Based on a comment reply I received the other day, I feel that it’s important to point this out to a greater audience. Apparently I’ve been the only one saying this, or if not, I am one of the few.
In the past, I have been elected to both a board and a commission, as well as a city council. When you’re elected to a city council or school board position in Maine, you are required to take an ethics training. Some people take a really short one online just to meet the requirements, but the city offers reimbursement for an evening-long one by the Maine Municipal Association, so of course I took the good one.
In that training, we received lengthy training about ethics, and conflicts of interest dominated a lot of it. What was important was learning about how the appearance of a conflict is almost as bad, if not as bad, as actually having a conflict. And when we’re faced with such situations, we need to either eliminate the conflict, recuse ourselves from the conversation, or even resign if we are unable to detach ourselves from it (the last being very, very unlikely, but sometimes the option which is chosen).
Locally we had a city councilor who dropped out of the race a few years ago because of how he interpreted Maine statute. He felt it denied him the ability to run in a partisan election, although that affected only state workers running in state elections. He wasn’t affected, but was concerned he was, and eliminated his conflict by getting off the council so he could keep his paying job.
So here’s why this matters to Debbie Wasserman Schultz (whose name I can spell, yay). When faced with conflicts of interest, as she has been, it is very important for her to be fair. Because of the conflict, she has to be twice as fair as she would be without the conflict, or she invites controversy. She has past strong ties to Hillary Clinton. She’s on the board of NGP VAN. And she’s the DNC chair. So she is a likely Clinton supporter who has the ability to shut down the VAN when she doesn’t like what’s going on.
And by doing so, she brought the current controversy on herself.
DWS had already been facing severe criticism for the debate schedule, which is argued by Sanders and his supporters (and I’ll admit, I’m both Sanders supporter and DWS critic) to be a strategy to protect Clinton, as more people seeing Sanders is argued to be something which would boost him.
Now, in dealing with the VAN, she shut Sanders out of the database for a day, which caused him to be unable to campaign for that day except in places where paper canvassing lists may have already been printed. This is controversial because the data breach had already been sealed. I’ll be the first person to admit that Sanders’s staff were wrong to do what they did, but after that 45 minute period was over, the database was functional for all users with no concerns for what the Sanders campaign could do because NGP VAN staff had plugged the hole.
If there was an issue with the database, closing it down for all users would be appropriate. But without an active issue, which VAN knew didn’t exist, there’s no reason to deny one candidate access pending information on past events. Denial of access could be used even days later to punish the campaign for not providing requested information if they still hadn’t, but a threat of withholding delegates would be a more appropriate intervention. Either way, if DWS had chosen an action similar to this, it wouldn’t appear as punitive an action. And punishment didn’t make sense, at least not until a breach happened and the Sanders campaign refused to fire people and refused to help provide information.
Ditto for the debates. When you have two candidates demanding more debates, give them some, or allow them to debate elsewhere. The debate calendar could have been expanded from six to eight and the extra two be placed pre-Iowa in prime time. Clinton doesn’t want this, I get it. But the current schedule does favor her, and the others deserve some input.
DWS needs to do this because of her position as DNC Chair, NGP VAN board member, and Clinton supporter. If she were an impartial DNC chair, she could probably get away with bringing the hammer. But she is not, and so she needs to engage in efforts to appear to be more fair to Clinton’s opponents than to Clinton in order to even appear equally fair. This is why I believe she should resign, because in truth, I’d rather have a chair who didn’t need to address this conflict. She can’t just stop being a Clinton supporter. I would like an impartial (at least as far as we know) chair to be a fair arbiter. I don’t want Clinton or Sanders having an edge. I just want them each to have equal opportunity. And right now that isn’t what’s happening — and O’Malley is even more out in the cold.
Until these things happen, expect Sanders and O’Malley supporters to be anti-DNC and Clinton supporters to be pro-DNC. I want everyone to think about that for a second. How many times has that gone the other way? How many Sanders supporters love DWS, or Clinton supporters demand her resignation? That is when you know a conflict of interest is burning, when one side’s supporters are almost all on one side of the issue. The two items shouldn’t be connected, and yet they are.
If DWS continues as chair, she should cure the issue with the debates. The VAN issue is done and past, she can’t fix it. But if she insists on continuing in her position, her goal should be that Sanders and O’Malley supporters look at the chair of the DNC and respect her as someone who is doing all she can to ensure that all candidates have a fair shot to win the Democratic nomination.