I got an email from Hillary Clinton today. She told me that it is important to count every vote (emphasis in original).
This Sunday, voters in Puerto Rico will go to the polls and make their voices heard — the first time the island has played such a vital role in selecting our party’s nominee. At this critical moment, I am depending on you to help me make sure they have a choice. We are depending on the voters of Puerto Rico in our fight to secure the nomination.
It doesn’t matter what the pundits say. You and I know this race is up to the voters, and I’m going to keep fighting for every last vote. That’s why it is so important that we get voters to the polls over the next few days — and we can’t do that without your help.
Let’s ignore the problems with the assertion that Puerto Rico is somehow going to secure the nomination for Clinton and focus on that part about the race being up to the voters. Because if the race is up to the voters, then why did she send out a letter to all the superdelegates today that said, in part:
At this point, we do not yet have a nominee – and when the last votes are cast on June 3, neither Senator Obama nor I will have secured the nomination. It will be up to automatic delegates like you to help choose our party’s nominee…
Ultimately, the point of our primary process is to pick our strongest nominee – the one who would be the best President and Commander in Chief, who has the greatest support from members of our party, and who is most likely to win in November. So I hope you will consider not just the strength of the coalition backing me, but also that more people will have cast their votes for me.
Before we get started with this, we have to remember that there are many ways of counting the popular vote and the only way that Clinton can make a claim to have won it is to give herself 328,000 votes from Michigan and give none to Barack Obama, and to count her popular vote victory in Florida. Having set down that marker, we have to wonder how Clinton can send out an email to her list that says “You and I know this race is up to the voters” on the same day that she sends out an email to the superdelegates that says “It will be up to automatic delegates like you to help choose our party’s nominee.”
Those are contradictory arguments. The truth of the matter is that Hillary Clinton is asking the superdelegates (or automatic delegates) to ignore the will of the voters as expressed by the delegates elected under the rules (even including Florida and Michigan). She’s saying that the whole point of the nominating process is to ‘pick our strongest nominee’ rather than discover the preferences of the voters (since those two things are not necessarily synonymous). Yet she keeps howling about how we have to count every vote? Why is it so important to count every vote if your ultimate argument is that the process should nominate the strongest nominee regardless of the vote?
To be fair, the process does allow for the superdelegates to overrule the preferences of the people, but it is really only for emergencies where the frontrunning candidate is clearly unelectable, or has become so through scandal or health reasons. It’s not true that the process is intended to nominate the strongest nominee. In 2000, the strongest nominee might have been Colin Powell. The process is intended to ascertain the will of the party (with a few independents and Republicans thrown in), and the superdelegates are only supposed to intervene if they think the nominee is a sure loser.
But even if you want to dispute my interpretation of the purpose of the nominating process, Clinton is arguing out of both sides of her mouth. And it is making everyone that pays attention to this crap just a little bit stupider every minute.
I can’t afford to get any stupider as it is, and I am simply out. of. patience. with the people who are already stupided.
And I’m kind of running out of patience with people like Dean, Pelosi, Reid, and all the others who could be (and should be) putting explicit open pressure on the Clintons to concede and start uniting the party.
I’m still not convinced they can put pressure on Clinton. Not direct pressure, anyway. Pelosi and Reed can make dark hints about coveted committee assignments, I suppose, but it’s not like they have signed proxies from the superdelegates saying they represent 100 superdelegate votes.
The real pressure needs to come from the people who are financing the campaign. Sure she gets some of her money online and from small donors, but I’m talking about the people who can deliver the $500,000 contributions. They need to tell her, “no mas. You want to campaign, you’re doing it on your own dime from here on out.”
I’d also like to see the suppliers she’s left holding the bag band together to demand their money from her and take her to court if necessary. That seems like it would cut severely into her cash flow (what there is left of it).
Jimmy Carter said they’re waiting until the last vote has been cast on June 3rd. So be patient; it’s only 6 more days.
Jimmy Carter wanna bet me that Clinton’s gone after June 3rd?
And McClellan’s book has knocked them out of the media’s limelight, so they’ll have a hard time drawing attention to their attempts to sway the members of the Rules & Bylaws Committee.
