The Wisconsin Democratic Party has stripped a woman of her position as delegate to the Democratic National Convention. That's after she told a newspaper she would vote for Republican Senator John McCain for President in November.
Last night in Stevens Point, state party members held a unanimous vote to strip Debra Bartoshevich of her delegate status and appoint an alternate for the Denver Convention.
Illinois Senator Barack Obama is in line to get the party's nomination, but Bartoshevich supports Hillary Clinton. Despite the controversy, party officials feel the situation has actually helped to better unify the democrats. Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Joe Wineke says, "It actually strengthened what we were doing here, I mean the thunderous vote on that from the delegation showed me that virtually everybody here has one mission, and that is to elect Barack Obama president."
When Senator Clinton bowed out of the race, Bartoshevich told a Wisconsin paper Clinton was treated unfairly by the party, and she has deep reservations about Obama's experience, so she'll vote for McCain. Wineke says the alternate will be another Clinton delegate, but one who will continue to support the party.
Technically speaking, neither delegates nor superdelegates are under any legal requirement to vote for any particular candidate at the convention, so while it's certainly understandable that the Wisconsin Democrat party would want to take these actions, it's not ethically correct. It is, however, par for the course for the modern Democrat party: if anyone is going to vote wrong (i.e. not for their anointed candidate), GET OUT! If you've read Bill Sammon's book At Any Cost, you know exactly what I mean (if you haven't, you should).
To drive the point home even more, just days ago, two women wearing the Muslim hijab (head scarf) were prevented from sitting on the stage behind Barack Obama for a speech:
Hebba Aref said Wednesday that she and Shimaa Abdelfadeel were among 20,000 supporters who gathered to see the Democratic presidential hopeful on Monday at the Joe Louis Arena when the groups they were with were separately invited by Obama campaign volunteers to sit behind the podium. But Aref said the volunteers told members of both parties in separate discussions that women wearing hijabs, the traditional Muslim head scarves, weren't included in the invitation and couldn't sit behind the podium.
Aref, a 25-year-old lawyer, said a member of her group was told by a volunteer that she could not invite Aref because of "a sensitive political climate."
Obama spokesman Bill Burton issued a statement saying such actions are "not the policy of the campaign."
"It is offensive and counter to Obama's commitment to bring Americans together and simply not the kind of campaign we run. We sincerely apologize for this behavior," the statement read.
One of the women is pushing for a personal apology from Obama, but a spokesman said the campaign had already apologized. It will be interesting to see if he takes that last step.
I'd like to point out a couple things on this. First, it's common practice for both parties to invite certain people up onto the stage to appear on camera behind the candidates. It's usually to make the crowd look more diverse than it actually is. That's fine, no big deal - some people get a cool perk. Yippee for them. What this incident portrays, however, is quite the opposite: removing people from where they would have been otherwise. In other words: GET OUT!
Also, if Barack Obama is the candidate of unity, as he is so fond of saying, what kind of a signal does this send? The anonymous volunteers who prevented these women from appearing behind Obama -- who have undoubtedly been thrown under the bus with the rest of the crowd by now -- certainly saved Obama from a damaging PR photo op, but the logic of these actions just doesn't match the rhetoric. Aref herself said his message in that speech was hollow to her:
"As he's saying it, I'm thinking, 'Well, wait a minute, I was obviously ... profiled and discriminated against an hour ago.'"
Yep. That's the Democrat party: two sets of rules. One for them, one for the rest of us pleebs (aka American citizens). Oh, and if you don't follow those two different sets of rules, you'll likely hear a resounding GET OUT!
There's my two cents.
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