There will be something like 600-plus delegates pledged to Obama at the Vermont Democratic Party's State Convention in Barre on May 24. Of those, 110 are declared candidates for the six open district-level slots to represent Vermont's Obama voters at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. If every candidate gets two minutes of air time, that's three-plus hours of listening to impassioned people say, "I'm just so fired up, and I've worked so hard to get here."
So I heard an interesting take this evening at our County Committee meeting. A young woman who worked the phones, stood in the cold at the honk & waves, and brought the signs to the Maple Fest Parade, told us why she wanted to go to Denver to help nominate Barack Obama. She's biracial, moved here despite her family's concern that she would be terribly isolated in the whitest state in the US, and she wants to show the rest of the country that there's more to Vermont than skiing, ice cream, and being the whitest state in the country.
There's an informational & organizational meeting at St. Luke's Episcopal in St. Albans on Wednesday, Feb. 20, 6:30 pm brought to you by the Obama campaign.
Phone banking is being organized, too.
St. Luke's is across from the southeast corner of Taylor Park (the green space in the center of town; the parish hall door is around the side to the left of the building.
If anyone is organizing for Hillary in Franklin County, I'll post that, too.
NanuqFC
In a Time of Universal Deceit, TELLING the TRUTH Is a Revolutionary Act. -- George Orwell
That's right, they arrived tonight, and I met some of them at the 40th birthday party for our proprietor over at the Labor Hall.
Fresh from their stints in New Hampshire and Maine, I met Rob Hill, the Obama State Director, and Emily Polak, the field organizer for Washington, Orange, and Caledonia Counties. As you might guess, Rob and Emily are young, smart, and enthusiastic. Who wouldn't be enthusiastic with the momentum they've got going?
The Obama campaign in Vermont has a state director and six field organizers, and I think some other staffers (it was hard to hear over the sounds of Sugar Shack but hey, I'm not going to complain about the chance to hear Scarlet Begonias, Cumberland Blues, and other Dead classics), and they're planning on a phone banking and door-to-door campaign from now to Town Meeting Day.
They didn't tell me this is okay, but if you are fired up and ready to go, you can contact them at rhillATSYMBOLbarackobama.com and epolakATSYMBOLbarackobama.com
Pretty grim few days, not just for the Obama campaign, but by extension for Americans and Democracy. Obama's new kind of politics looks just like the old this week in the worst possible way; that is, fanning the flames of homophobia to bring in votes. If you missed the details, the basics were diaried here. Suffice to say that the freshman from Illinois has had several opportunities to make this right, but has continued to dig in, in the process demonstrating either a callous indifference to the people hurt by McClurkin's anti-gay rhetoric, or a disturbing level of arrogance by deciding that if people have a problem with his giving this kind of garbage a national microphone and stamping his own endorsement on it, it's just their problem. (If you're curious how this played out - it went basically according to a worse-case scenario).
Obama - of course - was a no-show, just as he's often a no-show on controversial issues in the Senate of late. For my part, I'm going with the arrogance theory over callousness, as it would be consistent with what was on display iin the last couple paragraphs of this weekend's NYT piece, as well as the dug-in "if you build it, they will come" style of campaign he has run.
So this guy, who for most of the year has been my second choice, has now dropped into the Hillary "no way" column for me. The great uniter has thoroughly alienated me (and for an example of what a good job he's doing uniting us all, take a look at the comments at dKos on the topic. It's a pretty piss-poor display, and was utterly avoidable).
But what's really depressing is where this likely leaves me - and many other liberals - looking ahead to the General election. It's likely that either Clinton or Obama will be the nominee. I think for all of us, this was supposed to be the year that - for maybe the first time in memory - we were going to get to vote for a candidate we actually liked - somebody we might actually want to see as President - rather than, yet again, being faced with a "lesser of two evils" choice. In the post-Dean era, after ALL the work we've all done across the country on this party - and with the incredible opportunity afforded by a thoroughly discredited and rejected Republican Party - we were supposed to move beyond that tiresome scenario (even if just barely).
But apparently, not yet. For me, at least, not if it's one of these two. Clearly a lot has happened in the last few years.
One of the interesting discussions I had at the blogger shindig last night (I'll get a report up on it later) had to do with, what else, who's the best candidate for president? There was certainly a strong Obama contingent, ably represented by Philip Baruth and Neil Jensen--did I get that right?--but that may not be the end of it.
Bill Simmon has been arguing for Bill Richardson as a dark horse. Well, he's obviously a dark horse, but does that mean he's nowhere? Bill was pointing out a lot of good points for Richardson: many years in Congress, experience at the Cabinet level, he's a governor, he's Hispanic. All of those things are correct, but that doesn't necessarily make him a winner. Funnily enough, though, David Brooks makes all the same points in his column ($$) today.
I'm not much to take advice from conservatives, and I find Brooks particularly annoying, but that doesn't mean he's wrong. From what I know of Richardson I think he's an attractive candidate. The biggest question is how he gets from where he is now, which is pretty much nowhere, to the top of the charts. The way Dean did it four years ago was to be first out of the gate as an antiwar candidate. I didn't exactly buy his conversion from conservative DINO governor to antiwar diehard Dem, but he sure attracted a lot of people and attention.
Unfortunately Richardson doesn't have that going for him. I still think the Democratic field is going to shape up as Hillary vs. someone else, or maybe Hillary/Obama vs. someone else. If that's the way it is I lean toward John Edwards, but I think that Richardson has a shot there. Maybe a long shot, but he's not Kucinich or Vilsack.
