Four reports on PUMAs in the news. First from CNN:
The last place Kathy Archuleta could have ever imagined she’d spend the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado, was at a happy hour sponsored by the Republican Party.
But the 54-year-old Democrat joined several other Hillary Clinton supporters, along with volunteers and officials from John McCain’s campaign, at a Happy Hour for Hillary.
The event, sponsored by the Republican National Committee and approved by the McCain campaign, was a chance for McCain and Clinton supporters to come together for one cause: their opposition to Barack Obama’s candidacy.
“Four years ago, if you said we’d be at a Hillary happy hour at the DNC, I would have called you crazy. But today is a great opportunity for people who … agree that Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t have the experience to be president of the United States,” said McCain campaign regional communications director Tom Kise.
As Michelle Obama was delivering her “One Nation” unity speech on the convention floor several blocks away, more than 100 people gathered at the Paramount Café in downtown Denver.
In a side room, both groups of supporters discussed politics, sports and the convention while sipping cocktails and munching on tacos and a cheese spread.
But there was nothing unified for these Clinton supporters who walked across the aisle or, in this case, the cafe Monday night.
Archuleta, who hails from Denver, has been a registered Democrat all her life — until now.
“I’m a registered Republican … for the first time in my voting life,” Archuleta said. “No Obama for me. I’m voting for John McCain.”
“He reminds me of what the Jimmy Carter era was like. … If they think Jimmy Carter had it bad, just wait if Obama gets into the White House. That will be bad news in so many ways,” she added.
Obama’s relative lack of experience in national politics — long seen as his Achilles heel — was something that Clinton supporters, Republicans and independents attending the happy hour rallied behind.
“His lack of experience has been demonstrated so painfully every time he opens his mouth just about. … You cannot have good judgment without experience; that’s how you get it,” said 58-year-old Marnie Delano of New York.
Adam Edwards, a 20-year-old Clinton supporter, said that although the New York senator “was the stronger candidate,” voters may have “just discredited her because of some imagined baggage she carried from her husband’s administration.”
Leland Kritt, a McCain supporter who made his way to Denver from Los Angeles, California, said Obama’s message of ‘change’ is simply flawed.
“The simple fact remains, change will occur anyway, no matter who the president is. For every man, woman and child, change will happen. Question is: who is best able to handle that change?” the 51-year-old Republican said.
The McCain campaign has been aggressively courting Clinton’s voters in recent days, especially after Obama announced Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden as his running mate Saturday.
Shortly after the announcement, the Arizona senator’s campaign released a TV ad in several swing states that used video of Biden criticizing Obama as too inexperienced to be president.
And just as the Democrats’ convention was getting started in Denver, both the McCain campaign and the Republican National Committee unveiled four TV ads geared toward Clinton supporters.
The most recent McCain ad involves the famous Hillary Clinton “3 a.m.” spot and will be aired during the convention. The 30-second spot uses footage from Clinton’s original ad and declares, “Hillary’s right.”
The ad, set to run in key battleground states and specifically in Denver this week, also goes a step further than the New York senator’s original ad, explicitly detailing the national security threats America faces.
Clinton, speaking to member of the New York delegation in Denver on Monday, said she was opposed to Republicans using her words against Obama.
Meanwhile, a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll taken August 23-24 found that 56 percent of registered voters have a favorable opinion of Hillary Clinton, with 40 percent having an unfavorable view. The margin of error was plus or minus 4.5 percentage points. iReport.com: Are you in Denver?
So while Clinton’s die-hard supporters are in Denver in full force, the poll showed that her negative approval rating is very high among registered voters nationwide.
But there is some bad news for Obama. The poll showed that 66 percent of Clinton supporters — registered Democrats who want Clinton as the nominee — are now backing Obama. That’s down from 75 percent in the end of June. Twenty-seven percent of them now say they’ll support McCain, up from 16 percent in late June.
And nowhere was that statistic more prevalent than at the RNC-sponsored happy hour for Hillary.
Clinton supporters-turned-McCain converts at the event were not just angry at Obama’s campaign; they’re furious with the Democratic Party’s nomination process this year.
“The DNC really pushed [Barack Obama] on us. Now they’ve left us with two choices: somebody who has no substance or a Republican,” said Jessi Cleaver, 35, of New York. “And these are terrible choices, and they worked hard to select this candidate. … We’re watching the DNC pick this candidate for us.”
It’s a point Mitt Marr agreed with.
“We’re taking a stand and not backing down. It’s ‘we the people,’ not ‘we the DNC.’ We are standing up for what is right. I know in my heart,” said the woman from Sugar Land, Texas, who would give her age only as 50-something.
As the convention heats up and tensions remain high over how to make sure Clinton’s 18 million or so votes are counted, supporters will rally by her side, even if their pick in November is her enemy.
