Entries tagged 'election'

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Ickes Reserves Right to Call for Nuclear Option

Harold M. Ickes, a senior adviser to Sen. Hillary Clinton, today said that her campaign was reserving the what amounts to their last best option, challenging the decision of the Rules and Bylaws Committee before the entire Democratic National Convention this summer in Denver.

“This decision violates the bedrock principles of our democracy and our Party,” he said. “We reserve the right to challenge this decision before the Credentials Committee and appeal for a fair allocation of Michigan’s delegates that actually reflect the votes as they were cast.”

Ickes’ comment came just before the RBC passed a resolution (by a vote of 19-8) seating all of Michigan’s delegates and awarding each a 1/2 vote and passing unanimously a resolution to award Florida’s delegates 1/2 a vote as well.

Evidently, Ickes and some other Clinton supporters entered the meeting thinking there was actually a possibility that a “fair allocation” meant that Sen. Barack Obama should receive no delegates at all. In fact, reports say that Obama had the votes for a 50-50 split, but chose to accept a lesser split in the interest of party unity.

Chalk up another magnanimous decision on behalf of Sen. Obama and another selfish (and hopefully empty) threat by Sen. Clinton’s campaign. Hopefully the superdelegates can help stick a fork in this election on Tuesday so we can get on to the important battle against Sen. John McCain.

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Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Obama the Statesman

On Saturday, the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee will meet in Washington, D.C. to discuss what to do about primaries in Michigan and Florida.

While a compromise that would award each state half of their delegates seems to be emerging, there has been questions all week whether hordes of protesters would appear outside the RBC’s hotel to make their candidate’s position clear (as if they weren’t crystal clear already).

A group of Hillary Clinton supporters have created a Web site and called for a massive rally outside the hotel, featuring prominent members of Congress, to demand that the RBC “must honor our core democratic principles and enfranchise the people of MI and FL and their respective delegations.”

They, of course, make no reference to changing the rules in the middle of the game, a concept mastered on the playground by most five-year-olds.

In contrast, Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign announced Wednesday that they were asking their supporters to stay away from the hotel to avoid further dividing the party. Instead, the campaign called for potential protesters to join one of the nearby voter registration and mobilization events in the nearby battleground state of Virginia.

Sen. Clinton’s supporters have the right to hold a peaceful protest anywhere they wish. That I do not question. What I do question, however, is their judgement in trying to extend this contest in such a combative manner.

Come next week, the Democratic Party will have to begin healing itself to prepare for the general election in November. Clinton’s supporters would do more good for the party by basebuilding and reaching out to new voters.

But I guess that’s the job for the statesman, also known as Barack Obama.

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Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Who Should Go to the Polls?

Over the holiday break, I applied and was accepted to become a precinct captain for the Barack Obama for President campaign. As part of that gig, I am responsible for discerning the leanings of the registered voters in precinct 3861, pursuading undecided voters and getting supporters out to vote for the California primary on Feb. 5.

In discussing get out the vote efforts with a friend of mine who has much more campaign experience than anyone else I know, she made a statement which puzzled me for a while, saying “If I’m working on a campaign and you’re not voting for my candidate, I don’t want you to vote at all.”

In fairness, she later retracted this comment, but it still got me thinking about where the ethical line should be drawn in the promotion of democracy versus the promotion of a candidate. Surely there are limited resources in a campaign and most campaigns and campaign workers would never actively discourage supporters of other candidates (provide wrong date and/or location information).

But there is are gradations, at least in intent, in how campaign workers make the “actively encourage our supporters to vote, ignore everyone else” approach work. At the pro-democracy end, campaign workers genuinely hope for an overwhelming turnout districtwide and that they are able to drive more of their supporters to the polls than their opponents’ campaigns. At the pro-candidate end, campaign workers genuinely hope that supporters of opposing candidates ignore the election and choose not to vote at all.

In the end, the idealistic part of me hopes that the higher-ups in the 2008 presidential campaign organizations ascribe to the former, but realizes that in the heat of battle, such minor differences in intent often get overlooked in the overwhelming effort to beat the other guy (or woman).

As for my friends who are supporting other candidates, while you may not get a prodding phone call from me on February 5, I do hope you go out and cast your ballot. I also do hope that the Obama campaign is committed and organized enough drive enough supporters to the polls to beat the snot out of your candidate at the end of the day.

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Sunday, December 2nd, 2007

Enfranchising College Students

Young people between the ages of 18 and 20 have had the right to vote for scarcely more than 30 years. Yet campaigns have consistently done very little to actively support the youth vote. Sure, candidates will do a quick appearance on The Daily Show or Saturday Night Live, but little effort is put behind getting young voters to the polls in earnest.

So when I saw this column the other day by David Yepsen, someone whose opinion I generally very much respect, I was frustrated, but not surprised. In the column, Yepsen tells of a flyer being distributed by Barack Obama’s campaign encouraging students who attend Iowa universities full time to return to Iowa to caucus. Obama, being from Illinois, naturally focuses his message to students from his home state who attend schools in neighboring Iowa.

Yepsen warns of potential political backlash from full-time residents of Iowa and snidely remarks that “they do politics a little differently in Illinois than they do in Iowa.”

Obama’s rivals’ campaigns were quick to jump on the “college students aren’t real residents” bandwagon, particularly after recent polls place Obama at the top of a three-way race in the Democratic caucus. “We are not courting out-of-staters. The Iowa caucus ought to be for Iowans,” says a Clinton staffer smugly.

What these other campaigns ignore, and what Yepsen mentions only briefly in his column, is that if a student attends college full-time in Iowa, they are a legal resident and fully entitled to vote, regardless of whether their parents happen to live in another state. It’s not their fault that Iowa’s first-in-the-nation Jan. 3 caucus falls during most universities’ winter breaks–that’s a result of this country’s twisted primary system and worth exploring at another time.

Iowa, thankfully, has some of the most student-friendly laws in the nation around this point, giving student residents the option to vote in their Iowa precinct or their hometown precinct. I would have to imagine that most politically-minded students would certainly prefer the former and are well within their rights to do so.

While I would prefer students to be required to vote in their college towns–without their political voice, college towns often ignore the needs of students–Iowa’s practices are much more appropriate than other states in the country, like Mississippi, that through policy or practice, discourage students from registering to vote in their college towns.

An old, but still very informative study by a team of researchers at Salisbury University in Marylan classified states’ voter residency policies as either “restrictive” or as promoting “student choice.” At the time the study was written in 2001, 28 states had student-friendly laws. Not surprisingly, states with restrictive policies registered 10 percent fewer college-aged youth and experienced an 8 percent lower turnout rate in the 1996 presidential election.

For a country that prides itself on its democracy and tries to push that democracy out to the the rest of the world, for some states to enshrine policies that deliberately seek to disenfranchise college students is despicable. For presidential campaigns to try to score quick political points with older, “long-time” residents at the expense of students’ rights is sickening.

I wish Obama’s campaign the best of luck in their efforts to enfranchise Iowa college students, regardless of where their families happen to live. For those Iowans that are miffed that these “out-of-towners” may participate in their caucus, do us all a favor and stay home on the night of Jan. 3. You’re no friend to the democratic process anyway.

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