, and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago.
As an attorney, Obama worked on a low-income senior housing project in which Rezko and a partner firm run by Obama's boss Allison Davis charged a fee of $855,000 for their services. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, "In addition to the development fees, a separate Davis-owned company stood to make another $900,000 through federal tax credits." According to a January 28th overview of the Rezko/Obama connection, in 1994, the City of Chicago sued Davis's firm, Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corporation, for maintaining slumlike conditions that included no working heat in the apartments. Obama represented the landlord in court.
Later, as a state legislator, Obama wrote endorsement letters on behalf of Rezko to government agencies allocating funds to build other housing projects, even though he nowadays insists he never did his friend any favors. A 2007 Chicago Tribune article said that Rezko's firm eventually got contracts to rehab 30 buildings, including 11 in Obama's state legislative district on the South Side. Edward McClelland, writing for Salon.com, states that "Rezko, after all, built part of his fortune by exploiting the black community that Obama had served in the state Senate, and by milking government programs meant to benefit black-owned businesses."
While it may be unclear why Obama would continue his relationship with Rezko after this point, it's indisputable that he did. In 2005, Obama approached Rezko for help in purchasing a $2 million Georgian-revival home in the historic Kenwood neighborhood of Chicago. The property deal involved splitting the land into two lots, with Rezko buying the large side yard for $625,000. Obama and his wife Michelle acquired the parcel that included the mansion for $300,000 off the asking price. The Chicago Tribune reported the details of this unusual arrangement in November 2006.
Although no laws were broken in the transaction, Obama's entanglement with Rezko represents a significant hurdle to his presidential aspirations. The New York Times has reported that the developer's participation in the Obama property deal may have been an attempt to shield assets from creditors in several individual lawsuits pending at the time. Rezko also received a mysterious $3.5 million loan in April, 2007 from a longtime business associate, Nadhmi Auchi. This London-based Iraqi billionaire is described by the Pentagon as a former moneyman for Saddam Hussein, according to a report in the Sun-Times. In January, a federal judge remanded Rezko to county jail because he had not reported the loan and was considered a flight risk. Rezko is originally from Syria.
Revelations about past financial contributions from Rezko and his circle have led Obama to donate to charity money from his presidential campaign account. Initially, the Chicago Sun-Times put the figure of known tainted cash at $168,000. Eventually, the senator agreed to surrender about half that amount, but only as an "abundance of caution", a senior staffer said. However, when NBC Nightly News broadcast a story about the finances, the campaign announced it would donate the entire sum. Then on March 14th, the Obama campaign annouced it would donate more money to charity, after an investigative report by ABC News found another $100,000 linked to Rezko associates. A March 3rd analysis by the Los Angeles Times revealed that Obama's various campaigns over the years were financed in part using "straw donors", i.e. individuals who take money from tainted sources and then contribute to the candidate under their own names.
But here's the strangest twist of all in the Rezko affair (so far): While both Obama and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich are identified as the primary sources of campaign financing in a trial alleging multiple counts of extortion and influence peddling by Rezko and his associates, the U.S. Attorney's office says it has no evidence that either public official committed any wrongdoing. Talk about a willing suspension of disbelief. It turns out, the prosecutor in the case is Patrick Fitzgerald, the same attorney who tried the Valerie Plame leak case. In the infamous trial, a much anticipated indictment against Karl Rove for revealings Plame's C.I.A. employment failed to materialize. Instead, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, was tried and convicted on four counts of lying under oath. Whether Fitzgerald is holding off his indictments of Blagojevich and Obama until the week before the November general election is a matter of pure speculation.
(More from the Rezko trial coverage: On March 10th, Obama's name came up for his role in crafting legislation in 2003 to reduce the number of members on the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board from 15 to 9, according to the Sun-Times' Rezko Blog. The prosecution alleges that the Planning Board was stacked by Rezko in order to steer contracts his way. A memo entered into evidence further noted that Obama was one of eight people chosen to provide recommendations for filling board vacancies.)
For more on the Rezko/Obama connection, read the March 2nd article in the New York Times and the investigative series in the Sun-Times.