The second report is from Salon:
“This is where you see the civil war!” burbled Chris Matthews, experiencing near-asphyxiatory pleasure on an outdoor stage in the sweltering Denver heat, while behind him two competing groups, Obama supporters and the PUMA (Party Unity My Ass) backers of Hillary Clinton, chanted “Obama! Obama!” and “Hillary! Hillary!” at each other. Matthews looked as though he might wet himself as a camera panned the crowd, and he declared, “We’re at ground zero!”
Actually, he was about six blocks away from the Pepsi Center, the crowd behind him was probably no more than a hundred strong, and at least one of them was dressed as a toilet, (a gesture that seemed to have nothing to do with Clinton or Obama). But this is how media fantasy gets made, a miniature tableau of political discord, played out in front of a couple of well-placed television cameras and a television host who finds fetishistic, hyperbolic meaning in everything having to do with the defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her still-sore supporters.
Whether they knew it or not, the PUMAs who had congregated next to the MSNBC stage were making the night of the man who has done everything in his power to destroy their purported heroine. They held aloft Clinton signs and hand-markered cards reading “Stop Delegate Intimidation!” and “South Jersey PUMA.” At one point, three women and three men holding “McCain” signs started a melodic chorus of “Clintons for McCain, sweetie, Clintons for McCain, sweetie,” in reference to Barack Obama’s bad habit of referring to women by that diminutive. Next to them, a man in an Obama hat shouted, “You’re all irrelevant! Jesus!”
But irrelevant is not how the protesters will be portrayed by a media that has been salivating over the possible disruption of the Democratic convention — by angry, broom-riding succubi! — for weeks. Never mind that there were probably no more than 50 shouting PUMAs. Never mind that every national political convention in modern history becomes a locus for vocal agitators. Never mind that over the weekend, antiwar protests had been larger. Never mind that in three days in Denver I had not spotted a single PUMA or Hillary protester until I found where Chris Matthews was broadcasting. Never mind the guy in the toilet outfit. To hear Matthews, and the talking heads at CNN tell it, these demonstrators were “ground zero” in a rift that could potentially destroy the Democratic Party and ruin its national convention.
This scene was pretty much the worst nightmare of the women I had spoken to earlier in the morning at the Unconventional Women program, devoted to exploring the current climate for women in politics. At the Buell theater, mentions of Hillary Clinton, as well as a clip from her stirring concession speech, were met with enthusiastic applause and some light cheering, but nothing resembling disruptive anger. In truth, most of the current or former Clinton loyalists could not be more different from the afternoon’s demonstrators, but they will likely be tarred with the same hysterical brush.
“There is such a fear of women coming into power, that when they protest, they are given more weight,” said Marie Wilson, head of the White House Project, before speaking as part of the Unconventional Women’s programming, acknowledging the likelihood of protest. “Just the fact of women saying they support their candidate and want to make their voices heard sounds more scary than it would be if it were guys. That’s just part of backlash. But come on. When women gather around a water fountain, men get scared. People oughta just chill.”
Wilson acknowledges that there will be residual tension at the convention. But she sees the discord as a positive thing, a perhaps painful step in the right direction. “Putting issues on the table” — as opposed to keeping political frustrations pent up — “is what is going to bring people together.” Wilson believes that in the wake of Hillary’s run, “we are in the middle of a revolution. Women are stepping up and taking power.” She said her organization, which encourages women to seek elected office, has seen a 61 percent increase in participation in the past year.
A half-hour later, many of the same sentiments were echoed by a woman who sat behind me during Nancy Pelosi’s presentation, which was taken over by Code Pink protesters. As the demonstrators shouted for peace, I heard a soft voice say, “Ask Pelosi why she asked Hillary to get out of the race.” After the speech was over, I spoke to Pat, a 73-year-old retired teacher who declined to give her last name because her husband is a delegate.
“I’m not anxious to disrupt the convention,” she said, adding that she plans to go to a pro-Hillary march on Tuesday, but that “if it gets rowdy, I’ll step to the side. I consider that march a thank-you to Hillary for having not given up.” Pat said she’ll vote for Obama, but that she just wonders, after listening to Pelosi tell the crowd about how there should be more women seated around her at the White House table, “Why, why, why did she ask Clinton to leave the race? And why did she encourage superdelegates not to vote for her? That whole speech she just gave was about how women have to strive for power, but she used her own power to diminish and destroy Clinton’s.”
This was anger, no doubt about it. But it was reasonable, rational, thoughtful and politically sophisticated anger, not the “No-bama!” protests I would see later in the day. “The thing is,” said Pat, “if Obama loses the election, don’t think it won’t be Hillary who’s blamed.” But, she said, she doesn’t believe the convention will be badly disrupted by protest. “A roll call vote, that’s traditional!” she said. “Dennis Kucinich got one, and Shirley Chisholm. I don’t understand why it should be such a big deal.”
