Category: Barack Obama

I Voted For Obama

I voted today in New York City and I voted for Barack Obama. It wasn’t an easy decision and one that constitutes where I am today, not an endorsement. As anyone who’s been reading this blog knows, I’ve been highly critical of both Obama and Hillary Clinton most of the time and I expect that I will continue to be until one of them convinces me that I should be proactively supporting their candidacy in whatever way I can.

I’ve been trying to write a longer post explaining my thinking and the circumstances of my vote for the last hour. I’m completely unhappy with all of the drafts that I’ve written. I might take another crack tomorrow, but for now, this is all I’ve got.

Playing Offense

Via Bob Cesca, I see Cenk Uygur of the Young Turks has endorsed Obama and included this in his reasoning:

If we choose Hillary, then we have to defend her for the next nine months. I can and I will. But I’d rather play offense. I’d rather talk about how inspirational and hopeful and terrific our candidate is, and honestly, how theirs isn’t. It should be the Republicans playing defense this time around. Let’s make them.

I agree with Bob and Cenk – we can and will defend whoever our nominee is, as well as find ways to play offense on behalf of our nominee. Unlike the post-partisan bullshit, this is a real reason to be optimistic about an Obama candidacy. Obama is generating a real movement of Democratic activists, young voters, and new voters. If he wins the nomination, he’ll come into the general with a head of steam and more money than any presidential candidate has ever mustered for a campaign. It will immediately put the Republicans on the defensive and give us a unique chance to not only win in November, but do so in grand fashion.

Post-Partisan

Matt Stoller, in describing a conversation he had with a very convincing Obama volunteer, nails why Obama’s post-partisanship stuff just won’t actually produce a post-partisan presidency.

It was very mature, much more mature than the oodles of emails I’m getting about how Obama is post-partisan and get us through the bickering of the last fifteen years. Which, incidentally, he won’t, because the reason there has been bickering for the past fifteen years is because people disagree about stuff.

There are a lot of good reasons that might contribute to me wanting to vote for Barack Obama. The claim that he’ll somehow transcend partisanship and bring Republicans and Democrats together in Washington to get things done in unprecedented ways is not one of them.

I’m about to go vote. I haven’t decided who I’m going to vote for yet.

Broken Convention

Chris Bowers breaks down potential outcomes from Super Tuesday in the Democratic presidential delegate chase and paints a clear picture that shows we’re headed towards an outcome that is determined by super delegates. Then the Clinton campaign confirmed to Matt Stoller that they think this can go to a brokered convention. Then Bowers received further input worthy of reflection on how things could sort out if things remain close between Obama and Clinton.

I’m with Paul Krugman: “I hate this thought.”

I think for somewhat different reasons, though. I hate the horse race, having lived on the tail end of it for much of the last year. But what I hate more is the thought that Democratic primary and caucus goers may not be the final arbiters in choosing our party’s nominee. Super delegates, unelected officials bequeathed with authority for their role in the party structure, could determine the outcome in contravention to the popular vote totals.

This may be how things are always done, but I can’t say the microscope of a brokered convention would reveal particularly democratic tendencies  in the Democratic Party.

I’ve been mulling over a potential alternative system for picking our nominee. I’ll probably post on it after Super Tuesday, but needless to say it will reflect the need for us to evolve a more democratic, more systematic, more national primary system. This kind of nonsense needs to stop after this election.

Get Out The Vote

Tomorrow I’ll be voting in person in New York City for the first time (previous votes have been done by absentee ballot). Like many young, fairly transient people, I had no clue where my polling place was. Fortunately I’ve now received two separate emails from the Obama campaign directing me how to find my polling place in New York(One sent by David Plouffe yesterday, another from Barack Obama today).

The targeted email directs me to: http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/nylookup and directs me, as a resident of New York City, to this NYC Board of Elections page where I was able to find my polling place. Non-NYC residents are sent to a portal for all county Boards of Elections.

What I actually found most helpful was the information provided on voting rules and time:

  • Polls are open in New York City and Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, Putnam, and Erie counties from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
  • Elsewhere in New York, polls are open from 12:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
  • Anyone in line at the time the polls close is allowed to vote
  • If you are a first-time voter who registered by mail, bring a valid photo ID or a document that shows your name and address
  • If your name does not appear on the voter rolls or if you are a first-time voter and can’t provide proper identification, you may vote by affidavit ballot

Thanks for the help, Obama campaign!

For what it’s worth, I’m currently undecided about who I will vote for tomorrow…

Yes We Can

I watched this once two days ago and it’s been stuck in my head ever since. I haven’t decided if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet. On my first viewing, I found the layering of Obama’s speech with spoken and sung versions of the text by celebrities fairly inaccessible. A lot of the timing is off just enough to make it hard to hear exactly what’s being said.

