Glenn Brown even gave me a post, and I still didn’t get around to it. But here it is. I think it contains some very interesting and important observations:
I was at the IVI-IPO endorsement session this weekend and it was a complete shambles. As someone who has personally admired the organization from afar for many years it was strange to see the "man behind the curtain."
I will begin with the results of the voting for all who are impatient for those things. Barack Obama’s name was put into nomination for endorsement and a sole endorsement was voted down by a small margin. Partially, this was due to the fact that a representative of the hynes campaign accused the Obama campaign of having recieved a list of IVI-IPO members and calling them to get them out to the vote – something that the Obama campaign denies but there was no chance to rebut this nor was there any evidence of this provided beyond some anecdotal comments by people who said they had been called by the campaign.
The final vote was a joint endorsement of both Hynes and Obama – in other words it was irrelevant. However, the possibility of a single-candidate endorsement still exists because the vote, while a majority, did not reach the 60% threshold to guarantee this will be the endorsement. The IVI-IPO board will decide the endorsement with this "reccomendation" of the membership. The vote personally upset me because I am a supporter of Baracks but also because Barack worked for the organization and has been recognized by it for his great work on many occasions. Hynes, on the other hand, could not take the time to show up at the televised candidate forum of a couple of months ago.
Some other things I have noticed that startled me:
1) What was probably most startling to me was that it was common knowledge that campaigns bought seats for their supporters – I must confess that this was true both for Obama and for Hynes although it was clear that Hynes paid for more seats.
2) There was an incredible lack of control over the meeting. – and, as a matter of fact, most of those who were disruptive were clearly long-time members of the organization.
3) Contributing to the lack of control was a general lack of civility on the part of all parties concerned. Examples:
– Several people literally shouted at Dan Hynes during the question and answer phase – many of them also clearly long-time members.
– There was a section of the meeting where people were to point out areas where each candidate disagreed with the finer points of IVI-IPO’s political platform. When a woman stood up and asked for a copy because she did not know the whole platform she was chided by the chairperson who said "people who join the organization should already know where we stand on the issues." The chairperson later stated that she did not know where IVI-IPO stood on banning handguns!
What struck me about the organization was that it was an ingrown, extremely disfunctional group who uses these sessions as a fundraising tactic for it’s organization. They took no real great effort to encourage showing up at this session – despite the fact that it this would be the primary endorsement session of the year. Their description of the event in their newsletter was misleading and I suspect they were hoping for some iteration of what actually happend – that the vote session would not be final so that the central comittee could choose who they wanted.
What I noticed about the campaigns:
What we saw at this meeting could very well be the story of the race. The Obama camp was very passionate. The Hynes camp countered that by being extremely organized. This was true down to having handouts literally stating the way they wanted this to go – they were shooting for a joint endorsement to nullify it for the Obama campaign and give the news cycle to hynes with the AFL-CIO endorsement.
I have to say that I plan on resigining from the organization because I was so disappointed.
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