Neither did Dana Kennedy, a 40-year-old Hillary delegate from Arizona who is one of the 300 signers of the petition to get the roll call vote for Hillary. “My hope is that in the first round of voting I get to vote for her, and in the second round, I will vote for Obama,” said Kennedy. “A vote for Hillary is a vote for history and not against him.”
Kennedy said that most of her Hillary-supporting compatriots are torn about what they are going to do. “They want a unified party,” she said, “but this was the first woman to win a primary — and then primary after primary after primary. I think how we unify the party is to recognize the history that this candidate made.” Kennedy said she had not talked to any Clinton delegates who have any interest in causing a disturbance or making a scene. She said she is not going to a pro-Hillary march scheduled for Tuesday morning, “only because I can see exactly how the media will portray it.”
When asked about how Hillary loyalists are being portrayed in the media — as hysterics and harridans, Kennedy choked up with frustration and sadness. “It makes it so much harder,” she said. “This is the right thing to do for the party. I’m not disruptive. I believe this is the best way to recognize what Hillary symbolizes. I was elected to come to this convention and vote for Hillary Clinton.”
This was precisely the argument put forth by New York Hillary delegate Rosina Rubin, who said directly, “This is not about anger. This is not about a lack of desire for party unity. We all want to elect a Democrat in November. But why wouldn’t her name be placed in nomination? She is the only woman who has ever come this far. Her achievement represents a giant moment in American history. We just want to celebrate that.”
Rubin, a small-business owner from suburban, purplish Rockland County, said that people have stopped her on the street and begged her not to give up their vote. “We had a huge turnout in the primary, and they turned out for Hillary. The Democratic Party tells us that a delegate’s job is to in good conscience reflect the sentiments of the people who elected them. I don’t know why they equate an expression of democracy with ruining the convention. Hopefully Hillary supporters will be respectful, but I don’t think it’s disrespectful to cast the vote I was sent here to cast.”
Talking to these women, I began to believe that the threat of PUMAs, or aggressive Hillary supporters who planned to take over the convention, was a full-blown myth. I couldn’t find any; I hadn’t seen any. I half suspected that they were the creation of a media anxious to gin up a story in which the villains were a bunch of grumpy old white chicks.
But that was before I left the confines of the official indoor events and stepped out into the wide world of public protest and freedom of expression. And before the news of Monday’s shifting policies on the roll call vote began to leak out, and before Hillary supporters lining the streets of downtown Denver heard convoluted versions of what was likely to happen.
On a downtown street corner, Colorado Clinton delegate Sonya Jaquez Lewis was comparing what she knew with Washington Clinton delegate Michael Wagner. “I heard we’re not going to be able to say ‘And the great state of Colorado…,’” marveled Jaquez Lewis. Her mother — a delegate for Ted Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic Convention, where Kennedy supporters were allowed to vote for their candidate — told her daughter she was surprised that Clinton delegates were allegedly going to be denied the same opportunity. Wagner, another delegate for Ted Kennedy in 1980, also expressed shock at the lack of a roll call. “Ted Kennedy was challenging an incumbent president,” he recalled, “and he was allowed to have a roll call. I just can’t believe what’s happening here. Party leadership wants to show that we’re a party of unity, but what it’s doing is fracturing the party.”
A few minutes later, a parade of about a dozen women wearing buttons with pumas (the actual felines) marched past holding “Elected, not selected” signs on their way to find Chris Matthews. A woman sitting next to me on a park bench leapt up at their approach. “Oh, it’s the Hillary dumbasses,” she said. “I’d best get out of here before I get to fighting.”
But the dumbasses were already primed for a fight. “We’ve been told by Pelosi that we’re ungracious,” said Robin Carlson, a cancer survivor from Los Angeles and a member of the Clinton for McCain contingent whom I interviewed after the made-for-TV demonstration. “We’ve been told that most of Hillary’s supporters have united behind McCain. That is absolute crap.” Still, Carlson says that 500,000 people have pledged on her Web site to endorse John McCain sometime during this convention. “Our foremothers marched in the streets so that our voices could be heard. We will not be silenced now.”
I asked Carlson why, if she was offended by being called “Sweetie” and invested in the legacy of her foremothers, she would express her disappointment over Obama’s nomination by supporting a man who would rob women of their reproductive rights and who does not support equal-pay legislation. “We are really sick and tired of having women’s rights held over our heads as a threat,” she said. “It’s country over party now.”
