The praise for Hillary Clinton is flowing all over Blogdom and the mainstream media. The general consensus is that the speech accomplished its mission which was to bring the Party back together.
I must admit like many others I thought it was one of the best speeches I have heard her give. When she had finished I was prepared to join the stampede and write an essay praising her words–that is until I found out what was going on behind the scenes. Then I realized Hillary Clinton has nothing on her husband, who was known as “Slick Willie” for his ability to charm people who would not realize they had been had until it was too late.
In short Hilary Clinton gave a speech that sounded great in praise of Barack Obama, but she quite cleverly avoided saying anything about the real issue which is the people organizing for John McCain in her name and the people still bitter enough about her loss they want to make Barack Obama look bad and even sabotage this convention.
I found this out after checking out the PUMA website in the wee hours of the morning to see how they were reacting to the speech. There were PUMAs still posting at three a.m. and what they had to say did not inspire any confidence the speech had any impact on them.
What I did learn changed my entire opinion of the speech, for the PUMAs and other die-hard Hillary supporters had spent yesterday organizing for a roll-call floor vote on the nomination. The PUMAs believed they might embarrass Obama with the size of the vote while clinging to the possibility that maybe people might finally see the light and nominate Clinton.
Here is what the PUMA site said yesterday:
The DNC and Nancy Pelosi, the Chairman of the Democratic Convention, are doing everything in their power to make sure that does not happen. With Obama’s flagging support, according to the polls, running neck and neck with McCain, they are very worried that Hillary will get the nomination if a roll call vote takes place on the convention floor. That is why they are making the delegates have a secret hotel vote, instead of the floor vote that’s been done since forever. The hotel vote will purportedly take place on Wednesday morning, August 27, 2008.
According to the PUMAs, the Democratic National Committee took the unprecedented step of organizing a “hotel vote” in which delegates would gather in hotel suites to tally their votes under the watchful eyes of DNC staff who would be in place in insure no mischief took place. Nothing like this has ever been proposed at a Democratic Convention.
The PUMAs were justifiably upset. Thinking this might just be a PUMA bit of misinformation I checked it out with other sources. The Denver Post noted:
Supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton furiously circulated petitions on the floor of the Democratic National Convention last night, hoping to stave off a plan to hold the convention’s roll call at breakfast Wednesday — out of the public eye — sources inside the delegations said.
The move being worked out between the Obama campaign and officials behind Clinton’s suspended bid, would work in two parts: Delegates would cast votes at their hotels Wednesday morning; that night, at the Pepsi Center convention site, the roll-call process would rely on the votes cast that morning, the delegates said.
As the Post reported, Democrats were working out the details of the “hotel vote” yesterday afternoon even as the PUMAs feverishly worked to block it. According to the PUMA site:
There is a DNC rule that says if 20% of a candidate’s delegates sign a petition for a roll call vote, it must happen. This means that Hillary needs 826 of her delegates to sign this petition.
So the PUMAs hit the streets to try to gather the needed number of votes. The PUMA site does not report if they were successful or not. In fact at this point I can find no reference to the vote even taking place.
All this is irrelevant because there is one person who could have put an end to this and that was Hillary Clinton. The one thread that runs through the PUMA site is that members were afraid that in her speech last night Hillary Clinton would release her delegates making the organizing and the hotel vote all meaningless.
Releasing her delegates was the one thing PUMAs feared:
However, we have an unconfirmed report coming from someone inside the Pepsi Center that Hillary Clinton will make a special announcement tonight during her speech. Although I’m ever the optimist, call me paranoid: Will she try to pre-empt this grassroots effort by releasing her delegates tonight?
Releasing her delegates was the one action many Democrats wanted Hillary Clinton to do in her speech last night. She had to have known about the PUMA effort and certainly knew about the hotel vote negotiations, meaning she knew she was the one person who could end this entire mess. She refused to do so. What the PUMAs feared she might do in her speech never took place.
Word is she will release her delegates at a private meeting with them today, but this will not have the impact of doing it in the speech. As I write this no one knows what she will tell them.
In addition, one other task her speech convincingly needed to accomplish was to disavow the mushrooming number of Hillary Trojan groups who are urging voters to support McCain in her name. She needed to single out the PUMAs, Clintons4McCain and their leaders and specifically disavow all of them. She needed to say these people are not acting in my name and what they are doing is contrary to what I believe.
She needed to do this in as strong a language as possible, making it very clear she not only did not support those groups but considered them to be a perversion of her own ideals. There needed to be a section in her speech specifically devoted to these misguided people who would rather have another Scalia on the Supreme Court than Barack Obama in the White House. She did not do this either.
