Clinton Attacks Democratic Grassroots Activists
Fat cats good, Democratic base bad:
At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the “activist base” of the Democratic Party — and MoveOn.org in particular — for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had “flooded” state caucuses and “intimidated” her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.
“Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] — which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down,” Clinton said to a meeting of donors. “We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me.”
Shorter Clinton: These Democratic activists are ruining my beautiful Liebermanism:
What I … want to focus on is this: “[T]hey are very driven by their view of our positions, and it’s primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don’t agree with them. They know I don’t agree with them.” What specifically are the “national security and foreign policy” views that Clinton does not agree with? I suspect they are the same issues with which I started this post: Iraq and Iran; war and peace; belligerence and saber rattling versus rational, progressive diplomacy.
Hillary Clinton has always put herself in the “serious” camp. She’s a Joe Lieberman Democrat. Her contempt for those who were right all along about the war, and who dare to question her on it, has been simmering under the surface for most of the last few years. Here we finally see what she says in private, as opposed to her scripted message.
I’ve been done with the Senator from New York pretty much since South Carolina, so words like these being revealed won’t sway me. I do hope, however, that Hillary’s words will sway some of her supporters who have overlooked her Iraq vote, who have given her the benefit of the doubt, who refuse to hold her accountable, to maybe take another look at the candidate they so vociferously support.
Pam Spaulding sees a pathology at work in the Clinton campaign (emphasis in original):
The disturbing trend we’ve seen as Clinton and her team saw her fortunes fritter away at the polls, has been to blame losses on various constituencies, demographics in whole states, the caucus system — everything except the fact that she couldn’t make the sale in those primaries.
It’s almost a pathological level of denial — she’s not winning the popular vote, number of states won, the delegate count or in the money race at this point. Her campaign blew the huge war chest on the high life, based on the premise that she wouldn’t have to stay in the race beyond Super Tuesday.
The netroots didn’t do that to her.
Actually it is pathological, because the Clinton campaign has engaged in party-destructing behavior ever since the slide began. Never mind the merits of Barack Obama as a candidate, the long string of public embarrassing statements coming out of Clinton’s surrogates as well as the candidate herself have sullied her own reputation — poorly managing her campaign, looking, do I say the word, bitter, at primary losses and dismissing whole swaths of the party base — it makes no sense. I simply do not get it. Is she so hellbent on getting the nom that she’s willing to set the positive aspects of her reputation that drew her supporter base to begin with on fire?
Hilzoy has a few words to say about MoveOn members and the war in Afghanistan:
… I am a member of MoveOn. I joined during the Clinton impeachment hearings, and have remained on their list ever since. I signed some of their petitions opposing the war in Iraq, and voted for an endorsement of Obama, though I wavered on that one because I worried that since Republicans equate MoveOn with radicals, it might be counterproductive. Needless to say, I supported the war in Afghanistan.
All it takes to be one of MoveOn’s “3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers” is to sign up for their emails. You don’t pay dues, sign position papers, or anything like that. You just sign up for the emails, and voila! you are a genuine certified MoveOn member. Personally, I’m a member because I like seeing the emails they send out. I would be astonished if, say, none of the editors at RedState was a “member” for exactly the same reason. More to the point, I would be astonished if a lot of their members hadn’t signed up because of one particular issue — e.g., the war in Iraq — and just stayed on the list.
Which is just to say: membership in MoveOn means very little.
Much more to the point, equating “the activist base of the Democratic Party” with people who “didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with” is just completely wrong. “The activist base of the Democratic Party” is concerned with a lot of issues. A small number of us opposed the war in Afghanistan. That is not a mainstream position within “the activist base of the Democratic Party”, as far as I know. On the other hand, a whole lot of us opposed the war in Iraq. To the extent that “the activist base” opposes Clinton, her vote on Iraq has a lot more to do with it than her vote on Afghanistan.
Conflating opposition to the war in Iraq with opposition to the war in Afghanistan … amounts to taking a position that a whole lot of people hold — either opposing Clinton herself, or opposing the war in Iraq — and conflating it with one that only a small minority of people hold, and then using that supposed “fact” to discredit your opponents — to cast them as members of some tiny fringe that doesn’t need to be taken seriously. It is what Atrios calls the “dirty f*cking hippies” argument: that people who oppose the war in Iraq, or Clinton herself, are just relics of the 1960s, or some other variant of “not serious people like us”, and their views can therefore be dismissed out of hand. “MoveOn didn’t even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with.”