OutFoxing Fox News
Until a Saturday Night Live skit blew their cover, most national broadcast networks appeared to be actively favoring the Obama candidacy in their reporting of the primaries. Newscasters have adopted the journalistic device of shrewdly shifted any negative revelations about him onto Clinton when possible. For instance, shortly after she first raised the Rezko matter during the South Carolina debate, the Today show's Matt Lauer confronted the New York senator with a photo taken in the1990s. It showed her and President Clinton posing with Rezko.
Lauer provided no evidence that either husband or wife had any history with the indicted developer. Clinton told him that she's appeared in thousands of courtesy photos during her two decades of public life, but his terse questioning and skeptical demeanor suggested a sinister intent. NBC repeated the maneuver when reporting on Obama's plagiarism of a speech he gave in Wisconsin. Nightly News dug up separate video clips showing Clinton and her husband both reciting the same two-line passage from the bible. This was offered as evidence that Obama's uncredited use of his friend's "Just Words" speech in 2006 was nothing out of the ordinary.
A few other examples of media bias are worth noting. On the night before the New Hampshire primary, anchor Brian Williams accompanied Obama on the campaign trail, flashing a Newsweek cover of the senator and uttering superlatives about his meteoric rise to political stardom. In fact, Williams acted like someone undergoing a spiritual epiphany. During the same broadcast, Andrea Mitchell derided the Clinton campaign as broke, desperate, and ablaze with in-fighting. She continued along these lines the following night, assuring viewers that the senator's initial three-point lead in the vote tally would eventually evaporate. It didn't.
A common trick used by political hacks, this attempt to cast doubt on one candidate's viability while creating a bandwagon effect for another has become a regular feature of the 2008 election coverage. Shortly before Super Tuesday, both Mitchell and Meet the Press host Tim Russert claimed that the leadership of the Democratic Party was "mad as hell" at Bill Clinton and lining up to back the Illinois senator. No sources were offered to corroborate this bombshell allegation. Russert went on to explain that Ted and Caroline Kennedy's recent endorsement of Obama represented a sea change in the election, adding that because Ted's brother Bobby Kennedy had been friends with Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farmworkers, the endorsement should pave the way for Obama capturing the Latino vote.
What NBC's crack team of reporters failed to mention was that three of Bobby Kennedy's own children, as well as the son of Cesar Chavez and the United Farmworkers union itself had already endorsed Clinton. In Nevada, Latinos in the 60,000-strong Culinary Workers Union defied their white male leadership's endorsement of Obama and helped Clinton win the caucus there. Yet while the Florida primary was showing Clinton with a 15 point lead in the polls, over at CNN, fill-in anchor Jim Acosta was declaring the Obama campaign a "runaway train" after its big South Carolina victory.
On February 10th, two days before the Maryland-Virginia-D.C. primaries, CBS anchor Katy Couric joined the Clinton-bashing extravaganza with a 60 Minutes segment spiced with multiple questions about how the candidate would deal with losing the election. The contentious exchange followed a Steve Kroft piece on Obama that seemed like an instant replay of the Williams New Hampshire epiphany. At the time CBS ran the two segments, Obama was still trailing Clinton in delegates.
To wit, if there's a runaway train in this race, it isn't either of the candidates. For the past 20 years, media outlets have become increasingly consolidated into chains owned by multinational corporations. In consequence, over time the news, entertainment and advertising divisions have become increasingly indistinguishable from one another. The NBC/MSNBC network, which has come under fire for the mysoginist undertones of some of its cable newscasters, is owned by the energy company and defense contractor General Electric. And Clinton critic Andrea Mitchell is married to former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan, the man many economic observers blame for the current meltdown on Wall Street.
There are a few journalists who admit off-camera that Clinton has not been treated fairly in the course of the campaign. In December, Howard Kurtz published an article in the Washington Post that first exposed the widespread media bias favoring Obama. "The Illinois senator's fundraising receives far less press attention than Clinton's," Kurtz offered as an example of the phenomenon. "When the Washington Post reported last month that Obama used a political action committee to hand more than $180,000 to Democratic groups and candidates in the early-voting states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the suggestion that he might be buying support received no attention on the network newscasts." Fear of Flying novelist Erica Jong offers her take on the situation in Hillary vs. the Patriarchy, published in early February, also in the Washington Post.
