The best argument I've seen for including the Florida delegation is that both candidates were campaigning nationally for a year prior to the primary in that state, so the election wasn't unfair. Tops it may be, but this argument is a red herring. Clinton has been in the news in Florida since before 1992. She was a First Lady for eight years. Obama had significantly less exposure. Add that the rules prohibted candidates from even minor kinds of campaigning in FL. Thus, the Florida election was not fair, especially when you conisder that, in many primaries, Obama was behind until he campaigned heavily in those states.

The best argument I've seen for not seating them is that changing the rules in midstream would undermine the DNC. The rules would no longer matter. I just can't get around that argument.

Of course, many other arguments against seating them come to mind. Hillary, Ickes, and others in her camp agreed to the rules governing the timing of primaries and only cried foul when they needed the FL and MI votes. But that's only a point against them, not FL and MI. So that argument ought not to be figured into the decision. 

Despite all of the above, I think it's vital to include delegations from these two states. These party leaders in these states did violate the rules, but it's difficult to justify the disenfranchisement of voters because of the mistakes of their leaders. They didn't choose those leaders. That's the flaw in the system. No one really is accountable to the voters.

When you focus on alternative proposals, you see much jockeying for position in them. Each proposal seems transparently to favor one of the candidates. There is no proposal put forward yet that I know of which solves this problem.

Has anyone thought of creating equally represented delegations--equal numbers for each candidate--and requiring them to vote at the convention for their candidate during early ballots and then setting them free in the event that a stalemate occurs? This would give Hillary supporters at least some viability. It would be another very long shot to hang on to. It would create a pretext for carrying the fight to the convention.

They want more respect, more legitimacy. They need it, partly because they feel blindsided by the skinny guy at a time when they were virtually in the White House. This is a personal issue for her supporters that we should respect; it's our humanity on the line, not mostly political arguments.

All their hopes and dreams are extremely important to all of us. They're going through a natural process of grieving for what seems now an almost certain grievous loss. Give them more time, more of a chance. They absolutely deserve it. This isn't a sports contest; this is a family struggle in which there should be a little as possible triumph and sense of unfairness at the end. 

Incidentally, I've been observing elections since the late 1950s, and I remember when practically every convention mattered. I loved those boisterous events. I appreciate how the Carter/Kennedy fight weakened us in 1979, but that's not what would happen here. I believe that the Clintonistas would, by then, be able to accept defeat. Some of them seem like raving ideologues at times, but even that is an appearance. People who love Clinton are fighting for what they sincerely believe in. Even the ones who are single issue folks, focussed only on the need for a woman, having much to commend them. If Obama wasn't running, Moreover, the sense of fairness--rational and not-rational--that Clinton supporters need to feel okay about their party is important.  Perhaps their long shot will come home, too.

A joke comes to mind. A very responsible man who loved his cat had to go on a business trip and couldn't find someone to take care of his cat. His only option was his brother, who was somewhat irresponsible. The responsible brother explained that the cat should never be allowed outside, because he lived on a busy street. The irrepsonsible brother assured him that he would take great pains to make sure that the cat never was allowed to go outside. On the first night of his trip, the responsible brother phoned to check up on his cat. The irresponsible brother began, "I hate to tell you this, but your cat got out and was run over and killed by a car." When the repsonsible brother recovered from the first waves of pain, he lashed out at his brother, saying, "For God's sake; you've got the sensitivity of a longshoreman." The irreponsible brother implored, "What do you mean." The responsible brother said, "Well, you idiot, you could've broken the news to me piecemeal, you know, tell me something like the cat's up on the roof and you can't get it down and then eventually tell me what happened." The irresponsible brother agreed, and they talked at length about the cat and what to do with it and so on. At the end of their conversation, the responsible brother asked, "By the way; how's mother." The irrepsonsible brother replied, "Oh, let's see, She's up on the roof and we can't get her down."

I jest, but the point holds that these folks are, as we would be, suffering from this looming defeat. And we need to show respect in any way we can, including bending over backwards to let them continue their fight.

