Chaos Theory
Barack Obama campaign manager David Plouffe noted on a call with reporters this afternoon that his team is not encouraging supporters to protest the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting in Washington this weekend. Supporters of Hillary Clinton took out an ad in Sunday's New York Times urging like-minded voters to turn out Saturday at the Marriott Wardman to make their views known.
"We don’t think it’s a helpful dynamic to create chaos," Plouffe said. "... We don’t think a scene as we wind down the primary season here is helpful to bring the party together."
(JS)
re: Plouffe said. "... We don’t think a scene as we wind down the primary season here is helpful to bring the party together."
I guess Plouffe didn't get the message that the Democratic Party is blown to smithereens.
I don't know a single Clinton supporter who plans on voting for Barack Obama if he is hand-picked by the DNC. I live in NH and for obvious reasons (ie, we were the first ones BHO implied were racists because we didn't follow the crowd from Iowa and bow down) we hate him here.
Of course, as we all know, Obama doesn't actually need to win New Hampshire because he won the caucus in Kansas.
@Jan: Obama has never insinuated that anyone who failed to vote for him was a racist, and I think you know that's not true.
These supporters (both Clinton's and Obama's) need to take it down a notch. The party is not destroyed, but they seem determined to make it so. Each side backed their candidate, and as I said in another post, we saw what happened when an immovable object met an unstoppable force.
Both these candidates had powerful appeal to different constituencies, and for now it would seem that Sen. Clinton fell just short of what she needed. Sure we could say that by some measures (say if we used a winner take all approach, etc) she would win, but that's not the way the rules were set up.
In ANY other year she probably would have clobbered anyone else, but these two candidates are fantastic. This was the World Series of campaigning. Nobody deserves to walk off the field with their head hanging. Sens. Clinton and Obama both make me proud to be a Democrat, and moreover an American.
If you had told my parents when they were my age that a woman or a black man would get a million and a half votes in a primary they would have laughed. In the lifetime of my parents women went from nursing and schoolteaching to being a serious candidate for the presidency, likewise men who weren't allowed to enter places of business from the front door could be seriously considered for the presidency.
I'm overwhelmed with pride in my country.
It may take a few weeks but I think either side will begin to see this. These wounds are so fresh, we need time to heal. As long as the candidates reign in their supporters we'll be fine. No reason to go nuclear in the last week.
I couldn't have put it any better, Micah. The Democrats are still so caught up in the primary season that they haven't yet taken a step back to breathe and realize how fortunate their party has been this cycle. They're crushing the Republicans in fund-raising, the national tide is in their favor, they have millions of newly-registered voters, and they have two superb and historic candidates. If the two wings of the Democratic Party can learn to put aside their differences and work together, they could be unstoppable in the fall.