Today the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee officially decided what to do about the votes in Florida and Michigan. All the delegates from both states have been reinstated, but they only get half a vote each to penalize them for having their primaries early.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-dems1-2008jun01,0,3943793.story

I think, overall, this is a great compromise. It is much better than the original punishment, where both states were stripped of all their delegates.

The Florida debate, however, differed from the Michigan debate. In Florida, Obama was on the ballot, but his name didn’t appear on the ballot in Michigan.

In Florida, Hillary wanted 100% of the delegates to be seated at the convention with a full vote each. Her argument was that each vote is sacred and each one should count, but she totally disregarded the DNC rules by saying it was the Republican governor’s fault, and the Democratic voters shouldn’t be penalized. I understand her argument, but because neither candidate campaigned in Florida, she had an obvious advantage simply because she was more well known at the beginning of the primary season. This was not only unfair to Obama, but to all of her lesser known rivals. Obama also wanted to count the Floridian votes, but he supported the Ausman Petition, presented by Florida Superdelegate Jon Ausman. The petition called to reinstate 100% of the Florida delegates with a 50% vote each, and it passed the committee vote. Even the Clinton supporters had to recognize this as a fair compromise when the outcome they wanted failed to pass.

In Michigan, however, the problem was much trickier. In addition to the candidates not campaigning in the state, Obama’s and many of the other candidates’ names did not appear on the Michigan ballot, which made this primary race even more messed up than Florida. Also it was Michigan’s own Democratic Committee that moved the primary up, so it couldn’t be blamed on those darn Republicans this time. Hillary’s solution would have been to seat 100% of the delegates with 100% vote each, and with her 55% win, she would have gotten 73 delegates. It was even argued that Obama should get zero delegates and the 40% would be undecided, but she was willing to give him those delegates in the spirit of compromise. Obama wanted to split the delegates evenly, 64/64, since Hillary only won 55% of the vote even when his name wasn’t even on the ballot. The state of Michigan actually argued for a compromise that split the difference between the two. They said that there were many write in votes that were probably for Obama, so they wanted 100% of the delegates seated with a full vote each, but with 69 for Hillary and 59 for Obama. The rules committee finally decided on a compromise that split the difference between the rivals yet also complied with the DNC rules. They decided to seat all the delegates, 69 for Hillary and 59 for Obama, but with only a half vote each.

I think these compromises are a huge step in the direction of unifying the party. I fully support the penalty of half-votes because these rules were agreed upon prior to the primary season by all the candidates, and just like football or basketball, you can’t change the rules in the middle of the game just because you’re losing. If the rules are flawed, they need to be changed, but until they can be changed, they must be followed. I also fully support the 100% reinstatement of delegates from each state. If we are to have any chance against McCain in Florida and Michigan, we need to show those voters that they will not be left out of this important process. McCain has already been using this fiasco to persuade voters to vote Republican in November. We also need to unify as a party if we are to win the general election. We cannot beat McCain if we don’t stand together. I do support Obama, but I believe in the core principles of this party, and I will support Hillary in November if she gets the nomination. They stand together on so many issues that it would be ridiculous not to vote for one just because you originally supported the other. I certainly hope we can all come together around whoever the Democratic nominee turns out to be.

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Filed under: Pres2008

This Wednesday April 30th we are hosting a very exciting event for everyone who is looking to get involved in Democratic Politics and make a real difference. The Campaign Manager for Jon Powers For Congress as well as the political director of the Monroe County Democratic Committee and the New York State Democratic Party College Coordinator will be joining us to discuss ways college kids can get involved in real campaigns and make a real difference. I strongly encourage everyone who wants to gain some campaign experience, political knowledge, and important networking contacts to attend this great event!

The Event will be in the Faculty Commons room (6-1251) in the Liberal Arts building at 8pm.

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It is pretty shocking just how close Tuesday’s results show this race to be.  Obama’s net lead over Hillary went down by approximately 4 delegates, 4 delegates which the Obama camp quickly countered by announcing 4 new superdelegate endorsements.  After the results on Tuesday there actually are a few things we can say with certainty about the Democratic race:

1. Michigan and Florida will scramble to hold new contests
2. Superdelegates will decide the eventual nominee

Michigan is already rumored to be scheduling a caucus, something which will almost certainly upset the Clinton camp.  When Michigan’s Democratic party violated DNC rules when it held it’s contest before the Feb 5th deadline the candidates pledged not to campaign in the state and withdrew from the ballot.  Despite this, Hillary decided to place her name on the ballot so of course ended up beating second place “Uncommitted” although not by as large of a margin as one would have hoped for a candidate who was the only name on the ballot.  The Michigan caucus will likely go to Obama in a big way like essentially every other caucus has so far.

Florida’s non-Jeb Bush governor, Charlie Crist, has announced that the state is willing to finance a Democratic primary that will actually count in the Sunshine State.  In FL things are a little bit different, it wasn’t the state dems that chose to move the primary before Feb 5th, it was the Republican controlled legislative assembly and governor. FL will probably go for Clinton still.  Ultimately adding MI and FL will not greatly affect the delegate count, my prediction is that it will maybe give Obama a net gain of around 5 delegates.

