August 27, 2008
Democracy, huh?
It’s now official; Barak Obama is the Democratic nominee for President. Sure, I’m happy about this. Despite a number of recent disappointments, I’ve been a big supporter of Obama as the best realistic option in this crazy thing our country calls an election for quite some time. But, I can’t help but be a little bewildered, annoyed and surprise, surprise upset about the official means by which the nomination happened.
Since the middle of 2007 Obama and his campaign machine have been out and about talking to massive gatherings of the masses, raising masses of money and doing all the other fun things that go with running for President. When January finally rolled around the states finally started holding their primary elections and confusing caucuses. Through that process Obama began winning his share of delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
As the spring wore on he and NY Senator Hillary Clinton emerged as the front-runner and their lengthy contested battle wore on toward the summer. By the end of the primary season, Obama emerged with a majority of the convention delegates assigned to him and while the many people who voted for Clinton took her loss with varying degrees of outrage, he was supposedly assured of being the nominee due to those delegates he’d won in the primary season.
Today those delegates were all together in Denver and they held the vote for the nomination with both Obama and Clinton had their names put out as candidates. Strangely their vote totals did not match the assignments they’d received in the primary season. Obama was chosen by way more of the delegates than he’d won.
I’m not upset with this outcome, and I’m well aware that the Democratic Party is carefully coordinating their convention as a show of unity to prove to the skeptical media that the primary did not divide the party. Still, it seems that by voting how they wanted to show the media how that party runs things, the party representatives ignored the will of the general public who chose them as their representatives in Denver. The primary season left Obama with a slim lead and it’s by that margin that he should have been nominated.
The way they did this really just exposed the insiders’ clubs that run the politics of our country, and it makes me feel a lot more insignificant as a voter. The messages from both sides in this campaign (and most) talk about listening to the little guy and helping people out, but doing things this way just makes it clearer that outsiders will have a very difficult time making an impact on things through the political system.