I would like to begin this diary by making a very grave prediction. This is not a prediction I make lightly nor would I be making it if I didn’t think sharing it would possibly help change the trajectory that we are now on. And my prediction, as fortunate as it may be, is that come 2017, we’ll have a president Rubio. This is not a diary about oh woe is us for being mean to each other, or to blame one side of the primary fight, or otherwise to stir up trouble more than it has already been stirred up. I’ve been here since before the Dean scream, I’ve seen a few cycles. This nonsense is normal and expect and to a certain extent rather stupid. But folks need to vent at each other, so they get online and type battle it out.
But none of the petty battles I see waged on Daily Kos of late are going to matter if things continue as they are. And oddly enough, this silly squabbling isn’t really hurting beyond providing a serious distraction. But what is hurting is the Democrats across the country, and those willing to support Democrats, are at this moment seriously not engaged. There have been some very good diaries on this matter of late, and I commend folks for pointing out the absurd lengths the DNC has gone to make our primaries invisible. There is more to it than just the DNC of course.
And before progress, one might be asking… why am I thinking Rubio? Easy, without Bush in the race, and Kasich being essentially forgotten, Rubio has an in for overcoming Trump. And in a general election, despite his flaws, he can easily sell himself as being minimally acceptable to not drive Democratic turnout against him.
Of our problems, there are several. Let us begin by listing the DNC and primary process specific ones. And with each I offer some suggestions for improvements. Though a few are rather straightforward changes, some are obviously more easily pulled off than others.
Invisible Debates: By minimizing viewership of our candidates, the country hasn’t had the opportunity to get to know either Clinton or Sanders beyond what they get from the news. What more, the short debate schedule doesn’t demand that the candidates do more than hit the primary arguments and clock out. This keeps them unchallenged (outside silly media driven controversies) and weak. But folks around here are rather up to date on why this issue is a problem already. The solution to his problem is to ensure in the rules of the DNC that there is a minimum of numerous debates, and no penalties for participation in debates run by neutral news organizations.
Super Delegates: The other day I observed Maddow ask Debbie Wasserman Schultz effectively to justify super delegates. Instead of explaining the why, the chair instead opted to explain why the media was wrong to count them at all in the totals at this point. Some of you may have seen previous to this the out cry about the New Hampshire delegate breakdown, counting super delegates being tied between Clinton and Sanders despite Sanders’ big win. So there was certainly motivation for clarity on the question, and instead of trying to justify super delegates, she tried to simply make the argument go away. And there’s a reason for that. Super delegates are indefensible. The more people learn about the rules of the nomination process, including things like super delegates, the less they feel they have an actual say in the process. Having no say in the process means they disengage. People, the people we need to get out and vote in November, lose agency because of super delegates. The fact that after 2008 we still have them and after all the out cry against them at the time is similarly indefensible. Yes, I know, inertia and party rules changes and all that. But I’ll get to why that counter is also part of the problem later. If you really want to have party elites at the convention, those folks need to get behind a candidate and be the delegates for their candidate of choice at the convention. Anything else is undemocratic. Super delegates must be done away with.
Caucuses: I grew up in Iowa. Iowa is a great place. But the caucuses are idiotic. The only justification I can see for them generally revolves around folksy notions of town meetings and small town retail politics where you spend days meeting small groups of people. In a country of over 300 million people, both of these have no place in our presidential elections. This isn’t the 19th century any more. It didn’t make much sense in the 20th either. A candidate needs to be able to move large numbers of people to their cause in order to win in the general election. Wasting their time hanging out in dinners isn’t going to help them do that outside a few good press photos for that task. What more, the actual system of the caucuses is rather problematic. Demanding people participate during a set window reduces voter interest and their ability to participate. Demanding that they sit, sometimes hundreds in a loud crowded space, for hours, just so their preference can be heard wastes people’s time, and reduces voter interest in participating. Selecting delegates to go to county conventions and filtering them on up based on a prearranged distribution of delegates to each precinct subverts the entire concept of one person one vote as you may have 20 people show up to grab 5 delegates and 400 a town over show up to get 10. Caucuses are not private ballots and thus social pressures can prevent a voter’s ability to make an independent choice for their candidate. Or worse, it can potentially lead to effective machine politics where everyone in a group is obligated to go a certain way, and those with the influence will know because they are there at the caucus and keeping track of who behaves and who doesn’t. And did I mention that it kind of misses the whole counting of actual votes of preference? Some caucuses are forced to take place in large echoy rooms, with lots of people, and it gets very loud. Soon the only way to hear anyone might be to shout. Especially during the phase where preference groups are rearranging themselves and people are trying to convince others to join theres. Kind of makes one of the selling points of a caucus, the last minute campaigning, rather difficult. Finally, there’s the perpetual problem of poorly organized caucuses. Many of us heard about the precinct in Des Moines where no one showed up to actually run it. All of these reasons make caucuses a bad idea. And for this reason, I’m happy to no longer have to participate in them where I live to get my vote heard in the primary process. If a state party wants to have a caucus like system to organize their state organization or to select pledged national delegates after a primary determines delegate breakdowns, sure, fine, what ever. But don’t make the actual breakdown of delegates depend on this awful system. Caucuses must be done away with.
