A Trickle Down Effect

I agree with the comments from my previous post on Hillary Clinton that, from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, there is no divide. Nor is there a divide in the states where Obama won. Where the battles took place and where questionability remained were in the states where Hillary won. I can’t even begin to describe to you the amount of fighting and the amount of time wasted at the breakfast for the South Dakota delegation on Tuesday morning. I walked away from the breakfast feeling absolutely awful and almost disappointed in my delegation. That being said, any doubts about unity that remained on the lower delegate levels were completely gone by the time Obama was officially nominated this afternoon and part of that is due to the way delegates vote.

The official roll call is televised but that is not considered the official vote. Tuesday afternoon, the State party chairs were given manilla envelopes with the ballots and GPS locators in them. By 3:00 this afternoon, all delegates had to have voted, publicly signed their names next to Obama or Clinton, and collectively turned in their votes to the DNC. This means that nearly everyone voted in their pajamas at breakfast this morning. How’s that for a visual? As of Tuesday night, over half of the delegates were Hillary supporters and just under half were for Obama. Today’s vote, from the South Dakota delegation however went 17-5 for Obama.

What changed? A) Some people waited to vote until after Hillary officially released her delegates this afternoon and B) the delegate chairman realized that if, twenty years from now when he’s talking about when the first African American president was nominated for president, he didn’t want to say that he didn’t vote her him. In other words, it took a couple of days, but the message of unity eventually trickled from the top down, which is interesting since the campaign this year is supposed to be run from the bottom up.