All commentary via Memeorandum.
June 7, 2008 at 2:30 pm
To begin with in denouncing progressive activists Hillary falsely accused MoveOn of opposing the war in Afghanistan, which was most likely a statement she knew to be untrue. Karl Rove made the libelous claim up years before, and MoveOn set the record straight having never opposed war in Afghanistan.
Hillary blamed many of her electoral defeats to Obama on the activist base of the Democratic party. She also dismissed the activists, namely MoveOn, stating that they “flooded” state caucuses- this just shows the political power that the 3.2 million reliable voters and volunteers of moveon.org have. Hillary also might have mentioned her inability to compete with the massive amount of political campaign funds raised by small contributions and the effectiveness of these groups organizing through their networks on the internet.
One of the big reasons Hillary lost is that Obama was able to out spend her through campaign contributions with the twist here of course being that 80% of his contributions came from small donations of under $200 or less, while Hillary with strong corporate lobby support had 80% of her campaign funded from contributions above $200. Why she would dissociate herself from the “activist base” of the Democrats makes little sense. With over 3 million votes at stake from just MoveOn supporters a seemingly better idea might have been to at least give lip service to a strong, energized coalition within your own party.
Activists are very influential- they are members of a movement that donates not just money- but time and effort. They organize rallies, drives, and reach out to others to win the vote. Also they raise big money through a multitude of small donations. Howard Dean raised unprecedented campaign contributions through the Internet with the help of groups like MoveOn. Obama followed Dean’s example and again inspired the activists and staged one of the biggest political upsets in U.S. history.
Hillary on the other hand raised funds the old fashioned way by often seeking corporate support and working wealthy through the shrimp-cocktail circuit. Early on everything seemed to be going swimmingly, Hillary was the best financed candidate, and she banked on it. Hillary’s initial fund raising was impressive by every historic measure with her donors being typically big-check writers. She counted so much on her heavily funded campaign that when Obama showed up on the scene and into December Hillary dismissed Obama as a candidate because he simply could not raise enough capital to compete with her. The message that Obama’s ideas did not matter because she would just out spend him on the campaign trail appeared callous was not a message that sat well with the activists.
When questioned about concerns of the where her support was coming from (especially the often stated fact that she was the most endorsed candidate of the insurance companies) she would give a reply with the gist being “it’s just politics” and “that’s the way things are done”. And being an experienced Washington insider she was right. Again this did raise the question of where her loyalties lay- was it her corporate sponsors or was it with the public?
What proved to level the playing field between Hillary and Obama were campaign contribution caps. Donations were limited to $2,300 and once her backers wrote their check for the maximum allowed by law, they were forbidden to give more. Had the caps been significantly higher she may have had the edge needed to win the nomination.
Obama’s strategy was decidedly different and focused more on activist’s support than corporate lobbyists. He counted on the 800,000-plus people who had signed up on his website and could continue sending money his way $5, $10 and $50 at a time. (The campaign has raised more than $100 million online.) Of course in the end this proved successful Osama’s campaign contributions kept rolling on in while Hillary sank into debt.
This new tactic of fund raising is a real change in politics. There is now a new well of capital that politicians that can not ignore in the race to the White House. A populist that reaches out to middle America and mobilizing activists through the Internet is a now force to be reckoned with.
The old school method of almost exclusively seeking large donations lacks integrity. It divides a politician’s loyalties between the interest of the corporate lobbyist that fund their campaigns and their responsibilities to the public. This “politics as usual” system leads to a combination of public speeches giving out one message and closed door fund raisers where the politician lays out there real agenda in private (like the one where Hillary denounced MoveOn).
As it is Obama’s message and been change, and he is off to a good start- he has changed the way American political campaigns will be run in the future. Obama asserts that his campaign is above board and points to McCain’s closed and private meetings with the GOP.
Presently MoveOn is now gearing up for their real work of running very strong campaigns state to state that often rival the DNCs efforts to campaign for the progressives (Democrats), oust the Republicans, and defeating McCain in November.