I watched him on CNN a few minutes ago, and he sounded perfectly sensible most of the way through the interview. But the idea bothers me, and I can't really put my finger on the whole reason. Just some thoughts.
I don't have the transcript yet, but at the end of the interview with Blitzer he seemed to say that both candidates still have an equal chance at the nomination. It was casually done, I will have to find the words from the interview.
That was odd to hear, because there is that pesky fact that Obama is leading in pledged delegates and vote count. He never indicated that.
Something else bothered me about his proposal. Much of it stems from an interview he gave to The Politico. Bredesen is a loyal member of the DLC, and he gave the keynote speech at their
annual meeting last year.I have no idea if that had anything to do with some of his comments in the Politico. I just don't know. But his interview today on CNN and his interview with The Politico show a lack of respect for the arm of the party that handles the primary and the convention. Why does that surprise me? I guess it does, though.
In the interview today he was asked by Blitzer how Governor Dean felt as chairman of the DNC. He said Dean was "lukewarm." Wrong. Stacie Paxton issued a statement from Dean the day Bredesen first mentioned it. The statement made it clear that he did not endorse the idea.
Since the DNC has traditionally made decisions controlling the primaries and convention...you would think more attention would be paid to those views.
Here is his interview with The Politico.
A Superdelegate Primary?“Ninety days ago, everybody was talking in warm terms about both the candidates: ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Whoever’s president is going to be great,’” the governor said. “It has gotten vastly more polarized now, and that really concerns me.”
To Bredesen, an even-keeled political pragmatist, superdelegates are certain to ultimately decide the nominee, so it makes no sense for them to do it later rather than sooner.
“The bottom line here is that we have a problem, and I think we need to take it off autopilot and try to find some way of resolving it,” he said. “I don’t know any way that is not going to generate some hard feeling and some divisions in the party. But if we do it early, we’ve got a chance to patch them up.”
He's right about the tension and the anger, and he's right we have a problem. But since when has our party made up so many rules in the middle of primary season. I know the answer to that....never.
A party is not a national party unless it has rules. There have to be rules, or there is anarchy. You don't have to like the rules, but they have to be there. Here is what bothers me from the interview. There is a lack of the respect for the chairman. Would it have been there if Harold Ford were chair? If McAuliffe were still chair? I rather doubt it.
Bredesen gave a technocrat’s answer to why he made the proposal, calling himself “a problem solver" and saying it’s “common sense.” He came to Washington to meet with Democrats about the idea and has lobbied several fellow well-regarded Democratic governors — including Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas — about it over the phone.
The notion has found more favor among party activists outside Washington, he said, suggesting that Beltway Democrats and particularly Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean were not moving quick enough to recognize a growing problem.
“He certainly was not warm to it,” Bredesen said. “He was afraid that such a convocation … would present negative publicity for the party: the graybeards gathering in a back room to do it — smoke-filled room, all this kind of stuff. My retort to that is: You’re going to have that anyway. The superdelegates are going to decide the thing. Better to happen in June.”
Then the governor jabbed: “Howard Dean’s not the whole party. They call it a committee for a reason.”
First off, there are various opinions on the superdelegates stepping in this early. It could go either way.
Bredesen is right. They do call it a committee for a reason. The rules committee is in charge of making the rules. NOT Governor Bredesen.
Governor Dean had this to say on CNN the other day.
Howard Dean employs sarcasm more believably than political blarney, so when he flashed a thin smile on CNN last week and said, "This is the fun part of my job -- I get to bring these sides together," even a third-grader could figure out what the chairman of the Democratic National Committee meant.
Dr. Rorschach, National JournalThis is also apparent, a statement from the same article about the "party elders" setting him up for failure.
The carping from party veterans that Dean is to blame for the Florida and Michigan delegate disputes, or that he has been too passive or ineffectual to tease out a perfect compromise, exasperates aides and admirers who believe that Dean is being set up to be the fall guy, no matter what he does.
Yep, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't...
The presidential candidates went to him and begged him to keep an orderly primary. Guess what, he did do that. The disruptions by FL and MI, and now the disruption of the Clinton campaign using the issue....go beyond his authority to stop. They went beyond the rules, and they made it clear the sanctions did not matter.
Dean "did everything he could to try to stop this," says Moses Mercado, who was director of intergovernmental affairs for the DNC under Dean.
"The reason we're here is that seven candidates came to him and said, 'You have to figure this out and give this calendar reliability. It would have been easier for him to say, 'Screw it; we'll give them their delegates.' But this was a big leadership step to kind of hold everybody together. Dean said, 'We have rules.' " I hate the idea of prolonging this primary campaign. But making new rules and destroying party tradition are going to be far worse in the long run.
This paragraph is interesting...it shows what will be lost if the DNC is sidestepped in the process by the other wing of the party....call it what you may.
The state party chairmen and the grassroots Democrats agitated after the party's 2004 losses to devolve power from the Washington establishment. They wanted to break free of what they saw as the top-down myopia of an inbred pack of consultants, strategists, and pollsters. And Dean, embodying the new approach, arrived in Washington as an occupying force.
There is one more very telling paragraph in this article. It shows how easy it is to spread propaganda because figuring out the truth is just too complicated.
The current mess is the result of a bad brew of parochialism, party politics, misplaced bets, and, most of all, a surprisingly close and protracted fight for the nomination. The underlying facts are too complicated to compete with the simpler story line that Dean is to blame.
Those who defend breaking loose from the rules should realize that the old ways still want to control the party. Bredesen's plan, though it sounds good on the surface, disregards the rules and the ones who are trying to enforce them.
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