The protests — of course — will be purely spontaneous, without a connection to either campaign.
To make Clinton Math come out right you have to do some magical accounting in Florida and Michigan, and you also have to ignore the fact that there were four states where caucuses were held that either didn’t have votes, or the votes didn’t count for delegate selection, and it’s pretty much impossible to figure out what the popular vote in those states would have been. Had they had one.
Oh, and you have to pretend Puerto Rico is a state. And you probably have to ignore Democrats Abroad.
My current sig (brand new this morning) sums up my feelings on the matter.
Actually, it’s how many 3rd down conversions you make, plus the number of first downs.
Add to that the number of Hail Mary completions, and you have all the metrics of a winning team.
Declaring as winner the team with the highest score at the end of the game is not only unfair, but completely sexist.
So SHAME ON YOU, OMIR THE STORYTELLER!!!! It is time you ran a team consistent with your messages on ESPN. That’s what I expect from you. Meet me in Tampa. Lets have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this football game.
Does she really think she’s going to win hearts and minds by calling the superdelegates “automatic delegates” to their faces? not that it’s a derogatory term, per se, just that it could really come across as taking a gigantic liberty. I guess that’s what they do over there, though.
Hey. You’re right. She’s clinging to irrational and self-serving justifications. Obviously, any rational objective observer would recognize that she is trying to clutch a victory from the jaws of defeat. Which . . . . .
really doesn’t bother me. What if all Democrats had this much fight in them on the issues that really mattered? What if Al Gore actually tried to win the recount instead of being a wimp and giving up? Hey, I like a little fight in my Democrats and someone who is not going to be pushed around even when there is a ton of pressure on her to cave in.
My main problem with Clinton is that she is tenaciously fighting on behalf of herself, not Democratic party principles. She has never demonstrated political courage except for on her own benefit. She has never stood up and fought on behalf of her principles. No, she fights until the end for her own personal glory.
I still think the best way to make her go away is to act as if she and her supporters put up a good fight but to focus on McCain. Of course Obama should do the legwork to make sure that Clinton cannot “steal” the election at the convention. Just do that but Obama should focus on running against McCain.
Having some fight in you is one thing, and it’s a good thing. But when it starts to hurt Obama’s chances of getting elected in November, that’s where the line needs to be drawn.
The sooner she comes out, concedes the race and starts walking the walk of getting Obama into the White House in November, the less chance there will be that her supporters are going to think those mean (fill in the blank) stole the nomination from her. You don’t think there will be resentment if she doesn’t? Ask some of the Republicans here in Washington who think Dino Rossi had the governorship stolen from him in 2004, even though the state followed all the proper legal procedures in counting the ballots and their party lost a legal challenge (where they got to hand pick the venue and the judge, I might add), how long someone can hold on to such resentment. Hell, ask any Democrat who feels the election was stolen from Al Gore in 2000 how long you can hold such resentment. November is nothin’.
That is, again, unless she starts taking steps to unify the party.
I really think this exaggerates her impact. The Clinton voters who feel slighted and feel like the process was unfair, the media was unfair, and Obama supporters were unfair have already decided to vote for McCain or not vote for Obama, if the case may be. I think most will forgive and forget and support Obama. If anything, taking this thing to the final legal conclusion at the convention may offer some relief for Clinton voters. They will feel like their half of the party was respected. And Clinton will have no choice but to quit at that point. The endgame is in sight and there is limited utility in going on the warpath against Clinton supporters.
But imagine if it appears the party establishment put the brakes on her nomination too early. If the party comes out to hard against her she can use this as a rallying cry. Not only for this election but during an Obama administration as well or in preparation for a 2012 run. Funny, I think it’s actually in her best interest to be kicked out of the race by the elders. That way she can play the victim and there will be a lot of Democats who would be saying, “see, we told you Obama was a radical leftist that was not ready to lead. He’s Jimmy Carter all over again. There he is being soft on Iran. ”
But I agree that in a perfect world Hillary would quit right about now and support Obama. But this isn’t a perfect world and we’re past the point of debating the merits of Hillary dropping out. She’s got her core supporters, she’s got slightly less than 1/2 of Democrats supporting her, and she will do what she wants to do. She doesn’t care about the party she cares about herself. The question now is how does Obama deal with this reality. And I give him an A for how he is dealing with it so far.