The next two states to vote are Wyoming and Mississippi, both of which will presumably go to Obama by fairly large margins.  This will net him a few more delegates over Hillary, but then comes the 1 month break which would have been a momentum killer even if Obama had kept any momentum from his previous 11-in-a-row streak.  Pennsylvania is being billed as the last large state, and will probably go marginally for Hillary, but North Carolina isn’t a small state and will most likely have the effect of balancing out Pennsylvania.

Of course, these predictions only hold assuming the candidates don’t have some horrible Dean Scream/Macaca moment (or is it the media that has these moments?).  I doubt either candidate will unravel though, they are both great politicians and have for the most part run very professional campaigns.

So it’ll be that scary S-word that decides.. that’s right Superdelegates.

Obama will be almost certainly be ahead, by somewhere between the 100 he’s ahead by today and let’s say 150 if things go well.  It’s possible that with a small lead (keep in mind there are over 4000 delegates in all) Hillary could find a way to make the case to the supedelegates that she’s the right candidate for the top of the ticket and Barack belongs in the VP slot.  (She’s already been making this suggestion.)

Whatever the outcome, superdelegates will surely be important, which is why I also wanted to take time to mention the Superdelegate Transparency Project. I work with some amazing people, one of whom is Conor Kenny who asked if I could help make a widget for Congresspedia’s Superdelegate Transparency Project. I wrote up some quick code and Sunlight’s creative director Kerry Mitchell made a nice template image.  We now have an embeddable widget for tracking superdelegates. You can take a look here in this post and I’m also adding it to the sidebar of the website. It’ll be a nice way to keep track of who is winning the superdelegate contest.

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Filed under: Pres2008

On February 11th, Rep. Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress passed away.  With his passing, the people of California’s 12th district and the United States as a whole lost a terrific congressman.  Rep. Lantos was a distinctly qualified voice that truly cannot be replaced.

Shortly after news of the Congressman’s passing broke, an interesting name started being whispered in technology circles as a possible candidate.  Ignoring, or perhaps not aware of the fact that Rep. Lantos had already endorsed an assumed successor in Jackie Speier many individuals started to rally around the idea of a Congressman Lessig.

Lessig is an interesting character, especially for those of us who are interested in both technology and law.  He is a Law Professor at Stanford University with a distinguished legal career, one that many assume will earn him an appointment to a federal bench under a Democratic president.  He clerked for both Richard Posner and Antonin Scalia.  He was appointed as a “special master” to assist the judge in Microsoft’s late 1990s antitrust case.  He argued before the Supreme Court in a case against the “Sonny Bono” copyright extension in Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Due to his expertise in the law and his knowledge and passion on technology issues, he has played an active role as a board member of the Electronic Freedom Frontier and as a founder of the Creative Commons movement.  Along with the EFF Lessig has stood up for issues important for the future of the internet such as taking a stand against internet censorship and fighting for net neutrality (in essence making sure that on the internet all traffic is treated equally, instead of allowing your ISP to favor some websites over others).  The Creative Commons movement allows individuals to release their creations (art, music, movies, writings, etc.) under a permissive license that ensures fair use rights and explicitly grants or denys those rights that an author wants to give the public.  CC licensing can been described as “open source culture.”

Very recently Professor Lessig announced that he would be changing his focus from the battle for better copyright to a battle against corruption in congress.  As he put it, his change of focus was not giving up on copyright, but a realization that nothing could be accomplished towards real change until the system itself was less beholden to special interests.   Although it certainly wasn’t his intention when he announced his change of focus several months ago, it is out of this newfound political involvement that he has become a vocal Barack Obama supporter and now is considering a run in the CA-12.

Given the RIT community’s interest in technological issues where Lessig would serve as a knowledgable voice in stark contrast to existing politicians who assure is that “the internet is a series of tubes”, RIT’s sizeable fine arts and photo community which are affected by the implications of copyright law, and the large number of students on campus which have been threatened or prosecuted by the RIAA and MPAA for downloading of copyrighted material, Lawrence Lessig is a uniquely qualified candidate who’s candidacy I feel that the RIT community (not to mention the nation) as a whole has a vested interest in.

For more about Lessig and his candidacy check out Lessig08 or Lessig.org.  I’d highly recommend watching the campaign video on his website.

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Filed under: CA-12

Hello, and welcome to the new home of the RIT College Democrats.

If you’re reading this post while it’s new you’ll notice that the site is fairly empty, we’re working on importing some old content and will hopefully be generating quite a bit of new content in coming months.  We’d like to let as many people as possible post on this blog.  If you want to submit something feel free to email it to rit.dems@gmail.com and we’ll probably be happy to post it and give you access to post things on your own in the future.

If you experience any technical problems with the site please email us or post a comment.

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Filed under: website