It appears that Hillary Clinton is still running for president, still delegitimizing the process, and still engaging in delusional math. It’s irresponsible for her to lead her supporters on like this. It’s irresponsible to raise false questions about the legitimacy of the process. And it is just one more example of how she is making it harder for the party to come together. She needs to let it go.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Me thinks Jeralyn made notes backwards. Hasn’t HRC been saying the map is more important than the math? As in, the states she’s won are more important?
And where did she come up with 313 electoral votes? Does that count all the delegates from MI and FL like Obama doesn’t get any of them?
I am fed up with delusional Hillary maniacs. Can’t they read the news and compare it to what their great leader tells them?
But if what she posted is anything like what I’ve seen elsewhere, it’s the height of delusion. The thing that kills me how they get the electoral votes. Some of it seems based on the primary vote, and some seem based on internal polls. Fair enough, but they can’t say “Clinton will win Oklahoma because she won it in the primary and turn turn around and scoff, “Do you really believe Obama’s gonna win Mississippi or Idaho just because he won it in the primary?”
It’s crazy talk.
I’m looking at numbers. Over a million people vote for ONE Democratic candidate vs. the few hundred thousand who voted for all the GOP candidates combined. If those numbers hold, and I don’t say they will, but what’s not to say that any Democratic candidate would win those states?
“The thing that kills me how they get the electoral votes. “
Obviously they’re from the “When all else fails, pull the numbers out of your ass” school of thought.
The problem here is that Dem turnout is so much higher than GOP turnout that whoever gets the nomination is basically the next president (it reminds me of Philly mayoral races, but I digress).
Which explains why they’ll say and do anything to get the nomination, all the while claiming it’s the other guy doing the disenfranchising. Slimeballs.
Because McCain is the undisputed GOP nominee, don’t you think most Repubs wouldn’t bother voting in their primary. They’d all sit home saying to themselves, “I’ll wait til Novemeber when it will count.” I don’t think we should underestimate the potential in the GE. Afterall, a helleva lot of fools voted for Bush. Twice. We can all hope they’ve learned their lesson but I don’t think we can count on it.
And I should have clarified that I was looking at numbers up until Feb. 5th. After that, I expect low turnout. But look at those early states. I’m blanking on the state, but it was a state on Super Tuesday that Obama lost. He still got more votes than the GOP candidates combined and at that time they had no clear winner.
But by the same measure, look at the proportion of GOP voters showing up to cast protest votes for Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee last week in WV. McCain won, but with only 76% of the vote, which I think is pretty amazing for the same reasons you’ve mentioned: it’s already been decided, why waste the gas driving to the polls?
I don’t know how happy those folks will be to vote for McCain in the fall either…but who knows?
I am wondering how many of the folks over there are really Republican trolls just trying to egg people on. It is certainly the case that many of the people there are legitimate Clinton supporters.
Hillary and Bill think they need to remain relevant as they lose control of the Party. To do so they need to create uncertainty – change the rules and move the goal post. They’ll arrive at the Convention seeking a salute.
Al Giordano’s got a great post up today to help the recovering Hillaryites back to the real world. Worth a read.
And how to square it with things like this and this that suggest she’s throwing in the towel? I think clearly she isn’t giving up even if her rhetoric has changed. She’s going to keep pursuing it to the very last with everything she can use, right up to the last minute and to the last dollar she can drum up. No one should be deceived by all these dissections of what went wrong or by the milder tone, which is purely tactical, to keep from forcing the SDs to declare for Obama to halt the damage she was doing.
The assumption in the media and the blogs that the race is over is premature, and dangerous. All these calls for unity and reaching out to Clinton supporters lately are meant well, and important in the long term, but the fight is still on. I have great respect for Sen. Clinton’s will to win and I’m not as sanguine as some are like you that this is completely delusional. It may be harmful to the party for her to keep pressing on, harmful to our chances in November, but the fact is, she may yet still be successful if she pursues this to the convention, particularly as the GOP ramps up its attacks on Obama between now and then. Calling it delusional and impossible even at this point is simply a narrative to help make Obama the inevitable choice. One should never make the mistake that the Clinton campaign did about inevitability and fall for one’s own spin.
i’m not spinning anything.
All the same, saying it’s impossible for Hillary to win now because of the math and that it’s delusional for her to continue is a double-edged sword. It’s dangerous to take your eye off the ball before the game is actually over. It isn’t over until only one of them is left standing. And that hasn’t happened yet.
Miracles are for Angels and Hillary is no angel.
Obama has 1904.5 delegates to Hillary’s 1718.5. meaning after the Edwards endorsement 8 of his pledged delegates moved to Obama.
Obama now needs only 17 pledged delegates for a majority with a total 120.5 delegates to clinch the nomination.
It’s over. Insurmountable. May 20 is the party.
Hillary is staying in because it gives her grand-standing rights at the Convention. Selfish.
Good she’s being ignored.
We’ll see the outcome of the Rules and By-Laws Committee meeting on May 31,
Just don’t assume that unlikely equals impossible. There’s that thing called hubris. Even with the odds so against her at this point her tenacity and wiliness should not be underestimated.
On the one hand you don’t want to give her credibility by pushing back too hard, but on the other hand no one should be ignoring the fact that she’s still fighting on, making her pitch to the SDs and building her pv totals, with some big wins yet to be racked up. Her arguments may be specious, but she’s still making them, and she shouldn’t be counted out until she’s really out. There’s been a bit too much Obama-oriented triumphalism lately for my taste. I think it’s premature and frankly a bit dangerous if everyone just moves on to the GE fight and forgets the one that isn’t finished yet.