Which is exactly why she’s not going to voluntarily drop out. Her 2012 narrative requires that she be booted out by the “liberal establishment” and “elitist black people” so she can establish her credentials as a “poor white centrist maverick”. If the party continues to avoid giving her the boot, I think we’ll see this temper tantrum continue through November, complete with constant attacks on Obama and praise for McCain. I even expect her name to be on the ticket as an Independent, “in protest of the unethical and fraudulent Democratic primary process”.
Great insight. Yes. Her political future does depend on this narrative. And she will cultivate this narrative no matter the facts. So we best get used to dealing with another Joe Lieberman in the Senate. I reserve the right to kick her out of the party later but right now I just want the best outcome for Obama. In my mind, this means her taking her fight to the convention and her losing. The increased drama of a convention fight will bring more attention but lo and behold, it will be a tame affair. She will finally concede during the convention. This actually helps Obama more than it would if the elders pushed Clinton out before the convention.
But I don’t think she goes as far as you suggest. I really don’t see her name on a ticket as an Independent. For the same reason McCain never took that plunge. She’s better off cultivating this ‘maverick” image like you say and further buttressing her white Appalachian blue collar bona fides from the Senate. Get back to me next year. Kicking Clinton out of the Democratic party may be one of my main goals.
It’s a pickle. But practically speaking, how does she continue a fight after the convention? If she goes to war against the Democratic nominee, she is taking a huge gamble. I just see it being hugely impractical for her to do this outside of the Democratic establishment.
“She doesn’t care about the party she cares about herself. The question now is how does Obama deal with this reality. And I give him an A for how he is dealing with it so far.”
agreed.
l think at the end of they day, even with a contentious convention fight over credentials, obama get the nomination and destroys mccain in the GE.
the people have already spoken, and they have said they want change. whether the change embodied in the obama candidacy comes to fruition depends in large part on a massive turn out and rejection of the status quo.
the undercurrent of change in this country is as strong today as it was in the late 60’s, early 70’s.
the clinton’s are going to take this all the way to the convention, imo. the fact that obama has begun to campaign overtly against st. john the equivocator, is a sign that they are confident of the outcome.
That’s a scary comparison. The Republicans used their own whipped up hysteria as a justification for firing U.S. Atty. McKay. The voter fraud myth lives on with the lower echelon of the party even though it was used as a pretext to justify disenfranchisement efforts by Rove, et al. I hope that there will be some way for Clinton to extricate herself from her own web of canards, otherwise her only way of saving face will be to escalate the ruse.
My only solution is to provide them with a noble alternative story for leaving the race. The obvious ones seem appropriate, but do these previously fantastic justifications for staying in the race require an equally fantastic justification for bowing out? If canards were required to stay in, is a canard required to get out? Sticking with the original story has a virtue in that you never have to explain why were wrong — (just look at the Bush administration’s justification for the war).
Of course, tailoring the message to the audience is nothing new. But making two opposite arguments wouldn’t fall under that heading. Logic no longer applies here, and hasn’t for some time. Desperation will tend to do that to you.
With a flick of the wrist she can get all her mesmerized supporters behind Obama. Will she? Her last chance is right after June 4. Otherwise she and her family are irredeemable. She gives the impression that she has worked her way into a corner and feels she can come out with any personal sense of dignity and esteem only by blowing up the works. No matter what, the primaries have turned out tearing the Clintons to shreds. Well maybe not quite that, but they have certainly demonstrated that the Clintons have been widely overestimated up to recently.
got the same email. And after all these months I finally got around to hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom of the mail. Feel so much better now.
The Clintons are doing everything they can to trash the Democratic party, creating riffs where there were none , trying to branding Obama as the elite sexist , making appeals to race based voting more acceptable and the list goes on .
They are despicable .
Follow the $109 million. Look at all the trade deals. Bill and Hillary were never really Democrats. They are in place to do exactly what they’ve done.