Unlike her big Florida victory on January 29th, the news of Clinton's New Hampshire win was not blacked out from coast to coast the next day. Her detractors quickly rushed to fortify their positions, concerned that momentum from the dramatic comeback after losing Iowa would soon turn into an electoral tsunami. In the two weeks leading up to the South Carolina primary, Obama surrogates argued that New England's white voters had betrayed their publicly declared support of the black candidate in the secrecy of the ballot booth. Hence the reason why pre-election polls got the count so wrong. Then, when Clinton made a speech tying Martin Luther King's efforts to President Johnson's signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, highlighting the role of Johnson, the Obama camp pounced. An adviser immediately sent out a four-page memorandum urging all its spokespeople to slam her for disrespecting Dr. King.
If you tracked the coverage of the ensuing feud, you would never know that it was this document that sparked the episode. Before the memo surfaced on the internet, Obama insisted to reporters that neither he nor anyone on his staff had accused Senator Clinton of any impropriety in her speech about Johnson. He said he was "baffled" by her suggestion that they were somehow involved. At the same time, South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn claimed Bill Clintons' incendiary reaction to the racism charge had compelled him to renege on an earlier promise to the Democratic National committee not to endorse a candidate before his state's primary. A few days later, Clyburn retracted his endorsement of Obama, but the damage was done. Black voters converged on election day to back the senator from Illinois. Now that the Clintons were being barbecued in the press for "playing the race card", Obama would no longer have to worry about the African American vote.
More recently, the Obama campaign has taken up the call by neoconservatives that Clinton and her husband begin releasing tax returns for the last several years (even though he hasn't released his own), as well as records pertaining to the eight-year stint in the White House. (The National Archives released the former First Lady's appointment calendar on March 19th.) One Clinton staffer has accused Obama of imitating Ken Starr, the special prosecutor and who spent $70 million in taxpayer funds searching for dirt on the couple a decade ago, without success. In late 2007, CBS News reported that Obama himself had produced no documents regarding his own two terms in the state senate. "Obama's statement that he has no papers from his time in the Illinois statehouse — he left in 2004 — stands in stark contrast to the massive Clinton file stored at the National Archives: an estimated 78 million pages of documents, plus 20 million e-mail messages, packed into 36,000 boxes," according to the article.
Clinton Unplugged
Hillary Clinton has historically shied away from directly responding to personal attacks, whether it comes from sexist Manhattan firefighters or Chris Matthews' daily disparagement of her on MSNBC's Hardball. Her campaign briefly cut off relations with NBC when another MSNBC reporter, David Schuster, said the Clintons had "pimped-out" daughter Chelsea as part of their election strategy. Over the course of several debates, however, her political reflexes have sharpened to the point where no personal attack has gone unpunished.
In late February, SNL depicted infatuated CNN debate moderators fawning over Obama during the Austin debate. A few days later, Clinton referenced the skit during their Ohio matchup, which was moderated by NBC's Brian Williams and Tim Russert. After being asked to answer the initial two questions on NAFTA and health care first - as had become a pattern in the debates - she said it was "curious" that Obama was routinely afforded the opportunity to respond after she had essentially laid out all the talking points on issue. "Should we ask Senator Obama if he's comfortable and needs another pillow?" Clinton mused aloud. That particular dig, coupled with the arrival of several Chicago reporters on the campaign trail (when the Rezko trial started) finally generated some critical coverage of the new election frontrunner.
Yet Clinton has demured so far in implicating Karl Rove as one of the brains behind the G.O.P.'s covert operation to help Obama defeat her. After being targetted with offensive direct mailers in Ohio, she accused her rival of tactics "straight out of the Rove playbook", but has never mentioned the impact of a crossover voting scheme that's put her opponent far ahead of her in the delegate count. As for the rest of the Bush Administration, all Clinton has mustered to date on the subject is her oft-repeated statement, “They’re not going to surrender the White House voluntarily." Last spring, she suggested that another terrorist attack against the United States would inevitably play into the hands of the G.O.P.
