Brown Man Goes To SEC Coaches Luncheon

One of my buddies from my hometown, who raises money for a historically black college (HBCU), was in town this weekend for the United Negro College Fund training session. We got together on Thursday night to catch up and watch the game between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets.

He made an observation while the pre-game show was winding down. "It's just so funny to see you and my brother watch football these days. You two were some of the most "no sports watching" people I knew when we were growing up."

"I've come to realize this is good cheap entertainment. And of all the sports, what I really appreciate the most is the way the NFL invests so much time and energy into telling its own story."

He was right about his brother and I, though. When we were in our teens, we didn't care about pro sports the way other guys did. Didn't know who ran a 4.2 forty. Couldn't tell you when Draft Day was (I still can't).

Which is why I was amazed myself on Friday when I actually found myself sitting in a ballroom in a hotel in downtown Atlanta for the SEC Coaches Luncheon the conference puts on the day before its championship game.

I was the guest of another buddy of mine, my pal from Alabama. I had no idea what to expect, except a very good chance, given the looks of the crowd in the lobby, that we would be having beef for lunch. I grew up in South Carolina, where the college football rivalry was between the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and the Clemson Tigers, but since the HBCU my father went to was right down the street from our house, my early allegiance was to the South Carolina State Bulldogs.

The lunch itself was hilarious. The attendees were obviously diehard Florida and Alabama fans, so all you saw was either crimson or orange everywhere you looked. There was beef. It was steak. I had two - a woman at our table was a vegetarian.

The day was certainly looking up.

At our table, my buddy launched into a discussion about Alabama's top pro prospect. A short guy with a heavy Boston accent regaled us with tales of his paraphernalia hoard, clicking the button on his digital camera to show us his collection of 5,000 hats in college colors. The rest of the table thought he was pretty funny until he used the words "Harvard" and "football team" in the same sentence, whereupon the woman next to him proceeded to inform him that they were only interested in watching "real" college football teams.

The guy from Boston tried to get our attention back by asking us the date of the first SEC championship game. When nobody got it, he reached into his shirt and pulled out a plastic ticket holder that contained a ticket from that very first game. Somehow, I figured there were similar scenes between fanatic fans going on at many of the tables around us.

The Q&A by Nick Saban and Urban Meyer was almost an intrusion into the conversation we had going at our table. They said the obligatory coach things. They smiled for the cameras. They waved at their fans in the audience. Then they looked relieved that it was all over, and they could get back to their teams for some last minute instruction before today's big game.

Who knows - after all this fanfare and buildup, I might even watch the game.

A Guest Analyst Weighs In On the RBC Meeting

I frequent several political discourse websites, and have been practically living on them this weekend. The 80/20 rule applies on the internet, though, just like everywhere else - you have to slog through a lot of bullshit to get to the good stuff. My girl CarmenT, a member of the DailyKos web community, went beyond the call of duty since last night to assemble a damn good argument against the positions Harold Ickes sought to promote on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

It's a lot of verbiage - for those of you who are allergic to that much reading, I've highlighted some key sections. Enjoy.

Brown Man

CarmenT's Commentary

In this diary, I will constrain my commentary on the outcome of yesterday’s RBC meeting to the controversial and inflammatory statements presented by Harold Ickes which by his own admission were made expressly on behalf of Senator Hillary Clinton and therefore in direct conflict with his role on the committee.

While there are numerous other diaries on this and related subjects, a cursory glance at my diary history will show that I have considered these issues on a number of occasions based on careful analysis, and hence feel justified in contributing a further response.

1. The Constitution does NOT apply

2. The Rules & Bylaws Committee did NOT determine the delegate allocation

3. Any bias was in Hillary’s favor

4. No votes were "stolen"

5. The Principle of "Flawed Reflection"

6. Credentials Committee Challenge

7. Validity of the Election Sanction by the State of Florida

8. Conflict of Interest

Analysis in full below:

• CarmenT's diary :: ::
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1) Legal Precedent: The Constitution does NOT apply

First of all it is necessary to understand that the contest to determine the nominee of the Democratic Party is not bound by electoral voting provisions in the constitution.

In DiMaio v DNC, and Nelson, Hastings and Brown v DNC, the court determined that since the Democratic Party is a ‘private organization’, it has a right to determine and enforce its own rules. Specifically, although an ‘election’ took place, it does NOT come under the jurisdiction of a Federal Court.

