Sherry Chandler

from olviz at Echidne:

I’ve talked to people who didn’t stand up for Clinton in our caucus who are fully aware that she has the longer record of achievement and that, against high odds, triumph over the character assassins. She was elected to the Senate after one of the longest and most aggressive media campaigns in modern history. But that campaign is continuing and none of its lies ever falls on the weight of massive refutation.

One woman I talked with was in tears because she knew she was giving up the best chance of seeing a wonderfully qualified woman as president during her lifetime. She had every confidence that Barack Obama is an excellent candidate who will certainly be better than any Republican and that a Democrat must win this election and assume the office. She decided to stand up for him only because she made a rational decision, taking the continuing campaign to demonize Hillary Clinton into account. I have also talked to men who have made the same decision on exactly the same rational basis.

This primary, which should be a happy one for the Democrats, is making me sad because we’re still letting the right-wing hate machine make our choices for us.

Read this whole post and the comments.

Meanwhile I will tell you that I’ve asked to be taken off MoveOn’s mailing list. I sort of understood that they would support Obama even though Clinton was the candidate who stood up for them against the “General Betrayus” censure. After all they took a vote and their membership was overwhelmingly for Obama. But now, when it looks like the superdelegates might swing the primary away from their candidate, they’re petitioning them to “let the voters decide.”

I’ll let Kevin Drum have the floor on this one:

The very existence of superdelegates assumes that they’ll vote their own consciences, not merely parrot the results of the primaries. After all, why even have them if that’s all they do?

More importantly, though, who decides what the popular will is anyway? Is it number of pledged delegates from the state contests? Total popular vote? Total number of states won? What about uncommitted delegates from primary states? Or caucus states, in which there’s no popular vote to consult and delegates are selected in a decidedly nondemocratic fashion to begin with? And what about all the independent and crossover voters? Personally, I’d just as soon they didn’t have a say in selecting the nominee of my party at all, but the rules say otherwise. If I’m a superdelegate, do I count their votes, or do I pore over exit polls to try to tease out how Democratic Party voters voted? And how do I take into account the obviously disproportionate influence of Iowa and New Hampshire, two tiny states that have far more power than any truly democratic process would ever give them?

I’m not very excited at the idea of superdelegates deciding the nomination either, but the only way that will happen is if the primaries end up nearly tied in the first place. Then factor in the number of ways in which the primary/caucus process is nondemocratic from the get go, and it hardly seems practical to insist that superdelegates should all somehow divine a single “democratic” result from a very close race. I’m just not sure how you can do it. Better to simply respect them as human beings and party loyalists, and allow them to vote their consciences.

I have yet to have a chance to vote, so I’m not too sanguine about MoveOn’s enthusiasm for direct democracy (or perhaps direct Democracy). As I’ve said and said, Kentucky’s primary isn’t until May. So I think if there’s a desire to let the people decide, we should work for a single national Democratic primary by secret ballot.

And then there’s this from Ataturk at FDL. And this from Sisyphus Shrugged. And this question from Atrios.

Update: Read this from MyDD.

The arts which control the material and possess the necessary knowledge are two: the art which uses the product and the art of the master-craftsman who directs the manufacture. Hence the art of the user also may in a sense be called the master-art; the difference is that this art is concerned with knowing the form, the other, which is supreme as controlling the manufacture, with knowing the material.
—Artistotle, Physics

The word “form” sometimes suggests merely “the way the thing is said”—simply ornamenting some distinct “content” which, by contrast, carries meaning on its own honest face. But this dichotomy fails when meaning adheres instead to some interface between “form” and “content.” …What matters instead is a particular gesture of thought, which might take any materials for its embodiment—a jar in Tennessee, for instance, or the eye of a blackbird among mountains. …The form actively guides our attention to what signifies (the gesture of thought) and away from what does not (the object chosen to manifest it). Yet the form … cannot exist without some object. In short, form and content are inseparable. This is a commonplace; the poem exhibits “unity,” meshing its formal and material causes.
—Charles O. Hartman, Free Verse

A poem is not so much a thought, or series of thoughts, as it is a mind.
—Howard Nemerov, “Speaking Silence”

I was going to explain why I pulled these quotes, but a quick search discovers that I’ve already done that here and here.