News Item: The campaign of Senator Barack Obama ran out the clock today on allowing a million citizens of Michigan to cast their votes in a new Democratic primary.
Dear Senator Obama:
What a clever victory for your campaign. What a scandalous, hideous defeat for everything good you are supposed to stand for.
How depressing that the great candidate of “change” turns out to be nothing but a garden variety Chicago pol who wins his office by throwing out the ballot box.
When I first registered to vote 40 years ago, the right to vote was prominent in all our minds. Brave citizens in the South and throughout the country had marched, organized, sacrificed, had shed their blood to fight for the right of every citizen of this country to cast a vote. I was deeply inspired by their courage and by the students and the nuns of my college who had participated in this movement. I never took my right for granted.
I proudly cast my vote for Eugene McCarthy and four years later for Shirley Chisholm. I would have been drop-dead thrilled to know that 40 years later another charismatic, progressive black candidate would be poised to accept the nomination as president of the United States.
But never in my worst nightmare would I have imagined that this constitutional scholar, this civil rights lawyer and brilliant student of American history would stop a million people from voting because he was afraid of the outcome.
We have a word for politicians who win by slamming the ballot box shut. We don’t call them leaders. Or statesmen.
We call them tyrants. We call them despots.
They don’t deserve the office they seek.
A news article recently said that you told a guy from Michigan that re-voting there was “very complicated.”
You did not say that when you started your improbable campaign for president -- “It’s too complicated” to raise millions of dollars, organize volunteers in every state, get people to walk for you, call for you, vote for you -- No. You said, yes we can.
Thousands of people at your rallies chant “yes we can!” Re-voting in Michigan is peanuts compared to what you have accomplished. But now you say, No we can’t?
No. You’re saying “No We Won’t!”
We won’t allow people to vote because we might lose
We won’t allow people to vote because we are afraid of who they will choose
We won’t allow people to vote because winning is more important than anything else.
We already have a president who sits in the Oval Office because he stopped the votes of citizens from being counted. Some of us have never accepted the legitimacy of his presidency.
Are you going to be the next George Bush, Mr. Obama, doing whatever it takes to win, including silencing the voices of millions of citizens?
If that is where you are, you don’t deserve to be president any more than George Bush did.
Let them vote. Let them all vote – Democrats, Republicans, Independents -- let the chips fall where they fall.
Because if you win fair and square you could lead a truly united party. Because if you win when all the votes are counted and all the votes count, no one can deny you your victory. Because if you don’t, your victory will be forever tainted in the minds of many people like me who think you won by stopping the vote.
Because if you run out the clock until it is too late for all the votes to be counted, you will truly be the second coming of George W. Bush.
I don’t think we can survive four more years of that.
