“I'll never be equipped to handle failure. I'll come in kicking, screaming, throwing stuff, cussing and breaking stuff. I don't handle failure well at all."
Initially I welcomed the vetting of the fresh, young Senator from Illinois but after several weeks of bloodshed, some alarming trends have emerged. What was good political fun quickly became the "silly season of politics" and has hit rock bottom as a knock down, drag out fight leaving the presumptive nominee bloodied. When the Clinton campaign announced that they intended to throw "The kitchen sink, table and chairs" at Barack Obama prior to the March 4th primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island, they should have at least introspectively considered that it was (as brought to my attention by a clever commenter over at HuffPo) from "the deck of the Titanic." The delegate and popular vote math is more than daunting for Senator Clinton and has been since Wisconsin. None of her recent wins have put a dent in the numbers that painted Obama a winner more than a month ago.
Recent smears including the 3am ad, commander-in-chief readiness, NAFTA-gate, Samantha Power & Jeremiah Wright were intended to strengthen Senator Clinton's chances to win the Democratic nomination. Pollster's National Democratic polls and trending shows that these attacks have helped little to none. She has made slight gains among the electorate while Obama's numbers have grown steadily.
Despite lackluster gains in the primary race, her recent attacks have had a dramatic effect on the national electorate in theoretical general election match-ups against John McCain.
Senator Obama's support against McCain in the general election has weakened while Senator Clinton's has grown sharply in recent weeks. What can be ruled out is that public opinion has shifted to consider Mrs. Clinton the better opponent to John McCain. If that were the case, we'd see weakening support for Senator Obama in the primary polls, a hint that Democratic voters would prefer her to run against John McCain. What Senator Clinton has successfully done is weaken support for Mr. Obama among voters that aren't already part of his core constituency, voters that will play a decisive roll in November's election -- most likely independents and crossovers. So, instead of increasing her chances of winning the nomination, she has weakened Senator Obama's chances of winning the general election.
I know, you know and anyone that spends five minutes pecking away at the Slate Delegate Calculator knows that Senator Clinton has no chance in hell of closing the gap among pledged delegates. She would need to win 65-70% of the remaining pledged delegates to do so. So why has she been allowed to remain in the race given her actions and the damage she's caused to the Democratic Party's chances in November? Some would argue that she has a better chance of catching Senator Obama in the popular vote thus staging the argument of what's more important -- the delegate count or the popular vote. Given the 2000 Supreme Court fiasco, such an argument would gain traction among most American voters. Unfortunately, with 77% of the electorate having already cast their votes and Obama's popular vote lead of 700,000+ (courtesy of realclearpolitics.com; don't get your tally from hillaryclinton.com, her campaign excludes caucus votes), Mrs. Clinton would need to soak up 58.2% of the remaining votes to match his number.
So if she can't catch Senator Obama in pledged delegates or the popular vote, why are we still grinding this ax? The only elephant left in the room is the looming chance of re-votes in Florida and Michigan. Including those voters and delegates decreases Mrs. Clinton's needed margin among pledged delegates by roughly 5% and by 2% of the popular vote. Bottom line -- even with re-votes in FL and MI, Senator Clinton would need to secure 56% of the popular vote in remaining states to have one leg of an argument to stand on. Given all this, why hasn't Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean stepped in to stop the bloodshed and offer the Democratic party a chance at victory in November? Because they and the DNC would be buried up to their necks in civil litigation until the next election cycle, ensuring a Democratic defeat if this contest is shut down while one iota of a chance remains that Hillary Clinton can make a miraculous comeback. So unless someone at the DNC grows some balls, calls her on her bluff and endorses Senator Obama, we're stuck fighting this fight until the convention. Our only hope is that he can rebound in the 5 months between the final primary contest and the general election.
If a closed-door threat to sue all involved parties over a 'prematurely' terminated primary race did indeed occur, I will give Howard Dean, the DNC and remaining un-pledged super delegates the benefit of the doubt, as she may not be bluffing. Given her actions throughout this campaign that wouldn't surprise me one bit. It seems Hillary Clinton hates failure as much as Keith Foulke. If, by some act of god, she is successful in all this, she very well may be the next President of the United States. I'll have to bite my tongue and vote for her. If she isn't, she will have destroyed the Clinton name and would be lucky to win re-election for her senate seat in New York. If she loses the nomination and Senator Obama isn't able to rebound in national polls and ultimately loses the presidency, a strong case can be made to blame her for the foil. If that happens, god forbid, a concerted grassroots effort should be made to sue her to the gates of hell. I'd love to see Slick Willy's dubious Dubai millions go to child health care. Wouldn't that be poetic justice?
7 comments:
It does seem that Ms. Clinton is holding out hope when there's nothing left to hold on to. However, it can't be worse than Mr. Paul withdrawing a couple weeks ago. What was going through his mind? Can't be much, obviously. At least a debatable nomination running through to the convention will make for a raucous party and will definitely create an economic boom for Denver. Are you working the show?
Jigsaw Dust
Oh, and for some reason, I'm still thinking it'll be a landslide against McCain, any way it breaks down.
Jeff! Long time no talk, kind sir! I'm excited you have a blog; expect comments from me soon. About the convention, I may be a delegate come August. I won elections at my precinct caucus and county convention to be a delegate to the state convention on May 17th. If I win there, I will go to beautiful Denver as a national delegate for Barack Obama representing the state of Colorado! We'll see. I'm running a tough campaign. I've started smearing opponents recently; I've got a PI digging up fodder for blackmail as we speak. As per Paul, I liked him in the race, although he was far too fringe to push his party's discussion in a much needed direction. And, come November, I hope you're right, sir. I hope you're right.
I found a very pertinent article championing journalistic efforts that have a transparent bias in Time: http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1722047,00.html
Also, Hilary is probably banking on Michigan and Florida coming through. The PA and NJ guvs said they would foot half of the bill to redo the FL and MI primaries - both of them are H-Rod supporters. hmmmmm?
I'm back, and I stole your initial scheme.
I believe this quote adequately sums up the argument -- "If a tech writer told you he had no preference between Macs and PCs and chose not to use a computer in the interest of impartiality, you would rightly consider him an idiot. But politics is not consumer journalism, right? Right—it's more important, and transparency in it is more essential." Thanks for the link brutha, impeccable as always.
you're such a d. head
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