We who believe intensely in Obama can afford to take that chance. We need to allow the playing out of their long shot.

I had the good fortune to meet James Blight when he was visiting a graduate school within the Univ. of California at Berkeley. And I want to recommend him to TPM readers for his remarkable insight and processes for dealing with international conflicts, especially the problem with Iran. And I suspect that Obama will rely heavily on Blight in preparations for negotiations with Iran.

Blight is a former Director of Harvard's Center for the Study of the Psychology of Nuclear War and now is lead professor at the Watson Institute for the study of international affairs at Brown U.  He had the distinction of being the only psychologist to have been allowed to have direct access to prominent world leaders, including Gromyko, Castro, MacNamara, Rusk, and others who were involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Imagine. Heads of state talking to a psychologist!

He gained access, because unlike all other professionals who were studying the psychology of nuclear war, he refrained completely from name-calling and other degrading practices and relied only on amazingly thorough preparation and insightful questioning. Almost every other student of this problem called world leaders "insane." Blight understood them empathically as human beings caught in desperate, bewildering, and catastrophic situations. That is just how some of the best leaders think of themselves.

In this connection, I always remember Bush responding to a reporter who asked him, "In light of the grave dangers you face, how difficult is it for you to sleep." Bush said, "I sleep like a baby," whereupon Secretary of State Powell said, "I sleep like a baby, too--I wake up every two hours screaming." Blight appreciates that you can't rule out the whole human being when dealing with foreign actors. But don't be misled. He's not into pop psychologizing. 

Here's an announcement of one of Blight's presentations/conferences that speaks to Billy Glad's impression that I'm proposing a "new age" method for dealing with international conflict that relies on Obama's ineffable qualities.

Missed Opportunities?: US-Iran Relations, 1997-2005” is being launched as a major new multi-center, multi-national initiative, using the method of critical oral history pioneered by Watson faculty members Jim Blight and janet M. Lang.

The project began with an April 2007 planning conference for US, Iranian, and European scholars, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation and MIT’s Center for International Studies. This will be followed by research in Tehran. The culminating event of this phase of the project, a conference in spring 2008, is planned to feature major figures from the US administration of President Bill Clinton and from the Iranian administration of Mohammed Khatemi.

As a research method, critical oral history brings declassified documents and policymakers involved in a particular event into a conference setting with scholars to analyze what occurred. Participating with Blight and Lang in “Missed Opportunities?” is John Tirman, executive director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, and Malcolm Byrne, research director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The point of this critical oral history is to enable participants to construct a reliable, valid understanding of Iran-US relations as a basis for improving them. The documents help keep them honest, and that honesty and the trust the develops in these thoughtful, agreeable conferences enables leaders to achieve their goal.

As I've argued in other posts, the underlying may Obama opponents people are having with the kind of international relations Obama represents is at the level of the most basic human relations paradigm, prevailing morality. Here's a little more depth to that argument.

In the Realist/Moralistic view, there's practically nothing to understand concerning Iran. People are misbehaving. We point that out and demand change. We ratchet up the threats of  and actual punishment until they give in. There may be, in the case of international relations, a little more subtlety involved such as geo-political checks and balances that excite the livers of posters, but those are just more pressures to behave. Regarding the need to have an inquiring empathic conversation, as Billy Glad has argued in his posts on Obama and Iran, everyone already knows what they need to know.

In the Realistic Empathy view represented by Obama, Blight and others, there much to understand and much mutual understanding to arrive at. That's the basis of negotiations.

I know this way of thinking by analogy to my psychotherapy practice. The process of developing a realistic, empathic view of a person is excruciatingly tedious at times and quixotic. Consider the following example. I once said to a very troubled man, "It must be hard to think that you're not perfect." He seemed completely unaffected and started talking more about the incident that upset him. At the right moment, I then said, "It must be hard to think that you're imperfect." His entire expression changed. He sort of moaned and said, "When you said that, all of the tension in my stomach went away." My point is that relationships are in fact excruciatingly subtle and complicated, whereas the standard view reduces them to simple matters of pressure and compliance with it. In the therapy I learned in grad school, I felt like I was always subtly pressuring people to be more reasonable and behave better. Then I learned to help them by relieving them of degrading views of themselves and others.

