With the current brouhaha about Debbie Wasserman Schultz and
whether emails leaked by a hacker in Russia show wrongdoing, I think it’s
important that folks know exactly what the applicable rules mean in terms of
how Democratic Party officials are supposed to conduct themselves with regards
to contests for a Democratic nomination.
Many people seem to be attempting to apply these rules in a
way they were not intended.
I’ve been subject to similar rules in the past. As a past
precinct chair, then District Leader and then County Public Relations
Chairperson for the Pinellas County Democratic Executive Committee in Florida,
we were subject to the following rule:
PCDEC Bylaws
ARTICLE XIII
Endorsement of Candidates
The endorsement of candidates in Primary elections is prohibited to the
County Committee, the Chair of the PCDEC, and all groups within its
jurisdiction, except as otherwise provided by the FDP Bylaw
Every two years, at least while I was an officer of the
PCDEC, the county chairperson would go over with us exactly what that means and
how it affected us.
The main idea is, you cannot endorse any candidates or make
it seem to voters as if you were using your office to promote a candidate for
the Democratic nomination or that the local county apparatus endorsed someone.
You were absolutely permitted to volunteer for a campaign, work for a campaign
and to have a strong personal preference for a candidate. The key is not to make a public endorsement.
If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense to do otherwise. To prevent all
local Democratic Party officials from working on campaigns removes the most
active Democrats from helping candidates until very late in the process. That
is not the intent of the rule.
Now let’s examine the DNC bylaws applicable to the situation
with DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz:
DNC Bylaws Article 5, Section 4
In the conduct and management of
the affairs and procedures of the Democratic National Committee, particularly
as they apply to the preparation and conduct of the Presidential nomination
process, the Chairperson shall exercise impartiality and
evenhandedness as between the Presidential candidates and campaigns. The
Chairperson shall be responsible for ensuring that the national officers and
staff of the Democratic National Committee maintain impartiality and
evenhandedness during the Democratic Party Presidential nominating process.
The bold, italics and underlining are mine and they are the
key point to this rule. Again, the point is not that the national chair and DNC
members can’t have a strong preference for who wins the nomination it also
doesn’t mean that the national chair and other DNS members can’t express their
preference privately. It doesn’t mean that a candidate can’t anger them or that
they can’t express that anger privately.
Understanding the rule, did Debbie Wasserman Schultz break it?
I don’t think so.
Let’s also understand that we are dealing with extraordinary
circumstances here. I want everyone reading this to picture this scenario. For
25 years you have been a member of an organization that you believe in and
whose goals you believe are very important. During that time, an outside individual
has been attacking your organization and calling it insincere. He says he
upholds the principles your organization espouses better than you do and says
joining your organization would be committing treason to his beliefs. He
belittles and criticizes your organization at every turn. When it comes to making
decisions in a group he does support what members of your organization are
doing but only because it serves his interests to do so.
At the end of those 25 years, he joins your organization,
something he said he would never do, only because it is the only way he can try
to get something he wants and he contends in the highest level election against
someone who has been a loyal member of your organization for 30+ years. Your
responsibilities are as article 5 section 4 express them above.
Do you think you and/or members of your organization would
have a strong preference against this individual? Do you think you might
express that privately in emails since that does not violate the rule? When it
turns out that members of this individual’s campaign have early in the process
improperly used computer resources to gain an unfair advantage in the campaign,
do you think it would make you upset? Whose fault is it that there is antipathy
toward this individual in your organization? I think the answers to those
questions are obvious.
But hold on, it’s more than that. When Sanders’ campaign was
caught improperly accessing Hillary Clinton campaign information on DNC servers
and the DNC moved to sanction him, Sanders sued the DNC to avoid the punishment.
So you have retaliatory litigation against the DNC by Sanders on top of
everything I discussed in the previous two paragraphs. Now what kind of a relationship
and private opinion do you think DNC leadership and staffers have with/of
Sanders?
One of the things I keep asking myself when I think about
the relationship between Sanders and the DNC is, did Sanders ever do anything
to reach out and mend fences? You have his 25 years’ worth of attacks on the
Democratic Party. If you were in the position he was in at the start of his
campaign, wouldn’t you have seen the need to try to work to improve the
relationship because of your prior behavior/statements? Did Sanders ever do
anything at all along those lines? If so I haven’t heard of it. For someone who
purports to have the skill to be President, a job where negotiations, diplomacy
and dealing with countries and foreign leaders, not to mention domestic members
of the opposite party, whose opinions might differ for yours and where you need
to be able to craft compromises, are we to understand he was unable to reach
out and try to come to some sort of détente with the DNC?
Another issue is whether any of this had any impact on the
race. Hillary’s early and insurmountable lead came from winning African
American votes in the South by huge margins and from Florida which has long
been a Clinton stronghold. Nothing that I have seen has proposed anything that
suggests that the DNC influenced that in any way. I am not sure African
Americans in the South care that much about what the DNC says nor is there much
else the DNC could do to change how they would vote. So whatever the DNC did
had little impact on the race.
Of course the other upsetting point is that the leak of the
DNC emails comes from a Russian hacker who almost certainly operates with the
tacit or full-fledged permission of Putin. People in Russia who do things Putin
doesn’t like have a tendency to disappear or turn up dead see http://news.sky.com/story/the-putin-critics-who-have-been-assassinated-10369350
and note this is an abbreviated list. Even when they escape Russia, many of
them have a tendency to end up dead before their time and some by horrific
means, like Alexander Litvinenko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko
so I think it’s fair to say that this hacker operates with Putin’s permission. Putin’s
attempt to put his finger on the scale here for Trump against Hillary indicates
one of two things, either he really likes Trump and thinks Trump sees eye to
eye with him on world affairs, or it means Putin thinks Trump is a dupe who
would be easy to control or subvert. Neither possibility is a good one.
I don’t care what things were said about the candidates among
DNC members in private emails. But, if Debbie Wasserman Schultz or other
members of the DNC went beyond privately talking/emailing and expressing
personal preferences, even though it’s something that any sane person knowing
the background would probably understand, they should face repercussions for
that. To this point, I haven’t seen any evidence that they did.
No comments:
Post a Comment