Caca del Toro
The Democratic National Committee is meeting this weekend. Members of the DNC are elected from each state and are tasked with setting policy and direction for the Democratic Party. I have friends on the DNC so I will probably be a lot nicer than I normally would be when talking about this.
The DNC is total caca del toro when it comes to Super Delegates. That’s the nicest I can be.
Super Delegates are those party insiders who get a free ride to the Democratic National Convention as voting delegates because they are members of the DNC, elected officials, past party officers, former elected officials, friends of friends of past party officers, and God only knows how many are blood related or the product of political incest. They comprise about 15% of the delegates and can sway a party presidential nomination.
It’s just not fair and it’s just not how democracy is supposed to work.
Every delegate to the national convention should be elected by their presidential preference. The DNC said this weekend that they would “limit super delegates” but they won’t say how. They formed another damn committee to look into it. They kicked the can down the road – again.
I’m just about sick of them. Please let your DNC members know that you are made about this. Also find out who the super delegates are in your state and ask them what makes them so damn special.
Thank you for some good old fashioned hell raising.
(I’m off the LaGrange, Texas, today to attend a planning session for my friend Cecil Webster who is running in a special election. I’ll be back tonight.)
I agree 100% with this. We have an arrogant, self-important (I won’t continue with my description) woman in Juneau who pretty much told us to get stuffed as she refused to cast her vote for whom we overwhelmingly chose to be our candidate. (And didn’t that work out so well for us?) She was extremely nasty about it. I get angry every time I think about her.
1P.S. I just sent your column about this to the president (or whatever her title is) of our local DNC and told her what I thought of it too. Thanks! You said it best.
2May seem a bit cynical but I’m somewhat of the opinion that this IS in fact the way democracy works now. It’s pretty well been proven to us that there’s nothing like fairness involved.
3It’s not an election if the voters don’t get to pick the winner.
4Don’t issue them credentials. Make them wear this. https://www.hottopic.com/product/dc-comics-superman-logo-t-shirt/276046.html
It should take care of the problem in one election cycle.
5Susan. My gripe exactly. This has been a source of my frustration for years.
6I can’t tell you who are our Nat’l committee and and wonan. I do know who is Dem State chair and I respect her a lot, ditto our Dem Governor and Dem US Senator. Should they have votes in Nat’l Committe? If it was just those 3 I’d be OK, we elected them statewide, but the rest we could jettison.
Both major parties in Colorado are so screwed up with factions; I’m pissed! We should not have Hillery and Bernie factions. Let the GOP fight amongst themselves; we Democrats should be the grownups.
7The issue is that the powers that be at the dnc would rather elect a jeff sessions then a Bernie Sanders.
8Jeff wouldn’t theaten their shot at wing nut welfare as a pet d.
Bernie would make them take positions that present them with the alternatives of either being exposed as hypocrites or being forced to betray their paymasters.
Look at the gutting of dodd frank with the assistence of d’s who have been broken to the rethuglican saddle.
Look at the nominees that rahm’s disiples have been recruiting. rethug’s that get rebranded as d’s while maintaining reactionary/ rethuglican positions. Plus the dccc, dscc and dnc active attempts, with donated funds from party faithful, to kneecap progressives in the name of retaining power.
good example is the r running as a d in penn 18.
Pro war, pro fracking, anti environment ( if pro fracking this is obvious), pro murder lobby, anti miminium wage hike, anti Pelosi ( promised not to vote for her as speaker so rather Ryan?).
No wonder the thugs aren’t more worried in the end they get another obedient puppet no matter who wins.
Look at florida where r’s willing to rebrand are given preference over any d who might not toe the thuglican party line when picking an “official” candinate.
Hades they would probably support the demented one or even the twit from texas if they decided to run as d’s.
Power is a tool that should be used for improving the world not a goal in and of itself no matter what the cost.
Something that the party org’s have conspiciously forgotten.
You’re insulting caca-it at least has a useful purpose.
9The current DNC makeup is just a money machine for their in-house consultants who consistently lose the races they are supposedly helping.