Vague as they sound, those last two remarks may prove prophetic in the event the Obama strategy fails and she goes on to win the Democratic nomination. The implications of a female president for American foreign and domestic policy are profound, especially when the candidate has promised greater oversight of corporations, federally sponsored job programs and improving women's human rights around the world. Such initiatives create jitters not only for Wall Street concerns but for the Pentagon, the CIA and the State Department. Officials accused of breaking U.S. laws or violating the Geneva Conventions could ostensibly be arrested and prosecuted by a Clinton-run Justice Department. And if that's not enough to keep Bush appointees lying awake deep into the night, their long-running wink-wink with the ayatollahs in Iran (who paved the way for Reagan's 1980 election), the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and the Saudi royal family would likely be curtailed by a woman running the West Wing. The Saudis especially have reason to fret now that they and their counterparts in Kuwait and the U.A.E. have started buying up huge stakes in U.S. banks. Condolleeza Rice and Nancy Pelosi are one thing. A Clinton White House is quite another.
For his part, President Bush may have implemented a back-up plan last April when he signed National Security Presidential Directive/NSPD 51, an executive order allowing him to suspend the constitution without prior congressional approval. NSPD 51 gives the President the discretion to declare a state of emergency (i.e. martial law) in the event of a major terrorist attack or other “decapitating” incident against the United States, even if the attack happens outside the country.
Under this scenario, he can cancel elections, padlock the Capitol dome and send the Supreme Court justices home. The directive also assigns the President's homeland security assistant - a low-level position exempt from senate confirmation - to administer what has been dubbed the Enduring Constitutional Government. (Here’s the text of the directive.)
Michigan and Florida, Delegates and the Conventions
Assuming the homeland security assistant doesn't take over the country before next August, the Democratic Party's 794 superdelegates may get to decide the nomination. Most are members of Congress, state and local public officials. The rest are DNC personnel and its committee members. The specter of these folks determining the ticket in November has set Obama surrogates on their haunches, this time arguing that a "brokered convention" decided in "smoky back rooms" will destroy the party. (The local fire marshall may have something to say about this as well.) Initially, it was thought that two-thirds of the superdelegates were pledged for Clinton, but more recent surveys suggest the situation is fluid.
Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean issued a press release last month reassuring Americans that he will intervene before August if the race still remains deadlocked. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid echoed this sentiment more recently. The extent of their authority to subvert the Democratic process is unclear. Clinton has been under a full-court press from party officials to quit the race, arguing that despite record turnouts across the country, a protracted battle will somehow "destroy the party". Some pundits and journalists have also raised the prospect of violence at the convention should the nominee not be resolved beforehand. Both CNN and Fox were already using this "there will be blood" scenario in some of their election-reporting title graphics on the night of the Texas/Ohio primaries. While the rules don't require Clinton to cede the nomination until the 2025-delegate mark is reached, if sufficient mass hysteria is generated by these efforts, those who want her out of the race hope the guilt card will force her hand.
On another front, some Democrats are pushing to hold a separate meeting of superdelegates in June, a tactic that would derail Clinton's anticipated momentum going into August. Separating the superdelegates from the pledged delegates in this manner will create the public perception that the former are trying to hijack the democratic process from the latter.
That would be unfortunate. The high drama of a floor fight at a convention is not only firmly rooted in tradition, it would also makes for great politcal theatre. Far from "destroying the party", as some have argued, a huge television audience watching the battle is likely to translate into more votes for the Democratic candidate in the fall. For instance, one of the most sensational election stalemates in American history took place in 1932, when neither Franklin Roosevelt nor his rival Al Smith secured enough delegates to cinch the nomination. Media tycoon William Randolph Hearst took advantage of the deadlock, convincing FDR to accept third place candidate Texas Congressman Jack Garner as his running mate, in exchange for the delegates needed to win the nomination. (Interestingly, after FDR beat Hoover in the general election, a would-be assassin nearly liquidated the new President-elect in Miami. The bullets went astray when a woman in the crowd grabbed the assailant's arm. Otherwise, Jack Garner would have become president.)