The Primary Calendar: Again, a candidate for president needs to be able to run a national campaign. And how our primary system works in this country runs counter to that. You have a few early contests where candidates spend most of their time, money, and energy. And so they become very good at running a few state wide simultaneous campaigns. Nice for maybe winning a few swing states. But perhaps not that great for competing in all of them. Or expanding the map. The long drawn out process in 08 helped Obama expand the map because he had to compete everywhere. And that year was very good for Democrats. Including down ballot. Democrats across the nation were prepared and excited. But we can do better than even that. If we were to move to a more sensible system, say a two round primary system, then the winning candidate will have had to have run a national campaign to get the nomination. What kind of system would that be exactly? All candidates run in the first round. Have a single day of voting (no caucuses). If no one gets 50%, top two go for a runoff. All the same, the specifics of such a massive change are irrelevant. The tyranny of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina over this process must come to an end so that our eventual nominee is better prepared to run a national campaign. If all but one candidate is knocked out after these contests, then there is no reason for our nominee to keep developing nation wide or pushing their campaign apparatus for results until its crunch time in the general election. By making this change it won’t just help our presidential nominee, but the organization practice, voter lists, and hard work done to get them nominated will assist local Democrats as well. This is what we need to perpetually run a 50 state strategy.
Delegates Determining the Nomination In General: If we manage to move to a real national primary, delegates being part of the process for nominations at all becomes irrelevant as voters can directly decide the nominee themselves. So if a national primary, then remove delegates too.
So in total, our current system leaves our candidate for president ill prepared. Some of these problems are specific to this cycle. But most of them are systemic problems that we must fix. And yes, its kind of too late to fix them for this cycle. That doesn’t mean we can’t get started now.
There are two more issues that I would like to bring up that are rather specific to this campaign. And brace yourself, but the two issues are actually issues with our two contenders.
For better or worse, though I respect Sanders’ general effort to play the campaign fair and focused on his primary message, voters really do need more than that. I like that he’s doing his best to make it a campaign about the big ‘Us’ and ‘We’, but to get through the nomination, to endear people to your message, you have to get their attention. And some Democrats don’t care about anything other than checking off a few boxes to make someone an acceptable candidate. And that’s not something we should be upset about, not everyone in the universe is a political junkie like you likely are dear reader. If you can’t drive attention to yourself to counter the name recognition of Clinton like Obama did in 08, getting people to turn out in November is going to be more difficult, especially when facing off either the Fox News Approved candidate or the circus performer and reality TV nightmare pretending to be a human being. The opposition has a free level of hype that they will always get. Sanders is good at getting the attention of some folks. Those already highly engaged. But he needs more. I’ve seen in various forums across the internet folks lamenting why Sanders is doing so terribly with older folks, African Americans, ect. And this is the reason he’s doing so terrible. His campaign doesn’t know how to even get noticed by large parts of the party. And if he can’t even get noticed, how is he supposed to get them to the polls in November? Yes, it means you need more than issues. You need personality on top of passion. How does he fix this? He needs to tell more stories for one. Hitting the main notes of the campaign during a stump speech is a good start, but you need to make a narrative. And pretty much any time I see Sanders on TV its not at moments where he’d doing this. That suggests to me at least that they are few and far between. There’s other things he can do, but that’s perhaps beyond the scope of my diary here.