Also leaving the rally were Cynthia Novacek, a 54-year-old from Minnesota, and Mit Mar, a 57-year-old from Sugarland, Texas. “We’re all shouted out,” said Novacek. Asked what their goal for the week was, Novacek replied, “I want to make it an open convention, where delegates make their voices heard.” Barack Obama, she said, “was greased through by the media. They loved him. Everything bad about him, they didn’t want to focus on: Bill Ayers, Reverend Wright…”
“You mean Reverend Wrong,” Mar interrupted. “Look, I know about the race card. I know about race. I’m African-American. And it was Obama who played the race card, and it’s going to come back and bite Obama in the butt.” African-American supporters of Obama, in Mar’s view, “are proud. Yes, I understand that. But you want someone who can lead America, not because he’s African-American, or because she’s a certain gender, but because she can lead.” But what about the woman they wanted as America’s leader? Clinton has been leading her supporters, or trying to lead them, to vote for Obama. “We want Hillary,” said Novacek, with the fingers-in-her-ears insistence of an implacable toddler. “She can stand on her head and plead with us, and I still will not vote for him. I want her. She is best for the country.”
Putting aside the fact that Clinton is no longer running for president, I asked how they thought she would feel if they successfully disrupted the convention and attracted the news cameras, only to see PUMAs — and the candidate who is trying desperately to get them in line — being blamed should Barack Obama lose in November.
“I’ll tell you who should get blamed if he loses,” said Mar. “Barack Obama. It should go back to Barack Obama.” Novacek, meanwhile, thought that perhaps the media who hyped Obama should be ready to get some blame. Neither Novacek nor Mar seemed open to the possibility that maybe it wouldn’t work out that way, that neither the media nor the candidate would bear the brunt of the finger-pointing after a loss. They didn’t seem to care that they might be dooming their heroine to a legacy she never sought and certainly does not want. Instead, Mar showed me her shirt, which read: “PUMA Clinton Democratic No Deal Obama. DNC a disgrace.”
A fourth report from Minnesota Public Radio. Here’s the audio (part one):
Here’s the (audio part two):
Minnesota’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver will support Barack Obama for president and say the right words of unity even if it kills them. For several of the ones I’ve chatted with over the last few weeks, it will.
On Tuesday, the Democrats sent a former national chair of the Clinton campaign to the Minnesota delegation’s breakfast meeting to urge the Clinton delegates to get behind Obama.
“When someone puts a mic in our face and asks, ‘What about the Hillary supporter, or the person who supported Bill Richardson or Dennis Kucinich?’ We will say ‘We are Democrats,’ in a way that it will be so shocking to whoever asked the question, that they will just stand back,” said Rep. Sharon Jackson Lee of Houston, Texas. “They will say ‘Let them just walk on by. There is some kind of glory walking by. There’s a light over there.’ We are Democrats. We are one. We are one nation. We are empowered! We are strengthened! We are Democrats!”
Rep. Jackson Lee hasn’t met Connie Kafka of Wyoming. She is the Democrats’ worst nightmare. She’s not a Hillary Clinton supporter who’ll hold her nose and vote for Obama. She’s a Hillary Clinton supporter who’s going to work and vote for John McCain.
And she has no problem telling you why. She doesn’t believe Obama loves America.
talked with her while sitting on the steps of a row house in Denver, next to Red’s Anytime Bail Bonds. Puma PAC, an organization of Clinton supporters who will work for John McCain, has rented the space during the convention. Signs for Hillary Clinton share space out front with ones that say Take back our party! Elected not selected.
Kafka says Mrs. Clinton is the “rightful nominee” of the convention. “She won the nationwide popular vote and one of the reasons the caucuses came out different is there was fraud and voter intimidation.”
Kafka says the Clinton delegates to the convention, including those from Minnesota, have little choice but to back Obama because they’re being told they have no future in the Party if they don’t. And these are party insiders to whom a powerful role in the party power structure matters.
“They are still intimidating and strong-arming people,” she insists. “What we’re hearing is delegates are being taken into rooms and being browbeaten, being told ‘there will be no future in the party for you if you don’t fall in line.’”
She knows Sen. Clinton is in the same boat and has little choice but to support Obama. “I don’t believe in my heart that she believes in her heart that Sen. Obama can lead this country,” says Kafka, who has voted Democrat for 38 years and now vows to vote a straight Republican ticket..
“Anyone who claims to want to lead this country should at least begin by loving and respecting this country,” she said.
“You don’t believe that he does?” I asked.
“I do not believe that he does,” she said. “His greatest gaffe was when he said, ‘this is America, the greatest country in the world, now join me in changing it.’”She acknowledges that Sen. McCain is unlikely to come close to pushing the issues that made Kafka support Clinton in the first place. “I believe that Senator McCain at least begins by having a general respect and love for this country, its people, traditions, and a love of the armed forces.”
“Everything he’s done has been a coldly calculated move up the ladder of politics,” she said.
When the Democrats leave Denver on Friday morning, they’ll be taking a headache home, too: Puma PAC, the political action committee formed by Kafka’s colleagues.
As I find more, I’ll add them here.