As reported by Krissah Williams from the Washington Post - Florida Voter's Lawsuit Dismissed

A federal judge in Tampa has again tossed out a lawsuit filed by a Florida political consultant angry that his vote in the state's Democratic primary will not count. Victor DiMaio's lawsuit contended that the Democratic National Committee is discriminating against Florida voters. DiMaio argued that party leaders unfairly allowed Nevada and South Carolina to hold their presidential primaries prior to February 5, in part because of the sizable minority populations in both states, but punished Florida and Michigan for skirting the rules.
...
Judge Richard A. Lazzara agreed with the DNC, which said that it its practices are not discriminatory and political parties have a constitutional right to determine how delegates are selected in their nominating process.

Also in St Petersburg Times - Florida Democrats' lawsuit is tossed

Florida Democrats lost another effort on Wednesday to make Florida's Democratic primary more meaningful on Jan. 29.
...
The lawsuit was filed by Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Alcee Hastings and Rep. Corrine Brown, among other Democrats, against the Democratic National Committee and its chairman, Howard Dean.
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Judge Hinkle was not convinced. He ruled that forcing the national party to break its own primary schedule rules by seating Florida delegates would violate the party's First Amendment right to assemble.

Any claim to equate FL & MI election compromise to voter disenfranchisement or slavery is nothing more than divisive politically motivated rhetoric and is not based on fact.

To illustrate what this means, it would be ‘legal’ (with respect to Federal Law) for the nominee to be chosen by a flip of a coin or for all the delegate names to be put into a hat and the first 2000 or so to be chosen.

The fact that the DNC provides for the individual states to determine who their delegates are, is a privilege, not a right.

2) The Rules & Bylaws Committee did NOT determine the delegate allocation

There is no provision in the Democratic Party Charter or Bylaws to enable party committees to determine the delegate allocation per nominee, even though it would be perfectly legal (see point 1 above) to do so if they wished.

The delegate allocation is decided by the STATE and presented to the DNC. In fact, in order to maintain parity with other states and historical precedent, the ONLY reasonable choice available to the RBC to fairly seat the delegates was to accept the allocation presented to them by the state party representatives for each state.

In the case of the RBC meeting held yesterday to determine the fate of MI & FL delegates, the RBC voted to accept the allocation presented by each state, having established (as they are required to do) that the state representatives have acted in good faith to determine an allocation that is fair and reasonable.

Furthermore, there is no precedent or provision to allow a candidate or their official representatives to determine the allocation process. Had the RBC chosen to follow the guidelines of a candidate over the recommendation by the state representatives, it would have set an irretrievably dangerous precedent.

Therefore, it is fair to argue that the RBC could NOT have chosen Clinton’s proposal in so much as it differed from the state’s recommendation even if they had wanted to.

3) Any bias was in Hillary’s favor

According to the DNC Selection Rules, the minimum mandatory punishment for violating the nomination contest timing rules is that the pledged delegate allocation should be cut in half.

There are at least two ways in which the allocation can be reduced, both of which are legal interpretations of the DNC Selection Rules:

a) The number of delegates is reduced by half

b) The vote per delegate is reduced by half

Reducing the number of total delegates by half has the result of narrowing the delegate margin. For example, in a 4 delegate district where Clinton received 3 out of 4 delegates, (a 2 delegate lead), would be reduced to 1 delegate each to Obama and Clinton (no delegate lead).

Thus, by choosing (b), the RBC allowed the relative delegate proportion to remain as current, rather than further narrowed. The RBC, acting within its rights to uphold the DNC rules, clearly sought to preserve a fair distribution, contrary to Ickes’ accusation of bias against the candidate he represents.

4) No votes were "stolen"

In his vociferous arguments, Ickes claimed that the RBC had "stolen" 4 delegates for Clinton and "given" them to Obama

However, in order for ANY delegates to be ‘stolen’, those delegates must have been approved in the first place.

According to the RBC ruling in effect during the period of the 2008 primary elections in MI & FL, no allocation of delegates whatsoever could be sanctioned.

Therefore, the only time that any delegate in either state could possibly be recognized as valid was AFTER yesterday’s acceptance of a majority vote by the RBC to amend its sanctions against MI & FL.

As has been shown in (2) above, the decision to allocate MI delegates in a ration of 69 to 59 in favor of Clinton was made by the state party officials, not by the RBC.

