Democrats: Having It One Way and the Other
Thursday June 5, 2008
In her excellent blog post, "Media Declare Obama the Democratic Nominee," US Politics Guide Kathy Gill writes that the network news anchors may have jumped the gun Tuesday night when they annointed Barack Obama with the mantle of "nominee" when Hillary Clinton hadn't quite left the altar.
With Clinton's decision to wrap up her campaign on Saturday, it doesn't matter much, but Gill's comments got me thinking nonetheless.
From her post:
Pledged delegates are determined by caucus and primary votes in each state; they are "pledged" to vote for their candidate only on the first round of voting at the convention. Sen. Hillary Clinton has 1636.5 pledged delegates. However, the magic number to secure the nomination is 2,117.Obama's supporters remain stalwart in their collective opinion that the Democratic primary season vote was "democratized," and rank-and-file Democrats in every US state and territory were considered important to the process and allowed to fully participate in it.
Obama can be called the winner based only on public statements made by unpledged (soft) super-delegates -- delegates who are bound only by their conscience. There are 823.5 super-delegate votes; 400-or-so have publicly endorsed Obama and 280-or-so have publicly endorsed Clinton. Some have reportedly been subjected to pressure to cast their votes to Obama.
What's interesting is that if the Democrats had a winner-take-all system like the Republicans, Clinton would be in the winner's circle today.
The fact, however is that the Democratic National Committee "politicized" the process rather than "democratizing" it and handed Obama his nomination on a silver platter, rather than bowing to the will of its own rank-and-file voters and awarding the nomination to the candidate who actually won their elections. How can "residents of every state appropriately feel like an integral part of the process" (as one Democrat told me) when their party leaders have basically ignored their wishes and nominated the candidate they wanted regardless of the actual votes?
Just after the votes were counted Tuesday night, I heard a Democratic pundit on MSNBC say, "Who cares what the popular vote was? It doesn't matter. All that matters is that Barack Obama won." I never thought I'd hear a Democrat say that -- especially not after the debacle in Florida in 2000. How can Obama win if he didn't really win?! It didn't make any sense to me, and it still doesn't. Hillary must be muttering what Al Gore muttered in 2000 when he stopped his attorneys from pursuing further action in the Florida courts: "I can't win. Even if I win, I can't win."
With or without the DNC's politicizing, Clinton overcame her negatives by enough of a margin to make it a close race (too close to call, in my opinion), and either way you look at it, her negatives were sufficiently neutralized -- at least to a majority of rank-and-file Democrats, anyway.
Still, I can't seem to get the 2000 election out of my mind. It seems as though this election and that election ultimately boiled down to the same thing. The only difference is this election couldn't be litigated as the one in Florida could. If it were able to be litigated, I have little doubt that the country would be riveted right now as it watched Obama and Clinton engage in the throes of a bitter lawsuit. In case you're wondering, Obama would be the one fighting the recount.
My point in bringing up the 2000 election in relation to this year's Democratic primary is that they both represent (to me, anyway) a scenario that undermines the DNC’s complicated delegate process. Here they are in 2000 saying “Al Gore won the popular vote and should be president,” and over here, it’s 2008, and they’re saying “Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but shouldn’t be the nominee.” It should be one way or the other.
For Democrats, it's one way and the other.
Comments
Obama did not get the Democratic nomination fair and square. It was a rigged nomination for Obama. Sen. Clinton never stood a chance of winning the nomination. This was indicated by the sabotaging early calls for her to drop out and ended with almost all of the sabotaging, uncommitted superdelegates, showing no integrity, endorsing Obama. OBAMA GOT THE NOMINATION BECAUSE OF A RIGGED, CORRUPT DEMOCRATIC PARTY.
Hillary Clinton supporters should work for Obama’s resounding defeat and vote for McCain. I will volunteer and vote for McCain in a swing state.
The pro-Obama biased media simply reflected the rigged innards of the Democratic Party against Sen. Clinton.
A crushing defeat is needed to repudiate the rigged, corrupt Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party is in need of radical reform with the elimination of the superdelegates, the caucuses, and the proportional allocation system.
You can’t agree to one set of rules and later claim that if the rules were different, you would have won, so you’re the rightful winner. Obama’s strategy was determined by the rules: if the rules had been different, he’d have taken up a different strategy. He’d have left his name on the Michigan ballot, he’d have campaigned there and in Florida to cut into the advantage in name recognition she enjoyed coming in. To say Hillary beat Obama in parts of the elections he did not contest would be like saying Coke beat Pepsi in a taste test where they forgot to taste any Pepsi.
Justin, you make a great point when you mention that Clinton would have won if it was a winner-take-all system. What really killed her were the caucuses, and I think that fact is going to harm the Dems in the general election. Activists are usually the ones who participate in caucuses, so instead of choosing the moderate candidate (Clinton), they voted for the bleeding heart partisan liberal (Obama) who will have a harder time connecting to moderates.
I don’t get this blog entry at all. Obama won the popular vote. Any claim to the contrary is just Clintonista propaganda. They conveniently fail to count the caucus states, i.e. the states where Obama dominated, not to mention Michigan where most of the “uncommitted” votes were clearly Obama votes since he left his name off the ballot while the corrupt Clinton kept hers on despite her pledge that MI wouldn’t count. I also don’t see how the DNC “handed Obama his nomination on a silver platter”. He won a majority of the pledged delegates!!
Kathy Gill’s blog entry is also Clinton biased. Who can say what would have happened if the rules had been different? Obama obviouly would have adopted a different strategy. One thing the campaign highlighted was Obama’s superiority as a political strategist.
Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal wrote a great article the other day, congratulating Democrats on rejecting Clintonism: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121269958227749853.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
She wrote: “They threw off the idea that corruption is part of the game, an acceptable fact.”
I find it very unsettling that there were many conservatives who quietly rooted for Hillary during the Democratic primary season, more concerned with what was going on in Obama’s church than the corruption that was going on during the Clintons’ public lives over the past quarter century.
I won’t be voting for Obama in November, but I certainly join Noonan in congratulating the Democrats on finally ending the Clinton plague.
YOU WISH!