There's nothing democratic about them. Bill Curry, political writer for Salon, and Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies talk with Amy Goodman about manipulations of the debates by the Democratic National Committee and its director, Debby Wasserman Schultz, representative from Florida.
"Dark, smoke-filled rooms" continue to be where Democratic Party decisions are made. And sometimes that means a very small group of people decide who gets the serious party support. It seems that, this time, one person pulled all the strings.
BILL CURRY: ...I would just add, though, that it wasn’t the DNC that shut down the debates. It was Ms. Schultz. There was no meeting. There weren’t no notice. There are no minutes. All the other members of that committee never got to say—there have been at least two vice chairs have come forward and said they read about it after the fact in the newspaper. No one else has claimed to have been informed in advance.
AMY GOODMAN: About?
BILL CURRY: It was a decision that Hillary—about the decision to have—to go from 26 debates in 2008 to six debates, three of them on a weekend, for 2016. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary Clinton made that choice together.
In this contracting dispute, the contractor, a company of which Schultz’s nephew was a principal, and all of the principals have worked either previous—in various ways for different Clinton campaigns in the past, if you’re the Bernie Sanders campaign or the—
AMY GOODMAN: The ones that run the database.
BILL CURRY: The one—I’m sorry, the ones that run the database. For anybody to think they’re getting due process, when there’s such a small cabal making all the decisions—this is supposed to be a political party. In a healthy society, there would be a democratic process in the Democratic Party, by which elected people would be overseeing these issues by making sure there wasn’t just nepotism and insider dealing, and making sure that the public was able to see how this process works. That the political party itself, that what is supposed to be the progressive party, has become mortgaged to a small group of Washington insiders, who raise money from large corporate PACs, who are dependent upon them for their life, who pursue their own careers, that the party itself has become just a dead carcass of what it once was is the most important piece of information that this contretemps over the data files has revealed, or emphasized, because it’s been revealed a hundred other ways, including in the shutting down of debate. It’s time for progressives in this country to stand up and demand a genuinely democratic process—if nothing else, from the Democratic Party, a democratic process.
So here we are -- a few days later -- maybe wondering how all this internal Democratic kerfuffle will affect the numbers. Maybe not much. Maybe not at all. CBS reports the results of the latest poll:
If the presidential election were held today, Republican candidate Donald Trump would lose to either of the two leading Democratic candidates, a new Quinnipiac poll found.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, would actually be more successful than Democratic front runner Hillary Clinton, leading Trump 51 percent to 38 percent. Clinton's lead is smaller: She would beat Trump 47 percent to 40 percent. ...CBSNews