The RBC carefully considered the arguments placed before it by those officials as to their ‘best efforts’ attempt to deliver a representative (arguably a Fair Reflection) allocation of delegates according to the preferences of the members of the Democratic Party in MI.

According to the only measure that counts, the DNC rules & bylaws, Clinton never ‘had’ 73 delegates in Michigan to be taken away. Therefore any claim by Ickes that the allocation was altered can only be valid in the sense that the RBC voted to allow Clinton to receive 69 delegates more than she had before. Also, without an acknowledged ‘fair count’ in MI, since that figure is higher than the 59 to Obama, any concern over bias (given the invalidity of the election) would be in favor of Clinton, not Obama.

Furthermore, now that the delegate allocation has been sanctioned by an RBC majority vote, any adjustment of the allocation that might be considered by future committees could be considered as the very interference that Ickes decries.

5) The Principle of "Flawed Reflection"

On a number of occasions during yesterdays RBC meeting, Ickes raised the concept of "Fair Reflection". Though not a legal or factually provable measure, it is often cited as a standard to which an electoral process should aspire to.

It generally is taken for granted in a democracy that the outcome of an election is a fair reflection of the preferences expressed of the voters at the polls.

...

But this question is one of the foremost concerns of scholars of public choice. They have maintained for many years that the one thing most people counted on about elections – that the voters, however swayed or manipulated during the sound and fury of the campaign, did end up preferring the winning candidate to others – is open to question in many elections.

Excerpts from: John Haskell (1996) - Fundamentally Flawed – Understanding and Reforming Presidential Primaries, - Chapter 5 – An Introduction to Public Choice and Presidential Primaries

It is relevant to note that Ickes’ abandoned an early attempt to introduce the concept of "Fair Reflection" during the questioning of Wexler’s presentation. One can only surmise that he felt he had met his match against Wexler and pursuing the matter at the time would lead to a defeat of his argument.

Instead he pursued the argument later against what he presumed to be a less adversarial opponent, Levin, who in turn countered with the assertion that there can be no easily definable concept of "Fair Reflection" in a "Flawed Primary".

6) Credentials Committee Challenge

According to Ickes, the Clinton camp reserves the right to take their grievance to the Credentials Committee.

Since Ickes’ argues that the DNC does not have the power to determine the delegate allocations, then neither the RBC, nor the Credentials Committee would have the power to rule in his favor. Hence his case is moot.

Were Ickes/Clinton able to successfully argue the case with the Credentials Committee, the ONLY conceivable outcome that would satisfy his argument would be that 100% of MI & FL delegates be disqualified.

Since the RBC (including Ickes) voted to sanction MI & FL, they invalidated any subsequent election (whether sanctioned or not) by virtue of influencing some voters not to vote as "the election would not count".

Ickes’ and Clinton’s arguments rely on asserting the principles enshrined in the constitution. However, scholars of the constitution will be aware that there is no explicit "right to vote". The constitution does however explicitly assert that no-one should be prevented or influenced not to vote.

Hence, if the argument is that the validity of the MI & FL elections are determined by constitutional principles, the MI & FL elections must be invalid in their entirety. The only constitutionally valid alternative would be to hold a full revote.

7) Validity of the Election Sanction by the State of Florida

According to testimony presented at the RBC meeting, there were at least two reasons given that would legally invalidate any official sanction of the Florida election process.

Firstly, it was universally acknowledged that a significant proportion of voters were ‘discouraged’ from voting at that election. Indeed, Florida State Senator Arthenia Joyner, as an official representative of the Clinton campaign, acknowledged that perhaps 3M voters could reasonably have been expected to turn out for the election had it not been pre-determined that the votes would not count.

Secondly, it was acknowledged that a significant factor that led to the substantial turnout at the Florida election was that a Florida State Constitutional Amendment related to "Property Tax" was also on the ballot. Thus it is reasonable to assume that the demographic of the voters who did participate was unfairly biased towards homeowners to the detriment of those who do not own their own homes.

In both cases, the principles in the constitution and the DNC charter and bylaws, assert the preeminence of equitable representation. Unless those responsible for sanctioning the validity of Florida election are able to prove that no bias existed by virtue of the nature of the items on the ballot, the validity of the sanction is in question.

8) Conflict of Interest

Statements made by Ickes asserted that he was at least in part acting as an official spokesperson and representative for Clinton whilst simultaneously participating in a voting process as a member of the RBC.

