Will Denver be sweetness and light or pitched battle?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
It’s hard to figure how the Democratic National Convention in Denver later this month turns out to be anything but a mess.
The one possibility on the bright side would be that a perfectly orderly, according to plan, crowning of Barack Obama takes place Thursday night, Aug. 29, before 75,000 united and cheering fans in Invesco Stadium, the home of the Denver Broncos.
At the other extreme, and with a number of unruly scenarios involving crowd standoffs and recriminations in between, you would have some of Hillary Clinton’s 18 million primary voters streaming into Denver ready for a fight.
That idea could see Hillary’s women and other partisans, demanding, and getting, a roll call vote in the hall, and maybe, just maybe, steamrolling the convention and nominating her for president – with a churlish Obama getting the vice presidency as a trade off.
Incredible? Well, maybe. But stranger things have happened in American politics. She would need to do a lot of convincing among delegates now pledged to Obama.
Clinton’s power stems from the fact that her 18 million voters topped Obama’s and occurred within a party that has never gotten over 2000 when it captured the popular vote but lost the electoral vote (read delegate count) to George W. Bush.
Based on a flood of polling and press and broadcast interviews of her partisans, it’s a certainty that Clinton forces will be in the streets of Denver and in the convention hall, protesting what they feel was unfair treatment accorded their candidate, both by the Obama campaign and the Obama-leaning major media.
Obama can control the stadium crowd and apparently already has by limiting seats available to non-Obama supporters. Even that step could prove counterproductive by prompting an equal and opposite reaction by thousands of aggrieved Hillaryites staging marches and vigils around the stadium and elsewhere in Denver.
Hillary Clinton has put on a proper pro-Obama face since her initial bitterness over winning the popular vote but losing the delegate count. At the outset, Obama didn’t help by being 30 minutes late to a reconciliation meeting to which she was 30 minutes early.
Bill’s face for Obama has been more of a frown when it wasn’t a mask. His appearance of a general lack of willingness to embrace Obama seems more in line with the confidential top-level Clinton memos leaked this week in the Atlantic magazine. Sources from people like Mark Penn, eventually booted from the campaign, described Obama in the nicest light as unelectable in a general election to the most unflattering, saying he might win but only if the opponent were Attila the Hun.
Hillary waged a truly inept fight in the early primary states, the most obvious being the Iowa caucuses. There, she hardly campaigned at all and her team apparently did no opposition research on Obama.
The contest would likely have been over before it started had Obama’s dossier as revealed in the new book, “Obama Nation” been put forward. These include his links to the America-hating Reverends Wright, Pfleger and Farrakhan and associations with non-Christian tribal politics in Kenya, Chicago fixer Tony Rezko and the terrorist couple William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.
This week some Clinton backers seized upon the fall of John Edwards as a factor in Hillary’s defeat on the theory that had his sexual indiscretions come out before Iowa, she would have gathered enough of his supporters to win the delegate count.
Polls after Iowa, however, seem not to support that argument since they indicated more of the Edwards’ voters favored Obama.
August 2008