Blight for Secretary of State!

Blogger Billy Glad manages to draw a crowd, partly because he is so matter of fact and partly because he seems reasonable enough that his critics imagine they can change his mind. At least, that's what draws me in. I have become doubtful about his impression of him, but perhaps others who follow his blogs can help.

In his latest post, he criticizes Obama for proposing to meet with our opponents without "pre-conditions." I'm trying to elevate out of the fray he's helped generate by working on the level of the assumptions underlying his position and Obama's alternative. I argue below that Billy, like Hillary, Bush, and McCain, is trapped in a view of human nature that is at the core of prevailing morality. And Obama, because of his mother's and grandparents' loving, empathic view, has been able to step mostly outside of that view. I add that there is in the social sciences and schools of international relations emerging proof of the view Obama represents. I think that the presumption of his naivete is an artifact of the general lack of knowledge of substantial alternatives.

Regarding Obama's proposal to meet Amadinejad without conditions, Billy wrote,
<blockquote>Will he tell Mr. Amadinejad that our commitment to the safety of Israel is absolute? Will he tell him that we are sorry we invaded Iraq? .... Will he tell him that we wish he wouldn't continue to develop nuclear weapons, because, if he does, Israel will have to attack his country and we will have no alternative to supporting Israel? .... Mr. Amadinejad knows all that. What new information can Mr. Obama give him? The fact is, of course, that there is nothing Mr. Obama can say to Mr. Amadinejad face to face at a summit meeting that can't be said through intermediaries or that Mr. Amadinejad doesn't already know.</blockquote>

The view of international relations implicit in these words exactly mirrors Bush's. In Israel, Bush said it's ridiculous to think that someone can come up with an "ingenious" argument that will change Iran's mind. This so-called Realist method is all about lecturing, threatening, demanding, condescending, and other pressuring methods. These methods are a response to what these people think is going on in the minds of our opponents. What we do to them is based on a basic psychological understanding that is enshrined in prevailing morality.

The idea in prevailing morality is that people who do bad things are bad and, therefore, will respond only to equal and opposite counter-force. Their inner geyser of irresponsible urges must be countered. Hence, pressure, demands, and even grossly degrading name-calling. Notice that this view is tautological; it just can't make sense. But of course, it's widely believed because, for centuries prior to widespread academicians' knowledge of the illogic of tautologies, this bad-because-you're-bad idea is deeply engrained in our justice system and our systems of personal justice. It feels not only like truth but fundamental to our protection from chaos.

Obama is a magnet for challenges to this archaic but still prominent point of view. His empathic view enables many of us who are in the woodwork to have a voice. Here's my challenge.

The moralistic view of human nature can't be valid also because it completely leaves out of its consideration humanity's vulnerable nature. Specifically, it leaves out of the equation the idea that people are driven by maltreatment and its effects to do harmful things.

Of course, this view is controversial, especially when considering the cases of sociopaths like Bush, the Iranian President, and many others on the world stage, much less ordinary violent criminals. But many people are trying to press the alternative view.

The most widespread version of the alternative view is as follows. Since the beginning of our troubles with Iraq, a case has been made, albeit inadequately, that our murderousness and our almost complete lack of sympathy for innocent victims is what has set the Middle East so intensely and pervasively against us.

Our denial of this influence is what makes us seem like moral monsters. To take one of many examples, when a high-ranking Clinton official was asked to comment on the deaths of 500,000 children and older people because of our sanction of chlorine, he said only that it was Hussein's responsibility. He offered not even any condolences. This was gross insensitivity. And our officials' words about "collateral damage" express the same numbed out, dark position. 

