Beware the everyday brutality of the averted gaze.
Idaho Progressives fighting for delegate to National
Submitted by Serephin on Fri, 06/18/2004 - 10:06am.
I spoke this morning with Matt Ganz, a Kucinich delegate from Valley County and a member of the Idaho Progressive Platform, a group made up of Kucinich/Dean/Uncommitted delegates. The IPP met earlier today with the By-laws and Rules committee to request that their delegates be allowed to merge together, in order to garner 15% total state support and allow them to send one national delegate to Boston.
At yesterday’s initial meeting they were told that only delegates for Kerry and Edwards would be sent to the Democratic National Convention. The By-laws and Rules committee were reminded that, at eight other Democratic state conventions, delegates from different candidates had been allowed to merge. They were also reminded that Kerry and Edwards delegates had also been allowed to switch their candidate selections in order to increase the diversity of the discussion at the national convention.
The By-laws committee is meeting this morning on other issues, and this issue as well. They’ll be making their decision and will give their answer by the opening of the convention this afternoon.
UPDATE: The By-laws & Rules committee hath spoken — and the answer is no.
I'm sure the committee has their reasons, but I think they should re-consider — a large section of the progressives group is new, active and young democrats. I'd like to see the higher-ups in the party find a way to compromise and encourage this segment of our party.
Is Idaho's national delegate proportion set in stone?!
I got here at 9:20, so I missed the Rules meeting. I hear rumblings that I should have gone in late, that it went overtime and was a bit of a donnybrook.
A question: yesterday's orientation mentioned that 75% of the candidates are to go to Kerry, 25% to Edwards. Is that percentage set in stone?
If all the disenfranchised (uncommitted, dean, kucinich, sharpton) were to announce for Edwards, would that percentage change? I mean, seeing an increase of 20% of the overall delegates would make the delegate counts shift enough to cost Kerry a few delegates. I'm not sure I'd be any happier in the grand scheme of things, but I'd consider it rather than not voting at all.
As far as I know, people chan
As far as I know, people changing their votes to Kerry or Edwards didn't change the percentage on which the number of national delegates was based.
There were no Sharpton delegates.
Some people switched to Edwards and some to Kerry. I switched to Kerry.
One of the guys on the Rules committee (which, incidentally, was created just the previous day, or so we heard) said he would help us modify the rule for next time, and I've already written to him and he's already written back. We'll get this sucker fixed for next time.
(And one of the other Kucinich people has already called me to make sure I'm working on it.)
The Progressive Caucus issued a statement saying we weren't going to challenge the decision, and that our ultimate goal was beating Bush, and we got a standing ovation. A lot of the Progressive Caucus ideas got put into the platform, and some of the chosen national delegates have progressive ties, though some people considering running as national delegates were apparently told that they hadn't paid their dues enough to be considered.