I’m moderate and could belong to either major party or just be independent. But I’m not a Democrat because I cannot abide the junior high level name calling exhibited by k, and the hypocrisy of the people who are supposedly party leaders and usually behave more like Republicans.
10I have read Miz Juanita’s declaration and the ensuing comments. Y’all have excellent arguments. I do recall the kerfuffle over Dem superdelegates in the last national election and couldn’t quite understand what the heck was going on. I think my understanding has improved on the subject. But whatever y’all do, don’t let that issue divert you from the real flaming mess at the highest reaches of government in Washington. I just watched Betsy DeVos on 60 Minutes and I really have to stop grinding my teeth! She has been buffed up by professional make-up artists and wardrobe gurus but her brain is still as painfully limited as it ever was. And she is now moving to get rid of the Obama Administration’s action on campus sexual assault which would victimize the victim even worse than ever. She is also still sticking with the “argument” that public schools that lose funding when students transfer out to charter schools actually do better without these particular students in the enrollment, so its a win-win situation for everybody! Well, lah dee frickin dah! Betsy, for heaven’s sake go back to Grand Rapids ASAP. Your brother, Eric Prince, is going to need your familial support as he finds himself on the spot for some of the dangdest things his private army did along the way in other parts of the world!
11Thanks y’all for speaking up on this. I don’t know who any Super Delegates are and never did understand why we had them. How does one find them? Do they have a Super Delegate office suite at the state and national level? I just know they can override our votes. Guess I need to dig out the old Google and see what it tells me.
12One of my Super Delegates is Sen. Amy Klobuchar and I like her a lot. And. She should not be a SD because they should not exist. I’m sure she’d still be a super delegate, just not a Super.
13It was my understanding that the DNC Unity Reform Commission resolved this issue by making huge cuts in the number of super delegates. I guess the powers that be decided the DNC didn’t need any unity or reform. Democrats need every vote they can catch in 2018 and 2020 if we want to get out from under the horror we currently suffer. I may be wrong but it seems to me that unity is important in obtaining enough votes to defeat Trump and all of his buddies. And it all seems to me that the Democratic Party ought to act democratically and let the voters pick their candidates instead of having party elites do the picking for us.
14@ Marge Wood: The Super Delegate system was instituted after the 1972 McGovern debacle. It was then thought that the Party elite could keep an “outlier” like him from ever becoming the nominee. Then, they gave us Mondale in 1984–and we all know how swell that turned out.
Since then, the super delegates have pretty much gone along with whoever the caucuses and primaries produced. (There are many more of those since 1984–in the interest of actual democracy).
The Rethugs were actually jealous of the system in 2016, because it would have been a way to keep the Orange Moron from the nomination, in theory.
I would gladly go along with having state-wide elected officials automatically be part of the state delegation. Like Senators, Governors and the State Committee Man and Woman. This is because I remember the 1980 Republican convention that relegated Sen. Charles Mathias (R-MD) to the cheap seats with the great unwashed. The Reaganites didn’t want him to play any role in their convention because he wasn’t a “true believer”. He was one of the dwindling members of the “Rockefeller Republicans”.
And why did I care about the fate of any Rethug? It’s because, just as today, DC has no Senators and Mathias saw it has his duty to bring bills sponsored by DC non-voting Delegate to the floor of the Senate. It was all kept very quiet, but he acted as a DC’s Senator. I haven’t forgotten him.
15@Mr. B
16Oh but demented donnie accusing people of low iq’s is fine?
Or the texas twit’s mocking of a woman on death row is presidential?
Or cheny the crook telling Sen. Leahy to f…off on the senator floor is honorable?
Or newtie boys gopac script of calling D’s traitors etc is just hunkie dory?
The list is endless of rethuglican fools who got into office being insulting is ok?
Don’t forget perjurer poppa and addled ronnie raygun lying,and betrayal of their oaths but that was a-ok?
I do not hold any office. My descriptions are factualy accurate and more polite then they should be.
Gee you sound like an individual who would have voted for the twit because you thought he would be fun to have a beer with v. Gore who actually was trying to enlighten you and appeal to the country’s better nature rather then peddle 3rd rate conspiricies and fourth rate intellect as the twit promoted.
