Sheila lost
I was only there yesterday for a few hours, from about 11:30am - 2pm. I saw the candidates' speeches. Sheila made a way better speech; more passionate. Her supporters are so passionate about her, too. No loyalty problems in her campaign. The thing that struck me about the Sheila campaign was how ethnically-based it was. 9/10 or more of her supporters were minorities -- a lot of Seiks, South Asians, etc... whereas Valeri's base seemed predominantly white and Italian. (Sheila even said "thank you" in about 10 different languages during her speech.)
It goes without saying that it's great to bring as many people into the political process as possible. But I do think it's a little unfortunate that this is how nominations are increasingly being fought -- candidates go out and activate specific ethnic groups, and drag them out to these meetings. These people often don't even know what they're getting into. Some people there yesterday could barely speak English.
Observing yesterday made me wonder about the "closed" system we use here to nominate candidates, which is the reason campaigns do what Sheila did. Perhaps we should look at opening these things up like the US primary system, which would open the system up to everyone and likely reduce the instances of these ethnic recruitment campaigns.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 1:34 PM
