20 DEM ACTIVISTS WHO LEANED ON PELOSI HAVE GIVEN $24M TO DEM CAUSES

Susie Tompkins Buell and her husband Mark

March 27, 2008

The twenty Democratic mega-donors who warned House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to back off her position on the super-delegates automatically voting for the candidate with the most pledged delegates (i.e. Obama) have contributed almost $24 million to Democratic candidates and committees over the last 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics and as reported by ABC News.
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The list of major donors who signed the letter includes Susie Tompkins Buell of San Francisco, an entrepreneur who made her initial fortune with the Esprit clothing line, also runs a charity she founded, and who is often described as Hillary Clinton’s best friend.
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Under the circumstances, we disagree with the ABC News take on all of this that “threatening the DCCC is equal to threatening the superdelegates” and that it “also reinforces the narrative that [Clinton] will destroy the party to win." (See here.)
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That is nonsense. First, no one threatned Pelosi, let alone the "DCCC".

Moreover, if Nancy Pelosi can lean on the candidates about the tone of their campaigns and try to push super-delegates into, in effect, voting for Obama, it is about time Nancy Pelosi heard from a primary source of her own power: The ability to raise money for Democratic causes and the party activists who have made that possible.
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It is absurd that these twenty or so Democrats, who have given generously of both their time and money—and when Nancy Pelosi asked them to jump, they asked how high—cannot make their views known to her.
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And it is completely naïve for ABC news to be “shocked” that they would do so (or that Pelosi would listen) or imply that this feeds into the Mainstream Media’s preconceived story line of Hillary Clinton not playing by the rules. Next ABC will be telling us that they are “shocked” that Nancy Pelosi welds more power that any other congressmen.