May 09, 2008 06:22 PM UTC

Orwellism alive & well at Boulder Grassroots for Obama

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• by: DavidThi808

I would appreciate feedback on this. Am I making a mountain out of a molehill or is this worth bitching about?

Here in Boulder (and I assume many other counties) they have come up with 5 county candidates and are strongly pushing all delegates to vote for them. And at the same time, all other delegates should withdraw from running.  

The more I think about this, the more uneasy I am with this.

1. It feels wrong to me that a campaign based on “Yes We Can” is telling delegates “No You Can’t.” The Obama campaign is about inclusion and empowerment and as such should be welcoming everyone who wants to be a national delegate.
2. This will discourage people from attending the convention. It is demotivating to tell someone they should withdraw their candidacy and some of those people will figure “why bother” and will not go to the convention. In other words, this action could cost Obama a delegate.
3. We want to encourage all of these new voters to become politically active. To continue not just into the general election, but after that. A message like this tells people that their rewards are limited – that they cannot even put their name up as a candidate. Again, we will lose some people that otherwise would become active party members.

The whole thing strikes me as very hypocritical too. We have this quote from the Boulder Grassroots for Obama:

Collectively we made every effort to ensure that the Boulder County process for selecting final candidates we could all support was 100% based on the Obama campaign principles of: Respect, Include and Empower.

This exclusion of people from even being considered dis-respects, excludes, and emasculates all of those candidates. This is Orwellian double-speak to say the opposite.

Finally, I asked multiple party activists why it was so important to have 3 delegates from Boulder County. Not a single one could tell me any advantage that accrued. None. All of this damage is being done just for bragging rights – that a few Boulder County residents went to the National Convention.