Today, with only two candidates left in the race and the innovation of superdelegates, the deadlock scenario and prospect of a brokered convention is moot. There are also lingering questions about what, if any effect the ongoing Rezko trial in Chicago will have on Obama, making the late August date for a decision preferable to one in June. To muddy the waters further, global warming crusader Al Gore, who says he'd like to be president, may also be jockeying to enter the fray at the convention. As a "draft" candidate, Gore would avoid any scrutiny of his record in advance of potential G.O.P. attack ads against him in October. Most voters have long forgotten that while vice-president under Bill Clinton, the Nobel prizewinner failed miserably when it came time to press for senate ratification of the Kyoto Treaty in 1998. (Here's his press release.) In his role as president of the U.S. Senate, he has also been criticized for blocking challenges from a dozen African American congressmembers in certifying the vote in the 2000 presidential election. That episode is recounted in painful detail in Michael Moore's documentary film Fahrenheit 911.
Meanwhile, the January primary votes by Florida and Michigan (the country's 4th and 8th most populous states, respectively) remain big question marks in the Democratic race. Both states' pledged and superdelegates were stripped by the Democratic National Committee for holding primaries before February 5th. Clinton won 50 percent of Florida's popular vote, Obama 33 percent, and John Edwards 16 percent. The state's party officials explained to the DNC rules committee in August, 2007 that Florida's Republican-controlled legislature set the date for the primary, not them. The change was attached as an amendment to a popular bill requiring all electronic voting equipment to include paper receipts. A December 17th article in The Nation suggests that Howard Dean and the DNC unnecessarily antagonized voters by refusing to an grant exemption to the early primary date.
Clinton said in an interview with U.S. News and World Report on March 6th that she wanted the Florida delegation to be credentialed at the convention and rejected Obama's proposal that a caucus be held instead. "I would not accept a caucus. I think that would be a great disservice to the 2 million people who turned out and voted. I think that they want their votes counted. And you know a lot of people would be disenfranchised because of the timing and whatever the particular rules were. This is really going to be a serious challenge for the Democratic Party because the voters in Michigan and Florida are the ones being hurt, and certainly with respect to Florida the Democrats were dragged into doing what they did by a Republican governor and a Republican Legislature. They didn't have any choice whatsoever. And I don't think that there should be any do-over or any kind of a second run in Florida. I think Florida should be seated."
Michigan held its primary on January 15th. Since Obama, Edwards and Biden voluntarily pulled their names from the ballot beforehand, the votes for Clinton cannot be said to represent a mandate. However, there's more to this story than the mainstream press has reported. According to an October 11th article by Lynda Waddington of the Iowa Independent, "The campaign for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, arguably fearing a poor showing in Michigan, reached out to the others with a desire of leaving New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as the only candidate on the ballot. The hope was that such a move would provide one more political obstacle for the Clinton campaign to overcome in Iowa."
And the plot thickens. With its high percentage of Hispanic voters, Florida could also have been forecast in advance as a Clinton stronghold. In Michigan, the candidacy of native son Mit Romney precluded the possiblity of a large crossover vote of Republicans on behalf of Obama there. The state also does not have many upper-middle-class whites, Obama's second highest performing demographic after African Americans. Thus it, too, would have favored Clinton in the eyes of political strategists back in 2007. Had the DNC not sanctioned Michigan and Florida, she would therefore have hauled in the lion's share of over 300 delegates up for grabs, reversing the delegate count and adding to her momentum going into Super Tuesday. Arguably, the race would have ended on February 5th.
Soldiering on, the Clinton campaign pulled together $10 million in private funding to redo the primary in Michigan. When Senator Obama refused to endorse the plan, however, the state legislature declined to schedule a new vote. Meanwhile, Florida is in the midst of swapping out old voting machinery around the state and installing new machines, making a new primary there logistically impossible. Wary of ballot tampering, the Florida congressional delegation has so far refused to back a vote-by-mail proposal.
Without Florida and Michigan, Clinton may be unable to catch up with her opponent in either pledged delegates or popular vote before the convention. And with the biased coverage from the media only seeming to grow worse each day, her uphill climb is quickly turning into a vertical ascent. Thanks to Karl Rove and his friends in the shadows, the Democratic nominee may ultimately be determined not by Democrats but by the G.O.P., with a big assist from party leaders like Chairman Dean, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi recently warned superdelegates via an ABC news talk show that they should not "overturn what happened in the elections".
For those who have studied literature, the plot line here may sound familiar. In fact, if you're interested in an even longer opus on the subject political chicanery than the one you've just read, check out the Ibsen play, Enemy of the People.
- Rosemary Regello editor@thecityedition.com
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