June 1, 2008
Washington, D.C.
June 1, 2008
Political Update
At long last, the end is near. The final delegate selection processes of the 2008 presidential race will be held on Tuesday… primaries in South Dakota and Montana for both parties and a caucus that same day in New Mexico for the Republicans.
The Republican nomination is and has been wrapped up for months… Senator John McCain has won nearly two thirds of his party’s delegates and will be nominated in Saint Paul, Minnesota on the evening of September 3. The date and place of the Democratic nomination is as certain. It will happen on August 27 in Denver, Colorado. But no candidate yet has the requisite 2118 delegate votes to become the nominee.
The magic number was revised on yesterday by the Committee on Rules and Bylaws of the Democratic National Committee meeting in Washington to consider the messy situations of the Florida and Michigan delegations. Remember, those states determined to violate the party rules and hold their primaries earlier than allowed and have been in limbo, suffering serious consequences. The CRB reinstated delegations from both states in half their original strength and distributing the delegates between the two candidates in an arbitrary, but hopefully fair, manner.
Now, we are at a situation where Senator Barack Obama is on the brink of achieving the nomination. He has a total of 1743 pledged delegates and 329 superdelegates, for a total of 2,072, just 46 votes short of the nomination. Senator Hillary Clinton has just 1,624 pledged delegates and 291 superdelegates, for a total of 1,915.
Obama is expected to be the winner in South Dakota and Montana, but the delegate trough is small… The winner will get no more than twenty pledged delegates, leaving Obama needing the commitment of about thirty superdelegates to go over the top. You can bet that his team will be burning up the phones in the next forty eight hours to get those commitments to allow him to claim victory when he stops in Saint Paul on Tuesday night for his election night victory rally.
Memories
When I walked into the Wardman Park Hotel yesterday to observe the meeting of the Committee on Rules and Bylaws of the Democratic National Committee, I had a déjà vu moment. It was in that very hotel (then known as the Sheraton Park), back in the summer of 1972, that this whole delegate selection process of the party took on a life of its own. That is where the credentials committee of the 1972 Democratic Convention met… and where, I contend, the beginning of the big changes began.
There were two major challenges for the committee that year, California and Illinois. Both were challenges to status quo processes to implement the newly adopted Mikulski Commission rules. California was about winner take all delegate distribution… the new rules barred it and California law required it – a simple question of precedence.
The Illinois challenge was more technical and just as meaningful in the long run. The Illinois delegates were selected by convention, and delegates to the state convention were selected by precinct caucuses. The challenge was based on the charge that the caucuses were not properly publicized, open to any Democratic voter, or run by the letter of parliamentary procedure. There was plenty of evidence that the challengers were correct because the process was run like it had always been run… Chicago style.
The Mayor, Richard J. Daley, was engaged. He sent his son, State Senator Richard M. Daley (now the Mayor) to fix the problem. But the problem could not be fixed… the votes were on the side of the reformers. And Mayor Daley was kicked out of the convention. He was humiliated and infuriated.
But he knew how to avoid future problems of this nature. He said that he could not guarantee that 5,000 meetings would be held perfectly at the same time in every precinct in Cook County. But he could control a primary. So from that day on, the Illinois delegates have been selected by a primary… and it started momentum to primaries that has dominated the process. It happened at the Wardman…
Puerto Rico
As I write this update, the news is rolling in from the first Puerto Rico Presidential Primary and Hillary Clinton is exulting in a lop sided victory. But the turn out was not quite what she wanted… or needed, to put a topper on her claim to be the popular vote winner. But her disappointment at the Puerto Rican electorate pales compared to mine from their very first entry into presidential politics, the 1976 Presidential Caucuses.
My candidate was Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson. He had been a disappointing candidate in 1972 – it was a bad year for a Hawk in the Democratic Party. But we had high hopes for him in 1976, if we could get off to a winning start.
The Iowa Caucus was new that year… but we were skeptical of our ability to organize well in that state, so we skipped it. New Hampshire was not much better… and we laid low again. But we had a plan. Scoop was the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs – the rulers of the territories, including Puerto Rico. The Governor was anxious to be helpful and committed to full campaign effort for a caucus program that we set for February 22, the Sunday before the New Hampshire Primary. Our plan was simple. Puerto Rico had more delegates than New Hampshire. Iowa’s caucuses had not given any candidate many delegates. By winning in Puerto Rico, running unopposed, we would rack up enough delegates to be the leader in delegates when the networks reviewed the situation on New Hampshire’s election night.