In retrospect, knowing what I now know, her speech was all talk and no action. Clinton refused to release her delegates and she refused to disavow the Clinton McCain groups. But there is more.
She also refused to disavow the criticisms she had made of Obama during the campaign, criticisms the McCain people are finding quite useful. In a last slap at the Obama people she refused to give them a copy of her speech until the last minute. Meanwhile various unattributed leaks have been flowing from the Clinton camp like a veritable river about their dissatisfaction with Obama. Maureen Dowd, who has a great sense for such things caught the mood in a Times column yesterday. Dowd quotes Republican strategist Mike Murphy as saying the mood at the convention was “submerged hate.” Dowd then goes on the describe some of this:
There were a lot of bitter Clinton associates, fund-raisers and supporters wandering the halls, spewing vindictiveness, complaining of slights, scheming about Hillary’s roll call and plotting trouble, with some in the Clinton coterie dissing Obama by planning early departures, before the nominee even speaks.
That Dowd, who usually does not toe the GOP line, should quote a Republican criticizing the Democratic National Convention and then go on to support his accusations shows how out of hand things have become in Denver.
Behind much of this I see the hand of Mark Penn, the Clintons’ Karl Rove, who apparently played a major role in Clinton’s speech. By cleverly framing Clinton’s speech as all talk and no action, Penn/Rove continued to drive a wedge into the Democratic Party.
The only rational reason to do this is that the Clinton people, like the PUMAs, still believe they can turn the convention around. They are still hoping for some miracle in which the delegates come to their senses and nominate Clinton. If not this, they hope all of America sees the Democrats nominated the wrong candidate and won’t make the same mistake in 2012. It almost makes you believe the Clintons hope Obama loses. Here are Bill Clinton’s strange remarks yesterday in a story headlined, “Bill Clinton in Denver Again Undercuts Obama:”
Suppose for example you’re a voter. And you’ve got candidate X and candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything, but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom would you vote?
If Clinton had released her delegates it would have gone a long way towards lessening this tension. If she had gone even further and asked the convention to nominate Barack Obama by acclamation it might have helped to heal the wounds. She did not.
The question now is what will be the long-term consequences of this? Clearly, there are elements in the Democratic Party that will blame the Clintons if Barack Obama loses. In a strange way if Barack Obama does not win the White House, Hillary Clinton may close the door to the Oval Office on herself.
One thing is clear; McCain supporters are taking this and running with it. The PUMA website contained several posts with links to a Faux News story about Obama’s ties to William Ayers, a founding member of the 1960s and 1970s radical group the Weather Underground. One commenter noted:
We need help in this story please comment and make it hot we need to have it smoking hot for the morning there is less than 4 hours to do thanks,
Makes you wonder who this “we” is?
The vitriol on the site can get pretty amazing:
McCain has put his life on the line for our country and been willing to die for our country which is more than can be said for BHO OR Michelle. I swear I want to walk right up to BHO and pull his lapel pin off.
No, Michelle looked, as though she were trying to keep aloof, but there was a fire in her eyes. Like she was biting her tongue. I don’t understand what was drawing her ire, but the again, 20 years of Wright could make her angry, no matter what she heard?
Oh yeah… I haven’t heard him say his last name once without fumbling on the syllables. I suspect his difficulty in saying his name might be one of the reasons he gave up and said Barack America at the VP announcement speech.
I’m wondering if NObama will wear a TOGA on Thursday when he deliver his speech as selected nominee of the DNC, bought and paid for superdelegates.
He is his father’s son, his old man was the same way in Kenya, talk down on people, know it all. He died a failure and hated by a lot of people.
What the PUMAs have constructed ala Karl Rove/Mark Penn is an irrefutable argument: any criticism of Hillary Clinton shows that Obama supporters are really hate-mongers. Here is one PUMA:
This is why so many of us stand by our statements that we are fighting for our country. BO inspires hate and this is evidenced every day by his supporters.
Hillary Clinton could easily put a stop to all this, but she does not. That may prove to be the ultimate tragedy of this campaign.
UPDATE: CLINTON RELEASES DELEGATES
This afternoon Hillary Clinton met with her delegates, thanked them for their support and released them, saying:
I have spoken many of you who have expressed your questions about what you should do. Now many of you feel a responsibility to represent the voters in your state. And others of you after this long journey want the chance to vote for what’s in your heart. Now still others will be voting for Senator Obama because they want to demonstrate their personal commitment for the unity of this party behind our nominee. I am not telling you what to do. You come here from so many different places having made this journey and feeling in your heart what is right for you.
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, an Obama supporter, gave exactly the right response to the situation:
If she’s not a strong enough leader to get her followers to do what’s right for America, then that would surprise me.
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