On Tuesday, there will be primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. The latest polls show that Obama is up 19 points in Maryland and between 15 and 20 points in Virginia. I assume that people in those two states are all going to be working all day on Tuesday, except of course for the Obama voters. Obama voters don’t work. This allows them to show up at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday for a caucus or at anytime on a Tuesday for a primary. If it weren’t for the fact that Clinton’s supporters have jobs, she would obviously win all these caucuses and primaries. Unfortunately, she has this built in disadvantage which is really very undemocratic.
If Clinton doesn’t want to minimize her losses in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia by suggesting that Obama’s voters are all shiftless losers, she can point to the high number of African-Americans in the Potomac area. Surely if those people had not turned out to vote Clinton would have ‘felt pretty good about’ about her chances.
Look, I understand the necessity to find some kind of excuse to explain why she is losing primaries and caucuses. But disrespecting her opponent’s voters by suggesting there is something wrong with them is not the way to go. If she wins the nomination she is going to need Obama supporters and she simply is not going to get them if she goes around saying that they don’t work.
If she wants to complain about the caucus system she should be explicit and explain why caucuses disenfranchise people that have to work. But to suggest that she is only going to lose today in Washington because her voters have to work and that otherwise she would ‘feel pretty good about’ her chances is incredibly insulting. If she loses today it’s because people preferred Obama. They both knew the process and the rules.
This brings up another point. Some people are getting the vapors over the prospect that superdelegates might decide who the nominee will be. But those are the rules. If Bush had won Florida in 2000 by a decisive and uncontroversial margin, it would have meant nothing that Gore won the popular vote. If the election was decided by the popular vote, both Bush and Gore would have pursued completely different strategies. You have to compete according to the rules. And the popular vote has nothing to do with either the nominating process or the election of the president. Get over it.
