Howard Dean has issued orders to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Mitt Romney has brought orders from the top to the Nevada Republican Convention. Can unity be faked? by rtbohan
(libertarian)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Howard Dean, the Democratic Party National Chairman has issued orders to the two candidates still fighting for nomination. One of them has to withdraw from the race by early June. In other words, the National Convention which exists primarily to choose the presidential candidate of the party should be denied the opportunity to make a choice.
Mitt Romney, who finished with majority support in the Republican caucuses in Nevada has issued an order to the State Convention. All delegates from the state to the national convention must be supporters of the candidate who finished third in the caucuses.
The question now is whether the orders from headquarters will be obeyed by the candidates and by state party officials.Beyond that, there lies the question of whether each party's voters will be pleased enough by a bogus show of unity to accept the quashing of diversity of opinion within the party.
I don't believe that either of the two Democratic candidates is going to withdraw from the campaign in early June, and probably not before the convention meets. Each of them views this campaign, correctly, as his/her chance to become President. Neither will willingly give it up.
Senator Obama has said that if he iis not elected President in 2008 he will not be a candidate for the presidency again. I believe he meant that statement and will stick with that resolution. Even if I am wrong about his candor, I believe that this is his one chance to win the presidency. He was able to mount a (so-far) successful challenge to the "inevitable nominee" in part because he was able to match her contributions from large contributors with donations from small contributed solicited through the internet. A second race for the nomination would not have the novelty or arouse the enthusiasm of this one and not attract the same kind of financial support.
Senator Clinton, at this time, has a far slimmer (but not zero) chance of being nominated this year. Dick Morris, the former Bill Clinton staff member who opposes Hillary Clinton, says in an article on Fox News.com (www.foxnews.com) that Senator Clinton knows she has no chance of being nominated, but is staying in the race to do as much damage as she can to him, hoping he loses to John McCain in November. This would make her the obvious choice in 2012. While I am willing to believe that Senator Clinton and her staff are Machiavellian enough to conceive such a plan, it would not succeed.
Senator Clinton was called tha obvious--the "inevitable" --nominee this year. Four years from now, she will have less chance of winning the nomination than she does at this moment, and much less than she did at the beginning of this campaign. She will no longer appear invincible as a candidate for either the nomination or the election. She will find that being the candidate who "would have won the election" does not bring support and especially donations, just as Al Gore found four years ago that being the candidate who "really won the election" does not bring donations or enthusiastic supporters. All of the negatives which dogged her campaign this year will still be around. Her husband's popularity has suffered as a result of his gaffes in campaigning for his wife. The nostalgia for the Clinton years, which fueled the early stages of the Clinton campaign exists only because the nineties are compared to the current situation. In four years, whoever succeeds George W. Bush will probably compare favorably with the administrations of both the Bushes and the Clintons. If Senator Clinton is to become the second President Clinton she has to be elected this year.
The Republican party leadership seems to have abandoned the image of the "Big Tent" for the image of unity. But it is attempting to do it with the candidate who respresents the smallest group within its coalition. McCain does not appeal to the religious conserrvatives. He does not appeal to the livertarian conservatives. He does not appeal to the remaining liberal Republicans. He represents the military industrial complex and, within limits, appeals to the neocons. He has achieved the pledged delegates necessary to assure him of the nomination.
Although Senator McCain, even after achieving the number of pledged delegates to assure his nomination, still has around 30% of Republican primary voters voting against him, the party leadership insists on presenting a picture of unanimity. This will not fool the Republicans still opposing him, and it will not intimidate the Democrats. And, as the events in Reno on Sunday showed, it will not work.
Mitt Romney, who won the caucus vote in Nevada, wen to Reno to encourage his supporters and all delegates to the convention, to send a delegation to the National convention which would provide unanimous support for Senator McCain, who finished third in the caucus vote. The effort was rejected by a majority of the delegates to the state convention, and a number of supporters of Ron Paul, who finished second in the caucus vote were put forward to go to the naional convention. At that point, the party leadership adjourned the convention, and said that it will reconvene later. The only reason that the failure of this attempt at pseudo unity has not damaged McCain more is that it has been largely unreported in the media outside Nevada.
Politics is an arena of conflict, a battle between different political philosophies, tactics and programs. The national parties would like to present their conventions as a love feast for the television cameras.
But it is not a love feast but a debate with an outcome. The efforts of the party leadership to eliminate debate and minimize differences within the two parties ought not to succeed. Probably the efforts by the leadership will just make the conflict more bitter.
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Posted By: Gary R. Carter
Date: 2008-04-30 01:36:36
Haha, Lloyd, I am actually disappointed now if I read a decent article and you are not there at the beginning of the comments section discussing a different article from a different dimension.