While nothing in the DNC rules prevents members of the RBC to hold a private or publicly expressed preference for a candidate, the appointed members of the RBC are required as a matter of course to act solely in the interests of the DNC with respect to upholding the letter and intent of the rules and bylaws so stated. Any alternative agenda could be reasonably considered to be a conflict of interest.

If it had been the intention of the RBC to allow direct representation by candidates on the committee, the rules would have so provided. Furthermore in order to preserve fairness, any such candidate advocate would have to be formally declared as such and potentially be barred from certain votes.

The precedent for this was clear in yesterday’s meeting, as representatives from MI & FL were barred from voting on issues relating to their own state.

As such, Ickes explicit assertion that he is an authorized representative of a candidate, and his use of an independent forum to promote that candidate’s agenda regardless of the views of the majority, as expressed by his threat to dismiss the majority RBC decision and appeal to Credentials Committee is at best disingenuous, and at worst a blatant abuse of privilege for which he must tender his resignation.

The worst thing about all of these "events" which are seen as the next "game changer" for Camp Clinton, like the credentials committee at the convention, is that many of them are not inherently dramatic - they are mostly procedural activities that offer very little leeway to either candidate based on the rules, tests and standards already in place.

I feel as deeply for the Obama campaign as Clintonites do for their candidate, but its the knowledge of the process that helps me put my admiration into context.

Again, I thank CarmenT for taking the time to rebut many of the specious assertions that colored the air around the RBC committee meeting, and for allowing me to share her thoughts on my blog.

Brown Man

Half Dollars and Half Delegates

Who these people are and why they are important appear to be glossed over by the mainstream press – giving credence to Hillary Clinton’s aggressive efforts to sway the outcome seem to be their only interest.

The Americans I talk to seem to see something different – to them, Camp Clinton has begun to act like a band of desperadoes who have fought the long arm of the law off as long as they could, and are now holed up in their hideout, their supplies running out, their water running low, about to mount their final fusillade of bluster and conjecture.

But the posse, 28 strong, who will be wearing the sheriff’s badges tomorrow are the members of the RBC. Thirteen of them publicly support Camp Clinton, which means there is an enormous amount of last minute arm twisting going on behind the scenes. 15 votes will be needed to pass anything, with two additional at-large members on hand in case there is a tie.

The RBC will conduct its business school board style, in front of an audience of several hundred spectators and members of the press. I cannot imagine what deliberations they will have to hear, or what evidence they will have to examine, but the committee chairs have already requested that the committee members retain their rooms “in case we have to reconvene on Sunday”.

The dilemma the committee faces reminds me of a story from my childhood that took place back when I was about five or six years old. We used to go visit my mother’s mother fairly regularly in the seventies. My grandmother was pretty old at the time, and had always had problems with her legs, so she was often bedridden.

There was a ritual we went through whenever my parents announced that we were about to leave that involved making one last trip to grandma’s bedroom to say goodbye. She’d say a few words and then wave me and my brother over one by one to present each of us with a Kennedy half dollar. There was nothing in the world like holding that big silver coin in your hands. I'd feel rich as I left her room and headed outside to the car.

Once, when we were leaving, my grandmother said, “I haven’t been able to get out lately, so I’m going to give you a paper dollar this time.”

Oh yeah? I was ecstatic – a whole dollar!

Then she told me WHY she was giving me a whole dollar. “You give half of that to your brother.”

I immediately turned to my brother, held the dollar up in front of his face, tore the bill cleanly in two, and handed him his half.

It is a story my aunts repeat even now, laughing at the naiveté of a child who didn’t understand that having half of a dollar bill was like having nothing at all.

Camp Obama has offered to compromise with Camp Clinton over the Florida and Michigan delegations – either recognize half the delegates from each state, or recognize all of them, but allow them to have half votes. Which would pretty much put Camp Clinton in the same boat my brother and I were in that day we stood in my grandmother’s bedroom, each of us holding our own worthless halves of a dollar bill in our hands. The DNC's lawyers, much to Camp Clinton's chagrin, have recommended just this week a course of action much along the same lines Obama's group has laid out.

Which is why when you turn your television to CNN or Fox News or MSNBC anytime during the next twenty four hours, you will probably hear that Clinton supporters are going to be demonstrating outside the hotel hosting the meeting.

"With a click of a mouse in the mid-Atlantic, we could get thousands of people there," Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters yesterday. "But in the interest of party unity, we are not encouraging a protest. We don't think a scene is helpful as we try to bring the party together."

