O.K., I'm gonna give it to you straight, fellow Obama supporters. It ain't pretty.

AnarchoFreeThinker

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Fri May-16-08 10:47 AM
Original message

O.K., I'm gonna give it to you straight, fellow Obama supporters. It ain't pretty.

Despite the automatic fundraiser she is for the GOP, despite being a one-woman GOP GOTV, despite the strangulation it would mean of Obama's message about new politics, despite that video clip to be played on continuous loop on MSM of her endorsement of McCain's credentials at the expense of Obama's, despite the alienation of some of his African American base, despite her credibility problems and republican-symapthetic senate votes and her husband's baggage and pending court case, despite all this Hillary Clinton is going to be Barack Obama's VP, unless she decides otherwise.

Why? Her campaign's meme about popular vote has stuck and stuck hard. It actually seems like a real argument to the MSM. On its surface--and let's be honest, the surface is where MSM lives--it seems like a democratic argument. The people should decide, after all. Why shouldn't most of them have their way? Yes, it makes absolute sense. And, I think most of us here would prefer a process that dumps delegates of all kinds in favor of a popular vote total deciding who gets the nomination. But this, of course, has nothing to do with the rules in place.

Pledged delegates determined the strategies both campaigns put in place, and the Obama campaign designed such a groundbreakingly effective strategy to cop delegates that it even won a huge state, TX, while losing the popular vote there. Were they intent on capturing the popular vote totals, they would have run up the score in Illinois, poured it on in Mississippi, funneled dollar over dollar to Alabama, etc. etc etc etc, to milk every last vote, even if not a cost-effective way to affect the proportional allocation of a handful of more pledged delegates. But the Obama camp efficiently maximized its pledged delegate totals instead of its popular vote totals, and now is assured of the Democratic nomination. The supers have never failed to ratify the party's pledged delegate leader, and of course Obama already leads in supers, too.

But the popular vote meme, however disingenuous, has stuck. It's a product of effective communication, even if it's born out of desperation and self-interest. But the fact remains that it's stuck. But isn't Obama ahead in popular vote? Yes, easily ahead, by just under 600K votes, omitting of course the primaries that don't count. Throw in the reweighting of caucus states as hypothtical primary states and throw in actual vote estimates from caucus states that did not report them, and Obama is up by a couple million votes at least. At a minimum, Real Clear Politics has him up over 700K with caucus actual votes estimated and included (but not with those states weighted as if they'd been primary states, which, again, would've put him up by much more.)

But none of that matters to the MSM. All that matters is the recorded actual vote totals when discussing The Popular Vote, and credit the Clinton campaign for its successful planting of this additional notion: that the primaries that don't count actually should count when we're talking about vote totals. Really, it's not that much of a stretch once you get the rules out of the way to shape the rest of the discussion. Once delegates are discarded, it doesn't matter if a state is allocated any delegates or not when talking about The Popular Vote. And so we add Florida to the mix, where both candidates were "on the ballot," and Obama's lead shrinks to just under 300K. And what the hell, one candidate was on the ballot in Michigan, too. (This, by the way, has been masterfully framed by the Clinton camp as a "political" decision of Obama's to remove his name from the ballot there, when, of course, it was the coldest of premeditated political calculations that saw Clinton keep her name ON the ballot there.) Again, remember, the rules are long out the window anyway at this point. Delegates are done. We're measuring popular vote and popular vote only, regardless of party rules and pre-signed agreements. Kudos to the Clinton camp for so successfully placing such a perverse argument into the MSM, which now only rather sheepishly challenges the Clinton camp's rigging of the popular vote totals to make Clinton and only Clinton the popular vote leader by 17K.

Now....just to recap: none of the above can result in Clinton garnering the nomination. The specious popular vote argument only politically buys her the "right" to keep campaigning. But, in my opinion, also will buy her a massive measure of clout and consideration for the VP slot, despite the fact that the very reason she must resort to this argument indicates a THE COLOSSAL STRATEGIC FAILURE of her campaign, calls into question her ability to use and allocate resources, and reveals her utter mismanagement of a large-scale operation. Regardless, in the end, she will have more popular votes almost certainly by her campaign's measurement of those votes and the MSM's regurgitation of those numbers. Obama will blow her out in OR, lose in KY, win Montana and South Dakota, and lose electoral giant/GE-nonfactor Puerto Rico. By Tuesday he will easily have accumulated the majority of pledged delegates, and it's possible the supers will put him officially over the top for the nomination before all the votes are counted June 3.

In my opinion, the Obama campaign ought to present to the rules committee a plan to pay for revotes in FL and MI. Clinton can't compete in either state. She's broke, he's flush. The bogus popular vote totals would be wiped away and replaced with actual vote totals. The actual delegate breakdowns wouldn't hurt him in a real vote that is sanctioned by the party. Nobody gets disenfranchised, and the matter goes away. Chances for this must be less than slim, yet for about the price of buying out the Clinton camp's debt he could campaign in both states and end the false discussion.

But that likely won't happen. Instead, she'll have more popular votes when it's all said and done, according to her, and there will be a major outcry to put her on the ticket. They'll say she's earned the right. It won't matter that she's beholding to Limbaugh for Texas and Indiana and elsewhere for her popular vote lead. It won't matter that popular vote is a metric by which no campaign intentionally played and that no rule sanctioned. The one thing her campaign DID DO effectively was reframe the discussion around that meaningless metric, and now it's going to be damn near impossible to keep her off the ticket, despite the damage it'll do to the Obama campaign.