Thursday, May 22, 2008

Hillary's Mad Dash

hillary's popular vote argument is positively bogus. she's pretending to be a hero for women, acting like she cares about florida and michigan voters, when earlier in the race, when she thought she was THE ONE, she didn't care. why can't people see this? she knows better.
she's adding in florida and michigan votes but both parties--obama and hillary-- agreed not to campaign in those states, so how can they possibly be counted? obama might have even won in michigan.
obama's name wasn't on the ballot in michigan, so she doesn't have anything but a dream. i can't believe she thinks otherwise.
i can't believe that anyone is entertaining her. the clintons may not be in office but they rule the roost. they still have so much control over the democratic party. they need to be shut down.
hillary has no chance of winning but once again, she's exploiting her supporters who think she does.
she's serving no purpose, not even her career.
newsweek goes further in the explanation of why her argument is bogus:
But Clinton has continued with one claim that could have a pernicious effect on the Democrats' chances in November. While she knows that the nomination is determined by delegates, Hillary insists on saying at every opportunity that she is winning the popular vote. And she has now taken to touting the new HBO movie "Recount," which chronicles the Florida fiasco of eight years ago. Everyone can agree that the primary calendar needs reform. But popular-vote pandering is poison for Democrats. For a party scarred by the experience of 2000, when Al Gore received 500,000 more popular votes than George W. Bush but lost the presidency, this argument is sure to make it harder to unite and put bitter feelings aside.

Oh, and it's not true.

Let me go through the numbers without making your head spin.

After Kentucky and Oregon, Obama has an official popular vote lead of 449,486.

This does not include Iowa (where Obama first broke from the pack), Nevada (where Hillary won the popular vote narrowly), Maine (where Obama won easily) or Washington state (another strong Obama state). Why? Because these caucus states don't officially report their popular votes. But if we're going to truly count all the votes, official and nonofficial, as Hillary advocates, you can't very well not include caucus states.

Adding in the unofficial tally from caucus states, as estimated by realclearpolitics.com based on official caucus turnout and the number of local delegates selected at the precinct level, that gives Obama a lead of 559,708.

Now we come to Florida and Michigan, whose popular votes Hillary says should be counted. The argument for counting them is no better than for counting the caucus states (and maybe worse, considering that these states violated party rules by moving their primaries up on the calendar, and no one campaigned there). But for the sake of argument let's count 'em. That gives Hillary a lead of 63,373.

HILLARY WINS POPULAR VOTE!

Not so fast. If the Democratic National Committee completes its expected settlement on May 31, Florida and Michigan will each get half of their votes counted. Translated to popular votes, that would subtract about 325,000 votes from Hillary, putting Obama back into the lead.