It was a neat idea… The eight caucuses were to be held in the early afternoon in Puerto Rico. We scheduled a Pina Colada party for the press at the Wayfarer Motel, the unofficial headquarters of the New Hampshire press corps for 7:00 pm to claim victory. Everything was in readiness to get our campaign rolling and off to a winning start.
But as luck would have it, a band of local Puerto Ricans under the direction of Franklin Delano Lopez (yes that is his name), intent on loosening the hold the Governor had on the Democratic Party there, were intent on upsetting his plan. They ran a clandestine operation to disrupt the caucuses… All eight meetings were chaotic and impossible to police. The business of the day was never done. No results were reported…only fist fights and uproar.
So, we had no delegates to report from Puerto Rico. We cancelled the rum event. We went on to win the next primary – in Massachusetts on March 2, but Jimmy Carter’s victory in New Hampshire got his string running and his momentum flowing. So I have a very bitter taste in my mouth when I think of the Puerto Rican participation in the presidential nominating process and think of what might have been…
Hamilton Jordan, 1944-2008
Cancer finally claimed the life of Hamilton Jordan last week on its fourth try. His valiant battle with the disease pretty much defined the last two decades of his life. He became a leading spokesman for cancer victims and a voice of hope for survival.
Hamilton was the mastermind of the amazing election of Jimmy Carter as President of the United States in 1976. I met him when he was an assistant to Carter in the statehouse in Atlanta, but then worked very closely with him in the run-up to the election.
I was the Executive Director of the Democratic National Committee and promoted the creation of a national campaign committee for the party. Chairman Bob Strauss named Carter to be its chair. We did not realize why the Governor took it so seriously, but he did and installed his top man, Hamilton, in our offices in Washington to coordinate the activity of the committee. It became the ideal vehicle to roam the nation, meet the political leaders and start a campaign for presidency… and Hamilton walked that narrow line between serving the committee and his candidate very well.
The Ham Jordan I knew was a very deep thinker… He liked to have fun, but he was always working toward a greater purpose. He took on his first bout with cancer in typical fashion… studying it carefully, drawing up a game plan to conquer it, and then working his plan with discipline. He and his wife, Dorothy, a pediatric oncology nurse, founded a camp for children with cancer – Camp Sunshine Retreat – in Georgia. After two attacks from the disease, he put his considerable writing skirls to work to produce a book, “No Such Thing as a Bad Day” that is both inspirational and educational for cancer victims.
He came to Washington in the early fall of 2006 to have an emotional farewell dinner with our favorite political journalist, R. W. Apple, who was losing his own battle with cancer. I met Ham accidentally at my neighborhood Starbucks about 6:30 am while he was out on his morning walk from a neighborhood hotel. I told him how much I appreciated his book, because I had begun to send it to any and all of my friends who become afflicted with cancer… A problem, I told him, was that it was getting hard to find in the bookstores. The next week, I received a box with two dozen of those prized books in it for my distribution. Unfortunately, there are only eight of them left.
Delegate Count
Democrat Republican
Hillary Clinton 1,624 Barack Obama 1,743 John McCain 1517 – nominee
*This count is of the earned and committed delegates only. Super delegates are NOT committed and will not be included in my counts until they vote. The current estimate is that Clinton has 291 and Obama has 329 according to a telephone survey done by CBS and the New York Times May 29 and 30. Following the determination yesterday of the Florida and Michigan delegations, the recalculated number of delegates required to win the nomination is 2,118.
Schedule
June 1 Puerto Rico 55 D
June 3 Montana 16 D
South Dakota 15 D 27 R Caucus
New Mexico 32 R Caucus
Meanwhile, In Iraq
Lest we forget, Americans keep dying and keep being injured in Iraq. The official count as of June 1, 2008, of the dead since our involvement began on March 23, 2003 is 4,085. The count of American service personnel wounded in Iraq has now passed the 30,000, according to the Department of Defense.
This past month of May has seen the lowest level of casualties of American service personnel and Iraq civilians. Something good must be happening, at last. The military note that the Iraq forces have begun to play a much stronger role in providing security. They say that has kept their casualties to this lower level.
Our commitment of forces is still very high. The level of forces in the theater is still higher than before “the surge.” Hopefully, we will be able to reduce the force level, bring our troops home, and still maintain a level of security that is acceptable.
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Robert J. Keefe
Principal – Meridian Strategies, LLC
1920 L Street, NW, Suite 410 – Washington, D. C. 20036
Telephone: 202 223-8839 – Cell: 202 255-8161 – E mail: rkeefe@verizon.net