Now that everyone thinks I’m a Clinton supporter, time to dispel that notion.
The problem with Clinton is not really the trust issues, or disagreements on platform, or paid speeches, or the bone headed decision to have a private e-mail server. The problem is the fact that Clinton cleared the field of any viable threats to her nomination. You may have seen a trend in the earlier part of this diary about challenging our candidates before they become a nominee so as to be best prepared for the general election. And a candidate can not be challenged if there is no viable alternative to them. For years now, I’ve heard from fans of Clinton, those who dislike her, and those who couldn’t care less that this nomination process this year was a mere formality for the election of Hillary Clinton. And it almost was. If Sanders hadn’t pulled the race into nearly a tie, Clinton would have had no reason at all to prepare for a real national campaign. Sure, prepping for the general would be done, but it would not be enough. It would not be what the party or the country needs. Focus would be on swing states. No infrastructure built up across the country that could be given to local democrats or to push for surprise upsets or even just to boost turnout for a close senate election. What more, this for the most part behind the scenes pressure to keep the field clear, has prevented numerous other possibly better candidates from even attempting to go for the nomination. Why not have some options? Why not Booker facing off against Gillibrand? Or Kobuchar vs Schweitzer? And others all in competition. All of them getting out their voters. All of them getting people excited to vote. The lack of choice has disheartened many people I’ve talked to. Some of them have turned to Clinton. Some to Sanders. And others, well, they don’t see the point. And please don’t try to argue that there was nothing behind the scenes to suppress competition. If there hadn’t, the field would look more like 2008 than 2000.
So these are our problems. They are legion. But they need not be perpetual. Sanders can fix his in a few ways. Clinton should be thankful Sanders is a challenge and should accept a long campaign throughout the primaries. And win or lose, we might have a nominee who not only gets people excited but has the apparatus to push the party forward across the nation. That is how you have the political revolution. That is meeting the promise of getting progressive things done.
It is very tempting to at this point to get to the business of pointing fingers. But here’s the hard truth of the matter. If you are looking for someone to blame, all you have to do is look in a mirror. And I mean it. Kossacks pride themselves pride themselves on being informed, up to date, and all that. And yet, despite knowing this, we as a group have not done what is needed to make the changes to our nominating process to fix these problems. We’ve had years to do this. Instead, we weep. We moan. We talk about how unfair the system is.
Well, guess what. Its our party, we can do something about it.
The way we do this is to either pressure or change the Democratic National Committee to modify the rules on our nomination process. And if the DNC won’t change, then perhaps its time we get some Kossacks on the committee. This is a long term project. But we need to start this now. After Kerry’s loss in 04, there was a huge push to get Dean as DNC chair as he was focused on a promise of pushing the 50 state strategy. Maybe its time we do that again. And is, we should not let the failures of the current DNC continue. Yes, this means getting involved in your local and state party organization. Guess what, they’d love to have you get involved! Show your commitment, your passion, and get a seat with the state party, and go on to get one at the DNC. Change the party. Change the process. Change the world. No more back room sorting to leverage the process towards ill thought out goals. Make our process open, accurate, and fair. Make it clear that we should have many candidates, and they should all be challenged. Be made better so that any one of them will be more than able to dispatch the odious republican nominee come November.
But perhaps that’s all to hard.
So have fun bashing each other and each other’s candidates, and doing your best to convince a small audience of ultra partisan democrats about the importance of voting in the general. Which, lets be honest here, almost all of us will be voting then. Meaning all the furry in total is a big waste of time.
Or… you can hit the streets and campaign for your desired nominee. And then our nominee. And for changing how business is done in our party’s organization.
If it wasn’t obvious, I’ve been mulling a lot of this over for a while now. And perhaps I should have broken this up into two or three diaries, but you know what, I’ve not been able to sleep all night and figured what the hell. Hopefully my grammar hasn’t failed me… And if it has, oh well. I still needed to say somethings, and if you made it this far, thanks for reading. Its been ages since I’ve posted anything, so the current formatting system is a little new to me.
Final note… my prediction at the start. It can be avoided still. Its never too early to start GOTV efforts. Get people registered. Get them excited for our candidates. Make it clear what’s at state. And make it clear what can happen if we get either Bernie or Hillary in for the next four years. Remember, its always better to be for someone, than simply against the other guy.