Why can't we treat all delegates equally - Part 2

About 2 weeks ago the Boulder Obama Grassroots held a meeting for Obama delegates. First off, I want to stress that this group has no official relationship with the Obama campaign. But it is most of the Obama activists in Boulder.

The purpose of this meeting was to get Boulder to agree on a slate of 5 candidates that we would all vote for. The "cause" of this was that Adams County was doing this already and it was the only way to "wrest control" from Adams County. (Turns out this was not true - see below.)

The idea of telling people they should not run bothered me. I had my hand up the entire meeting to speak to this but was never recognized. DeAnne Butterfield tended to mostly recognize the same 7 people but many times it seems half the people had their hand up so it wasn't easy to moderate.

So I then wrote this post asking for feedback. The one comment did not help much as it didn't speak to my concerns.

I then went to the second "Grassroots" meeting and talked to several people about my concerns. This just reinforced my questions as everyone was happy to talk about why this was the only way to respond to Adams County, but no one had any reason why it mattered.

So then I wrote this post, with more information and in a more aggressive tone, asking for feedback. And there was a lot of feedback, all of which was yes, this "anointed slate" is B.S.

So I went to the convention today and passed out this flier. In it I listed my concerns and asked people to consider all candidates. Now here's where it gets even more interesting. From my live blog of the convention:

I talked to Danny T. Watson Jr. who is president of the Adams County Young Dems and a bunch of other political groups including the Obama teams in Adams county. I asked him about the Adams County list of suggested candidates and he said "there isn't one - that they had heard Boulder had one but they did not have one." In other words, the whole Boulder Obama Grassroots excuse for having a suggested list, according to Danny, is total B.S.

So the whole reason for coming up with a slate is likely a fabrication. (I say likely because there may have been a group Danny was unfamiliar with.) If so, we were not addressing an anti-democratic problem, we were creating it.

As I was passing out my flier I ran into 10+ people who were livid over the whole anointed slate issue. Across the board they felt dis-enfranchised before the vote was even taken. Disenfranchised enough that several asked for my fliers and passed them out themselves. These are people that supported Obama strongly enough that they were spending a Saturday at the convention and wanted to spend 4 days in Denver doing the same - and they felt betrayed. That is not how you build ongoing support.

Even worse, we were short 49 Obama delegates today. That could have cost us a national delegate for Obama. Almost certainly some who decided to not show were candidates who figured why bother as they had been discounted as possibilities. Here is the emergency email sent by the Obama campaign today:

If you are a delegate or Alternate that did not come today to the CD2 Convention, please come immediately!  We are 49 delegates short and are about to lose delegate seats to Senator Clinton

I almost did not hand out the flier today. In hindsight, I am very glad I did. All of my concerns turned out to be very real. And talking to many of the candidates today, I would be proud to have most (granted not all) of them represent me. And what County they are from - irrelevant.

I don't know what motivated the leadership of the Grassroots group to do this. But I don't think they served Obama or the Democratic Party well with this effort. Sending the "right" person to the convention and losing Colorado in the general election - not a good trade-off.

Comments

[Brad]

I heard that in fact the people running the convention miscounted, and the Obama folks weren't short any delgates -- they had to turn away about 20 alternates. So no worries!

[Brad]

In my personal opinion, the Adams County reason is a red herring. I understand that some people were giving that as a reason, but in my opinion it's not a good reason to give. The main reasons are to make sure that delegates who have been long-time supporters of Obama get rewarded, and -- even more importantly -- to help ensure that good representatives of the Obama campaign get sent to the national delegation. (As you rightly point out, you want someone who will interview well, for example, regardless of what county they're from.)

I would worry that without the Boulder Grassroots recommendation process, people with the highest name recognition would win, even though they haven't really been involved with the Obama campaign. (Here I have in mind Suzy Ageton and Jean Dubofsky -- I have nothing against them personally, but as far as I know they haven't been much involved in campaigning for Obama.)