Don’t forget the thuglican svengali’s such as atwater ( may he be frying in hades) or rove or …
Gee hope reality is not offending you.
@Mr. B
17Easy solution. Just as if Choice for women offends you or same sex marriage offends you just don’t engage in those actions.
Don’t marry a same sex partner or, I hope you never have to I wish no one had to, face the difficult decision women face on choice.
Just ignore my comments and don’t read them. Then you won’t be offended.
OK. Here we are in a primary season that looks pretty damn good for the Dems largely because the Golden Gibbon has irritated enough people, including a percentage who voted for him. Further, whenever the Golden Gibbon goes on the hustings to publicly endorse a Rethug, he does nothing but talk about himself!!! If I were such a candidate i would not opt to have him in my territory! And what’s more, the Golden Gibbon is mentally, spiritually etc. unable to speak the speech of his predecessors such as right from the first one through to oh, I dunno, say Kennedy. Our language today contains such phrases as by the people, of the people, for the people . . . we have nothing to fear but fear itself . . . ask not what your country can do for you (hear that, Golden Gibbon?) and so on. You know, the kind of things that real leaders are apt to say. As for that guy in the MAGA cap who keeps showing up everywhere in your area, sometimes these are the things you have to remind him about whether he wants to hear them or not. Might not do him any good but it does great things for your blood pressure.
18Mother Jones’ cat, you’re so right about unity in opposition to rethuglican money and power. The Democratic candidate in PA is far from perfect, but we need to elect him and send a message to Trump that he has lost his mojo. Conor Lamb is obviously trying to appeal to more than just the educated, progressive voters in this area in order to win the seat, which will have to be defended again in November, I believe. He will feel the wrath of true Dems if he underperforms.
19I agree with k that we have withstood more than our share of name-calling, but now it is time to show our character in the face of that abuse by “going high” when they “go low” which is far more difficult than it sounds.
Listening to Trump and his minions refer to Congresswoman
Waters as “low I.Q.” and hearing the phrase “dumb ass democrats” coming from a Rethug U.S. Senator made me seethe.
My private go-to retort is “santorum” which sounds like Latin, but is really quite nasty.
@Maryelle
20As a matter of principle I agree we should not stoop to the thugs level but alas in reality, and in practice, I can not.
Reason is that the thugs have been getting away with murder while the d’s try to maintain some standards.
In practice an example is the use of “blue Slips” in senate judiciary committee. Historically both senators from a state had to return the “blue” slips ( are they really blue? or an anachronistic label?) for a Judges nomination to move forward. At least as far back as the twit’s junta when the d’s held majority in Senate this was adhered to. When the R’s seize power they ignore it.
So the r’s had majority under Hatch and ignored blue slips to stack judiciary with under-qualified ideological hacks. When the d’s came back (’08) Leahy started to respect blue slips again only to see r outright attempts to sabotage the entire process by even holding blue slips back for their own nominee’s. Then comes an r majority and the blue slips are ignored again.
Point of example is that until the r’s feel pain from their bad behavior they will not change.
As long as they get rewards for being obstructionist’s while being able to count on honorable d’s to save them they will continue to be destructive.
So yes as a principle, much like the Oxford debaters in the ’30’s who came out as pacifist’s but then volunteered in droves in ’39, I would like to go high but when it is seen as a weakness that the thuglicans repeatedly take advantage of and profit off of I can not in practice support it.
My head is full of words, great words, but it’s gonna overflow in a minute. BarbInDC, thank you for clarifying all that for me about Super Delegates. I still think there shouldn’t be super delegates. Time to make meat loaf. Y’all are the best.
21I’ll put in a good word for some of the super delegates. I am fine with having elected Dems serve as super delegates. That would be governors and senators, perhaps even lt. governors or congress critters. These are all people who were able to win an election as Democrats, so they know something about winning elections and something about the people they represent. OTOH, I am dead set against anyone else being appointed a super delegate, I don’t care how big a fund raiser or ass kisser they are.
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