Who’s engaging in hubris? OK, people like us are, but you know what? It’s safe for us to do so because nobody listens to people like us. I can sit here and proclaim that the race is over, Obama won, the whole nine yards, and it won’t make a bit of difference either way. Tim Russert can say the race is over, and OK, more people listen to him, but that still isn’t all that important.
What’s important is that I’ll bet you anything you care to bet that Barack Obama is still working hard for votes, courting superdelegates, working the bylaws and credentials committees, and taking nothing for granted. Yes, his tone has shifted to where he’s running against John McCain now. He can do that because it would take a complete overturning of the results of the primaries for Clinton to be declared the nominee, and if that happens frankly the Democrats’ nominee would be the least of their worries. And he can do that precisely because he is working so hard to wrap this thing up even tighter than it is.
If you thought what you had to say had no effect on anyone or anything why would you bother? The effects may be minimal, commenters being the lowest form of blog life, but the effects are something, and they’re unpredictable. The campaigns wouldn’t be bothering with bloggers if they thought they had no effect.
CW is shaped by simple repetition. The CW narrative of who’s winning and who can win in November is the battleground now. It’s what the decision of the SDs will hinge on to decide the race, nothing more substantial, and the Clinton campaign is still busy shaping it even while we scoff at their math. All I’m saying is don’t get too complacent that it’s over, there may be some surprises ahead.
Because every so often, I turn out to be wrong in that opinion.
HRC’s campaign is dead as the barn mouse cornered by two barn cats out back.
Hillary already gave her concession speech. Did you miss it? Now it’s called the looooooong farewell.
Jeralyn, ‘small tent democrat’ (aka Armando), the self-described “shrill” Corrente, and last and least eripostal and Turkana at the Left Coaster, all spew the same nonsense while pretending to be neutral.
Obama supporters who have the guts to post online are derided as “idiots”, “Obamabots”, naive, “followers of the Dear Leader” (or “Precious”), misogynists, ad nauseum. I have never seen this level of vitriol in a Democratic primary. Certainly their is pro-Obama bias in dKos and elsewhere; but objectively, is it this negative?
All I can hope is that the “delusional” Clintonistas are small in number and not representative of Democrat voters, especially women.
We have enough to worry about in the GE, e.g. Bush’s comments about Obama as an “appeasor of terrorists”, McCain’s “concerns” about Obama’s former pastor, and Huckabee’s insinuation today that Obama was shot at.
I’m not worried if the fight continues on its current course between Obama and Bush/McCain. Regardless of my being annoyed with Obama over his statements on Iran (on its nonexistent nukes program) and Hamas — I favor sitting down and talking with both, and I hope he’ll get back to that — it’s clear to me that Obama won the first skirmish of the general election handily.
Seems pretty clear to the press, too.
At this point I think we should just ignore them. We all know Obama will be the nominee. Bush knows, McCain knows it, the press knows it.
They have their little alternate universe, it has no relation to the real world and their bleating will not affect the outcome. Let them waste their time.
Turning this topic on its head somewhat, what’s most apparent is the proliferation of bizarre theories employed by Clinton supporters to ‘explain’ the unthinkable idea that people could actually choose Obama over Clinton.
Despite the fertile ground that exists for the various social psychological effects to take root in the thought processes of Clinton supporters, I can’t help but wonder if someone is aiding the cause. I’m not merely stating the obvious, since we know about the agitprop techniques in use by some in the political sphere, but the prevalence of pop psychological explanations for Obama’s support strike me as odd.
It could be said that we’re doing the same thing now, by using psycho-pathological explanations for Clinton support, but some of these theories are so over-the-top and strange as to be unrecognizable.
I recall reading about Sydney Blumenthal’s “liberal guilt” explanation for Obama’s support. Apparently, I’m so neurotic about the legacy of slavery that I need a compensatory mechanism to assuage my guilt. Of course, Blumenthal’s position with the Clinton campaign explains his fondness for psycho-babble explaining Obama’s support, but his tendency to use right-wing sources to spread his malicious propaganda is no less heinous.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/sidney-blumenthal-uses-fo_b_99695.html
I could go on but I think I’ll save my thoughts for a more extensive posting in my diary. However, there is one more article that illustrates the method of the smear as well as the utter lack of integrity by a Clinton supporter.
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/04/obamas-believer.html
The author of the above OpEd, Mary Zeiss Stange, is an assistant professor of Feminist and Religous studies at Skidmore college in the state of New York, and we can quite safely assume that she’s a Clinton supporter, which is why she’s so willing to sacrifice any professional standing she may have to provide an academic gloss to the cult explanation for Obama’s support.
One thing a lot of people are missing is that the delusions are actively encouraged by the Clinton campaign. One of its strengths (and Obama’s weaknesses) is in its blogger outreach. Every day HillaryHub links to SusanUnPC, Jeralyn, Alegre, and other pro-Clinton blogs. There are conference calls where the bloggers pick up their talking points.
It’s true that Hillary Hub has a disclaimer saying that external sites don’t represent the opinion of Clinton’s campaign, but that’s not a persuasive argument for me. The fact of the matter is that Clinton’s Internet team, led by Peter Daou, is encouraging Clinton supporters to feed at the trough of the smear merchants at No Quarter & Talk Left.
I’m still confident that Clinton will eventually concede before the convention, but as someone upthread pointed out, she’s got her work cut out to reign in this beast she’s created.
than money and when a certain campaign is 20 mil in debt and over half is owed to that campaigner personally, one sticks around for a deal that will include some if not all of that debt to be paid off. Sickening but true.
Has anyone even stopped to think for two seconds about the millions being spent on this campaign, on both sides? Think of all the people that could have given health care to.
Americans spend almost $1 billion per month on video games…
Astonishing…