The meeting Saturday might last all day. It might even go over into Sunday. There will come a point during the proceedings, however, where the RBC committee chairpersons will realize it's time to get to the end, much like my parents used to do on those Sunday afternoons at grandma's house when they announced it was time to go home. They will very likely award each candidates half-delegates to take home with them, much the way my grandmother handed her grandchildren those Kennedy half-dollars she had saved during the year.

Keeping The Tally From Our Eyes

"As you sow, so shall ye reap"

All these machinations that we will be privy to before the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee meets this weekend to decide how to handle the mess the Michigan and Florida state delegations have become will probably give us some new numbers to live by.

The end result of all the posturing and protesting that will take place Saturday at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, DC will most likely be the emergence of a new goalpost – maybe 2208 delegates this time – that Obama or Clinton will have to acquire in order to claim the nomination.


I have heard this story before.



Growing up, my father used to tell us colorful stories about his uncles and aunts and cousins who grew up around him in the country. One of the stories that has stuck in my mind for years was the one about an old plantation, located a few miles from my grandfather's house in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, that became a sharecropping operation after their slaves were freed.

His cousins had lived on this plantation's grounds for generations. They were still there at the middle of the twentieth century, even as the civil rights movement was fomenting around them. They worked the landowner's land by day and lived in the landowner's shacks by night.

Stores for groceries and clothes were far and few between – moreover, you needed to have cash money to purchase any goods. But sharecroppers didn’t need to go to local stores – the landowner had a store he operated especially for his help. This commissary was a place were the sharecropper could buy clothes and food on credit until harvest time, when his share of the crop went to market.

The theory behind sharecropping suggested that the tenant farmer had an opportunity to earn enough money to pay off what he owed to the commissary and put the rest aside. In practice, this never happened – no matter how much money your efforts yielded, the amount you owed was always higher than what you earned.

The ledger was not open for inspection – it was this part of the story, more than any other, that made my blood curdle every time I heard it. This power the landowners had, an authority so vast it allowed them to alter the details of previously agreed upon terms, a control so absolute it permitted these landowners to change the amount of money these hardworking men and women owed to them with nothing more than the stroke of a pen - this kind of power scared the hell out of me as a child.

My father would pause here, letting his description of the commissary arrangement sink in for a few seconds, answering questions from me and my brothers - why didn’t your cousins have any MONEY? - as well as my mother - you mean to tell me your cousins were still on the old plantation IN THE FIFTIES?.

Then he would plunge into the Brier Rabbit part of the story, relating to us how his cousins, having had enough, vowed to leave at the end of the next harvest. And the only way to leave was to pay off their debt. So the head of the family went to the commissary that fall and received his allotment from the harvest. It was weighed, a figure was arrived at, and he carried his scrip to the commissary, where he applied it to his bill. But this time, instead of taking a verbal accounting of how much more he owed, he asked the landowner to write it down.

The landowner handed him a slip with a figure on it. That’s all he walked out with – no flour, no sugar, no coffee, no salt pork, no rice, no toiletries – nothing but that slip of paper.

My father’s cousins went to work in earnest then, making what they had last as long as possible, borrowing what they could not do without from relatives like my grandfather, going back to basics as they hunted, fished, and gathered practically everything they ate for the next twelve months after toiling in the fields all day.

So the next fall, when it came time for harvest, when it came time to settle up with the landowner, my father’s cousins had enough amassed enough scrip to settle their tab. It is this part of the story that I have probably romanticized above and beyond the imagery my father provided, adding extra heft to the pasteboard suitcases they had packed to the gills, extra shine to the moonlight as they trudged away from their empty shack under the cover of darkness, an extra gleam in their eyes as they headed for the main road, their next stop the train station, their destination, New York City.

It is stories like this, stories told and retold, most of them containing more than a kernel of truth at their center, that make me and people like me wary whenever we see business that is meant to be public conducted in private, whenever we see men with knowing smiles emerge from smoke filled rooms…whenever we sense that someone is keeping the tally in the metaphorical ledger book from our eyes.

The Democratic Party Rules & Bylaws committee has a hard job to do. I don’t envy them. The piles of delegates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are standing on aren’t much different than the plantation token pictured above this commentary. Whether or not these delegates will retain their original value or be assigned a new unit of measurement is entirely up to the landowners, oops, I meant committee members, who will convene this Saturday, just before the candidates begin to harvest the fruits of their campaign labor.