If Obama is the pledged delegate leader and the untainted popular vote leader, then I will be up in arms if the Super Delegates deny him the nomination. But I do not claim for a second that this violates the rules. It clearly does not. The whining about the existing rules comes from Kos and Josh Marshall and other die hard Obama supporters. THAT is a fact.In essence, what some Obama supporters are arguing for is CHANGING the rules so that the pledged delegate leader is the nominee. Maybe we can adopt that rule for the next nomination fight. But we won't for this one. Instead, JUST LIKE the Clinton campaign, the Obama campaign and its online supporters are arguing for what they think the Super Delegates should do.
What bothers me is they are pretending they are not. It is disingenuous of them. I am arguing for my views as well. For making the popular vote the deciding yardstick. But I admit the rules do not mandate that my yardstick be followed. Obama, his news network NBC, and his legion of blog followers pretend they are standing for the rules. They are not.
I agree with almost everything BTD's posted on this subject in the last few days, and I'm so grateful that there are a few folks like BTD and Jerome pushing back against the shill-like narratives coming out of what is normally the reality-based community. One comment: I think there's a corollary to this that needs to get explicitly called out by the widely-read folks who are still making some sense on this subject. We seem perilously close to losing ourselves in our candidates, which is something I thought us netrootsers were supposed to frown upon...
I thought we were supposed to drag Democrats back to progressive policies and better tactics, not get roped into fake Great Man (or Woman) schemes. Activists are a dime a dozen when all we do is lick envelopes, or post pro-candidate diaries, or start shilling wholesale on the superdelegate issue...it's when we work as a movement to push progressive interests within the party that we actually do real good. At least, that's what I figured. So is Obama going to stand up any more on healthcare than he seems to be planning to in exchange for Kos' almost shill-like backing? And nearly all my participation in the blogosphere these days is limited to pushing back against what seem to me to be unfair anti-Clinton or pro-Obama narratives...does this help us?
When we take sides against each other and start spinning, we help the primary candidates, but the only help we are giving the party (and our country) is the direct effort we put into nominating the better candidate. We're maxing out at picking the better candidate. And as Atrios points out, deciding which one is the "better candidate" is insanely subjective, since policy-wise they're around the same.
When instead of picking a candidate and pushing for the candidate, we push candidates to convince us to help them by taking good positions and doing good things, we make better candidates. Instead of picking from what we're given, we can actually make what we're given better. To be effective as a movement we need to be a movement. Not a bunch of individuals who buy into candidates and then start shilling. Carrying water for the Obama camp on superdelegates (dishonestly!) is hardly a good use of front page space on Big Orange. It's a waste of our efforts to just break down and carry water for our favorite camps. I'm not an Obamacrat. I'm not a Clintonista. I'm a progressive. Can we go back to being progressives? Please?
I wish we could stop the shilling, can the cognitive dissonance, and go back to being the netroots that I still identify with. But that probably won't happen until a month or two post-convention, the way things look. I just hope that once the nomination's settled, we'll remember why we came here in the first place.
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