Does anyone really believe that it is the job of political parties to be fair? It is the job of the political party to elect as many candidates from their party as possible. Nothing more.
Why is the media holding the Democratic party to a different standard than other parties? Where are the leaked emails from the Republican National Committee? Does anyone have any doubts that such a release would be full of emails critical of Donald Trump, and trying to figure out ways to derail his campaign?
As far as anyone can tell, the very worst email was one where the DNC’s CFO suggested that someone ask Sanders if he believed in God (in order to expose him as an atheist). But even that was never done. I’m sure there was much more skullduggery among the Republicans.
As they say, “politics ain’t beanbag”.
And the smaller political parties are even worse — they don’t even pretend to be fair. Did anyone even pay attention to how Gary Johnson was nominated by the Libertarian Party? It wasn’t very pretty; you can read about it here. Was that fair?
Or the Green Party, where Jill Stein offered to give the Green nomination to Sanders and step aside herself. Would that be “fair” to anyone else who wanted the Green nomination, to just hand it to someone who wasn’t even a member of the Green Party?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Political parties are inherently unfair, and complaining about that misses the point. The only way to make political parties fair is to take away their main event and have a nonpartisan blanket primary, which already works in several states.
I’m also suspicious of this email leak. As we’ve already seen, it doesn’t really matter what is in the emails, this will just be used by the Republicans to attack Hillary Clinton. And according to experts, it was the Russians who did the hacking. Do the Russians have something to gain if Trump gets elected?
11 Comments
So you are fine with political parties to be internally bigoted? (against atheists, and not so directly jews).
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” – George Washington
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/462873-however-political-parties-may-now-and-then-answer-popular-ends
@Hassan: What’s bigoted about acknowledging that being an avowed atheist is considered to be a negative by large numbers of the public?
And how does an email chain suggesting questioning Sanders about it, that was never acted on by-the-by, make an entire party “bigoted.”
I think some perspective is in order, that out of all the emails the stuff that has come out is the worst they could come up with? Seriously? This is no worse than what I’ve seen at every corporate job I’ve had where it gets called “office politics.”
SAM FOSTER, mere raising this as a tactic should be enough for him to resign, and to the guy who responded with amen.
Hassan, do you not agree that eliminating political parties (or at least, not putting them in charge of primaries) would solve the problem you mention?
Do you think that there aren’t many many internal emails between Republican National Committee people talking about how they can call Obama a Muslim? I’d be willing to bet that there are even plenty of emails talking about how they could use Sander’s religious leanings against him if he were the nominee.
One more thing. Have you ever considered that the DNC took a long hard look at Bernie Sanders and came to the same conclusions as this person: https://medium.com/@robinalperstein/on-becoming-anti-bernie-ee87943ae699#.ula76pnde and then decided that Bernie was a very bad risk as their candidate? You know, similar to what the Republicans decided about Trump? And you know what, if they weren’t talking about the chances of each candidate in the general election, then they failed miserably at their jobs. Furthermore, if the DNC wasn’t talking about tactics that could be used against potential candidates, then they weren’t doing their jobs either.
Iron Knee, if Republicans do it, it does not make it right. Democratic party brags about non-discriminatory policies/agenda, yet they want to use these tactics. It is like saying that we hate racism/bigotry but since we can’t change people, let’s exploit people’s attitude towards it.
I am fine with DNC choosing their candidate, if this is transparent with people who are trying to vote for their candidate. Just save people time, and party officials can nominate whomever they want and not give people false sense of neutrality.
Don’t get me wrong. If the DNC actually did purposely sabotage Sanders, then you could have a case. But they didn’t.
I don’t think the DNC are under any obligation to treat candidates equally. After all, Clinton and Sanders weren’t the only primary candidates. According to Wikipedia, over a thousand people filed the required paperwork with the FEC and thus were officially Democratic party candidates for president (including my favorite, “Vermin Supreme”).
I think the bottom line is that Hillary won the primaries convincingly and there is no evidence that the DNC did anything to divert more than 4M votes from Bernie to Hillary. And one can argue that the media was biased against her as well since what I mainly remember hearing about is emailgate, her ties to banks and her lack of charisma. I really don’t recall reading how unrealistic some of Bernie Sanders proposals were (free tuition etc) and how he was going to get them passed through the senate and the house. So was the media biased?
In my opinion, what the DNC did shouldn’t be excused as something that everyone does so its ok. Most people feel that their voice isn’t heard and stories like these lend credence to that. However the stakes are high in this election and at some point Bernie’s die hard supporters and Bernie himself need to be smart about this. They’ll have to fight a lot lot harder for everything they are fighting for if they let their emotions get the better of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries,_2016#Schedule_and_results
“Why is the media holding the Democratic party to a different standard than other parties? ”
You seem to think the media should be impartial.
It’s always difficult to tell what would have happened under different circumstances. However, the DNC proposed a very limited series of debates scheduled, apparently, so as to minimize viewership and to protect Hilary. The debates are what made Trump – who knows what more frequent and more available debates might have done for a Sanders’ candidacy? The bias of the DNC has been obvious, we didn’t need emails to confirm it.
What bothers me is that in an election cycle in the the electorate is (to quote “Network”) “mad as hell” at the establishment and tired of our unending wars, the Democrats are nominating the most establishment candidate possible, and one who is a defense hawk at that.
We’re left betting that the electorate will decide that Trump is too awful to elect and so will vote for Hilary. I suspect that the “stay” forces in Brexit may have operated under the same bet.