Haiku Politics

At the New York Democratic Party convention, Hillary Clinton won the endorsement of her party faithful for relection to the US Senate. While this should come as no surprise, the details surrounding this non-event serve as an interesting object lesson in the futility of any effort by the left in trying to reform the Democratic Party.

According to the Newsday article on this subject,

Backstage, Clinton's aides and consultants frantically beat back anti-war candidate Jonathan Tasini's attempt to get the 10 delegate signatures needed to place his name on the ballot. A Tasini victory would have forced an embarrassing three-hour roll call vote and tarnished a day that was intended to be a seamless coronation for Clinton.

Tasini eventually dropped his bid after delegates including Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., introduced a resolution denouncing the "error of going to war illegally."

Clinton, whose October 2002 support of the Bush administration's war resolution has prompted a backlash among anti-war groups, had no comment on the resolution, which passed in a voice vote after most delegates had already left.

This passage illustrates the fact that we all know about Democratic Party conventions--they are stage managed events, essentially coronations rather than real conventions. How horrible--the thought of actually having a roll call vote at a convention! We can't have that, now can we? The Quixotic attempt by Tasini to challenge Clinton over the war from within the Democratic Party was an obviously doomed effort. While the Iraq War continues to be the single most pressing issue in national politics, the Democratic establishment simply treats the issue as unimportant--just as it did in the 2004 election, when its platform essentially said that you can take any position you want to on the war.

The article also notes:

Apart from condemning the invasion, the resolution echoed Clinton's recent statements on Iraq, calling for the safe withdrawal of U.S. troops once the country is stabilized.

This is also the typical Democratic Party position on the Iraq War--rather than calling for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, the party squirms its way into a meaningless call for a withdrawal at some future, unspecified date--"once the country is stabilized", which obviously won't be for a very long time, given that the presence of US troops is actually destabilizing it. But Tasini was willing to accept the worthless bone that they threw him, a resolution criticizing the decision of having gone to war, which might be useful for historical discussion but which doesn't solve the problem of what to do about the troops right now. Tasini's efforts at issuing a challenge within the Democratic Party have proved to be a wasted effort, and by accepting that compromise he merely played right into the hands of the political machine that governs the party.

While a third party challenge from the Left is obviously unlikely to have any success against Clinton in the November election, at least such a challenge will not be tainted by participation in a stage managed coronation that is corrupt and undemocratic. Rather than participate in such a process, it is better to challenge it from without and work towards building a new movement that rejects out of hand the coronation of warmongers.

Posted by The Haikuist on Thursday, June 01, 2006 at 12:36 PM | Permalink