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Pressure cooker politics?
Both Fowlers said they didn’t receive extreme pressure from colleagues to support either candidate, but they received many e-mails and letters from individuals telling them their reason for supporting either Clinton or Obama.
“I didn’t feel the pressure, even at home,” Carol Fowler said. “I laugh because people always ask, ‘How do you survive your marriage?’ But surely husbands and wives vote differently all the time. Maybe they just don’t talk about it to each other. Certainly, most husbands don’t have to read in the paper about their wives supporting a different candidate.
“We talk about it, of course, and there are some things we argue about to the point of throwing pots and pans,” Carol Fowler said, “but this is not one of them.”
Don Fowler said he understands that some voters have a concern about superdelegates overriding the popular vote.
“The perception that this would happen bothers me,” he said, noting that he, like his wife, would not prefer to see the decision made at the convention in Denver.
“I don’t think we’ll go to the convention with a deadlock,” he said. He believes the party will have a presumptive nominee by August.
The vote of the people
However, if it is deadlocked, Don Fowler doesn’t think superdelegates need to support the candidate that won their state, and if they dodn’t, “They obviously have a good reason to do that,” he said.
Carol Fowler, on the other hand, expects that superdelegates nationwide will probably reflect what their constituents say.
“But if their candidate jumps off the track between now and August, people are free to change their vote, and be thoughtful and deliberative,” she said.
The uncertainties regarding Florida and Michigan may also be a lingering issue heading into the DNC convention, the question being whether these states will be stripped of their convention delegates by the national party for moving up their primary day, a decision that was agreed upon by all the Democratic candidates last year.
What is for sure, said Carol Fowler, is that “both of us are 100 percent certain that in November we will vote for the same candidate.”
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