If her turn to more hardball tactics is any indication, Clinton may be trying to preempt the firewall strategy's failure. In two bold moves at the end of March, her campaign launched a two-pronged initiative to intimidate Democratic leaders and to strongarm pledged delegates who are already committed to Obama through primaries and caucuses.
First, the Clinton campaign organized 20 major Democratic Party financiers to release a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi upbraiding her for appearing on ABC News and saying, "If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party." According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the contributors who signed the letter have given a combined $23.6 million to Democrats since 1999. These mega-donors, clearly wielding their financial heft as an implied threat, claimed that Pelosi had taken an "untenable position" by merely suggesting superdelegates should avoid overturning the results of democratic primaries and caucuses.
At the same time, Clinton told Time that technically, even pledged delegates who are supposed to represent the will of voters are permitted to change their vote at the Democratic National Convention. "Every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose," she said, introducing the possibility of a new, more brass-knuckled kind of delegate campaign. "We talk a lot about so-called pledged delegates, but every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment."
A late March NBC News poll reports that if a candidate "loses among delegates selected by voters but still wins the nomination," a plurality (41 percent) of Democratic voters believe that candidate would be "not legitimate." Many of those surveyed probably remember both the recent episodes of stolen elections, and the past eras of brokered conventions and corrupt, often racist political machines stuffing ballot boxes.
The latter, in fact, was precisely how the epithet "Democrat Party"—as opposed to "Democratic Party"—was coined. As the language-obsessed William Safire documented 24 years ago in a New York Times column, the term "Democrat Party" was created by Republican leaders in the mid-20th century to imply that their opponents—many bigoted segregationists and machine pols—were, in fact, undemocratic.
After the Florida and Ohio debacles in the 2000 and 2004 election, Republican lamentations about democracy are, of course, absurd. Additionally, many machines have long ago decayed … except for the one inside the Democratic Party itself—the Clinton machine. If that machine's firewall strategy continues to exploit the Race Chasm and threaten to trample the will of voters, Clinton will be asking the Democratic Party, one that has come to champion racial tolerance and democracy, to truly become the Democrat Party—one that ignores those ideals in favor of a single Democrat.
Originally posted at http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3597/the_clinton_firewall/(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