Jeff Jarvis is certainly on to something when he writes:

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

Of course this also gets at the fact that a blurred version of his speech, when spoken by beautiful celebrities, is still really uplifting. Improbably so. As in, his words are being somewhat poorly repeated by somewhat vacuous spokespeople for a profound political message. I’m still finding it appealing in a way that makes me feel guilty, like a music connoisseur  who loves The Mars Volta but is accepting the fact that he also kinda digs Panic! At the Disco.

This video doesn’t make me want to vote for Obama any more or less than before I saw it, but as it has already gone viral I’m sure it will turn on lower information voters at a time when he needs to be turning out everyone he can.

Questions about MoveOn’s Endorsement of Obama

Yesterday’s MoveOn member poll showed Barack Obama winning decisively over Hillary Clinton, 70% to 29%. Matt Stoller has the news at Open Left. MoveOn had set the threshold for endorsement at 66% and Obama comfortably got enough votes to meet that standard.

But there are a number of questions that I would be curious to see answered.

MoveOn cites the votes totals as Vote results:

Obama: 197,444 (70.4%)
Clinton: 83,084 (29.6%)

That’s a total of 280,528 votes cast in 24 hours, a very impressive number. But MoveOn has 3.2 million members. Only 8.7% of them participated in the poll. Only 6.17% of MoveOn members voted for Obama, yet he will receive their endorsement and support.

Now, comparing vote totals to total membership is not exactly a fair comparison to adjudicate the merits of the endorsement. But it’s the information I have at hand.

What would be more helpful to know in evaluating these numbers is this:

  1. How many people opened the email?
  2. How many people went to the voting landing page linked in the email and decided not to vote?
  3. How many people previously participated in MoveOn’s Virtual Town Halls on Iraq and the environment?

Knowing the answers to these questions would give us a better sense of how MoveOn members thought about the vote between Clinton and Obama. I don’t expect to find out #1 and #2, as most organizations keep that information secret. I asked for the answer to from #3 by Ilyse Hoque of MoveOn, here’s what she provided me with:

Iraq Town Hall: 42,896 votes cast

Climate Town Hall: 95,284 votes cast

She also provided me with the individual candidate breakdowns for both votes, but I don’t think those numbers are relevant to the question at hand. It’s the totals that concern me.

MoveOn saw a 294% increase in participation in the straw poll from the larger virtual town hall to the endorsement vote. That huge increase makes me think that concerns about participation in proportion to list size for the endorsement vote are not valid. They clearly had a major portion of the active members of their list participate and the result was clearly decisive.

I’ll be curious to see how MoveOn members work to help the endorsement have an impact beyond a press release. Will Obama be able to count on nearly 200,000 MoveOn members to man the phones for him in the coming days and weeks? Will MoveOn ask their members to donate to Obama’s campaign? Will Obama’s campaign try to do an acquisition email to MoveOn’s members who voted for him? I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Anger & Bluster

Lambert at Corrente makes a great case, a la Mike Caulfield, that sides matter in American politics.

Do we really need the kind of politics that tells us to lay back and enjoy it?

The country can’t afford to wait for Obama to discover that his strategy of conciliation has failed. Do the math. Reid and Pelosi tried “reaching out” in 2007. Nothing will happen in 2008. Assuming Obama takes office in 2009, it will take his conciliatory strategy a year to fail, which it will, since he’s doing the same thing Reid and Pelosi did while expecting a different result.

That brings us to 2010.

Can the country really hold out against a runaway Conservative Movement that long? [Emphasis in the original]

Go read the whole piece, it’s a great argument aimed at convincing Obama that we need partisanship.

Mike Caulfield’s Right

Mike Caulfield, co-founder of Blue Hampshire, included this passage in a comment here on my first post on Bob Cesca and blogger endorsements.

I’m not interested in helping either of these candidates win at this point. I’m interested in helping them be better candidates. That means applying pressure to Obama to stop his fetishization of unity (which I’ve been complaining about since before he was a candidate).

It also means applying pressure to Clinton to apply that dogged (some would say bullying) style to the opposition, and help us fight the battles that matter.

Or to kind of take off on what Eli said — to make sure Clinton is on our side, and to make Obama realize sides matter.

I’m into doing whatever it takes to get that done. The question at this point is not who is the better candidate, but how do we make both of these candidates better. [Emphasis added]

That’s a great way to think about the impact we can have on candidates that we might not be ready to endorse. It may be that one of them actually is a better candidate, but that’s clear, working to make them both better is important. That’s what I’ve tried to do with my writing since I started this site, at least.