Inflamed Middle Easterners, of course, see us through the same moralistic prism that we see them. That constitutes our underlying stalemate. They think of us as evil, believing that we are evil because we're just greedy or power hungry or some such. There's no sense that we're bewildered and lost and tormented internally, that we're vulnerable beings trapped in a crazy system without no awareness of our actual predicament. They hear our Realist pronouncements heavily laden with policy-ese and mechanistic concepts. There's no humanity there, except in the thin, abstract promises of freedom and democracy and, ironically, sympathy for the victims of the tyrants whose countries we're devastating.

Obama represents the alternative view of human nature. He exemplified this view most prominently in his speech on race when he empathized deeply and in intellectually credible terms with white racists. In this profound, out of this world empathy, he represents a spiritual awakening to the promise of the heart and soul of the Song of Solomon; the lover says that, "Love is more power than death." Intelligently expressed realistic empathy, as many now out of power international relations experts argue, is capable of changing the positions of even dictators--of course, not all of them. It is more powerful than the erupting torment that threatens to engulf us. Of course, Obama can't soar rhetorically into these spiritual climes, because America is so lost into prevailing morality that the "appeasement" attack sells. You can't legalize marijuana without seeming, within the logic of prevailing morality, to be saying, "Smoke whenever, wherever, and as long as you like regardless how damaging you are to yourself and others."

Imagine the repercussions throughout the Middle East when our president first hears face-to-face the leaders throughout that part of the world condemning America for it's murderousness and it's monstrous insensitivity to the plight of Middle Easterners, especially in Iraq. Will Obama say, "Well, of course, that was Hussein's and Al Queda's and Iran's and Syria's fault," and then fall silent. No. He will express intellectually credible empathy and, thereby, institute a new dawn in international relationships.

Silly? Try to imagine the reaction throughout the Middle East to the headline, "Obama Expresses Profound Regret for the Deaths of Innocent Victims in the Middle East." Try to imagine the reaction in high-level meetings when he, as he puts it, "disagrees without being disagreeable." Of course, the problems will not disappear. But his expressions of concern are the conditions of best possible negotiations. In the old view, you can expect nothing except a stalemate.
 

It seems that Obama's strategy, which agrees with the vast majority of bloggers, is to avoid the Wright flap. The argument is that, because it didn't do serious harm and he seems to have rebounded from it, let sleeping dogs lie. To do otherwise just stirs up the hornets.

I'm in the minority, thinking that Obama has an opportunity to win over some of the anti-black voters, much less the swing voters who were swayed by the Wright stuff.  I argue that he can elevate into his statesman role, much as he did in his speech on race in Philadelphia. In that role, he can help Americans protect themselves from all of the guilt by association attacks that threaten to subvert the democratic process. But in this post, I also want to argue that another speech on the Wright stuff can show that Obama truly is a uniter. How?

For one thing, he can show that his speech on race had an impact that all people who fear Obama's radicalism or just his race can admire and feel reassured by. Here's just one of many reassuring reactions. J. Alfred Smith, the senior pastor at Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif., and a friend of Wright's, said.

All of us from that [Wright's] generation had to go around through the back door, had to ride in the segregated portion of the train. That anger can keep us marred down in the mud, or it can be creatively used. Brother Obama has called for our higher selves to rule over our animalistic selves.

Allen has a following equal in size to Wright, and Allen is conveying to them the sentiment quoted above.

That's the kind of still unappreciated impact Obama has had, both in reaction to his speech on race and to his beliefs and practices when he was a community organizer in Chicago. Folks on both sides of the racial and political divides in Chicago realized that he wants to uplift everyone, not just blacks and, of course, not just other educated, professional people.

Too often, we're victims of low expectations, which is one way of framing the strategy of avoiding the Wright stuff. A much higher expectation was satisfied in the crucible of Obama's sinking campaign following the first broadcasts of Wright's incendiary rhetoric. If we keep that expectation alive, think how much more we can achieve.

Here's the citation for the Allen quote: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/18/AR2008031803195.html?hpid=topnews