On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Well if that's really what's she's planning, that's the best reason yet
>> for people to ask her to drop out. That'd be the Samson solution to
>> her problems. She'd bring the house down on everybody's head. It
>> makes perfect sense for people in there to yell at her not to.
>
> But she's ahead now in the polls and there are more primaries ahead. Why
> should BHO be the presumptive nominee, other than because you like him
> better?
Hey, waitasecond -- mine was an If-Then statement. I'm not asking her to step down. She can campaign until the end as far I'm concerned and good luck to her. I have no anti-Hillary animus at all.
My point above was simply that the general understanding of most voters is that the person who wins the most delegates duing the primary season, in the primaries and caucuses, is the legitimate winner. And that this general sense will be outraged if the "legitimate" winner is overthrown by superdelegates or by seating disqualified delegations. Which would destroy the party's campaign chances.
In that universe of choices, nothing would be worse than her trying to win by such means.
But I could be wrong about that in two ways. I could be wrong in my judgment that this is the general governing understanding of what counts as a legitimate victory. (BTW, my understanding is that it's not only Obama partisans who think this way, but that the majority of primary voters, including the majority of the ones who voted for Clinton, will feel queasy and weird if she wins this way).
And I could be right in that judgment, but wrong in my implicit assumption that you can't argue that mass of people out of this conviction. Clearly some people are already trying to do just that on the grounds that caucuses are fishy votes (which they are) and that their delegates shouldn't be counted as equal to primary votes (which is what most of the popular vote argument amounts to -- not counting caucuses). And that if we do count caucus votes, then we shouldn't regard lobbying superdelegates and maneuvering to seat disqualified delegations as beyond the pale because that's just another species of caucusing.
I don't think this will succeed. But I don't pretend to be a sage, and I fully grant that if you guys succeed, my if-then statement will be wrong: there will be nothing wrong with winning that way Iff it doesn't outrage most people.
But just to be clear, is that what you're arguing? That she can win this way and not outrage so many people that she fatally weakens herself?
Because to argue over whether it's fair in the abstract seems kind of pointless. In the abstract of course it is. In the abstract, every aggressive gaming of electoral rules can be justified. The only real barrier to political maneuvering is whether it outrages people or not.
Now personally, I think most of the arguments now being put forth by the Clinton camp are a classical case of exactly the kind of special pleading I earlier said that every losing candidate engages in when the margin of error is less than the margin of fishy votes. If Obama was behind I would expect him to be engaging in a complementary version of it.
That is, if the math was closer, and Hillary could reasonably hope by the end of the season to edge him out in elected delegates (which would leave the party in exactly the same quandary that it is in now, just with the parties reversed), Obama's complimentary whine would go something like this:
1) the reason she's behind in caucus votes is because she made a strategic decision not to target them and to concentrate all of her resources on primaries:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/05/AR2008030503621_pf.html
which was a stupid decision to be ashamed of, and not something to brag about. It's why she ran out of money, and why she's behind -- caucus votes cost less per vote. Rather than a testament to her popularity, it's a refutation of the idea that she's a great manager and problem solver. On the contrary, her campaign staff seems like exhibit A for the argument that her only experience is the experience of managerial dysfunction. She's got all the divisiveness of her husband's stuff had plus one more huge problem he didn't have -- him, flapping like a ominous unmoored barn door in the wind. The clash between their staffs will only get worse when their staffs get bigger.
2) The main reason she's ahead in primary votes and big states is because she got them on Super Tuesday which was wildly rigged in her favor, so much so that it was supposed to decide the contest. If those states had been spaced out as in any normal year, Obama probably would have won more of them (which is precisely why they weren't). To brag that she won more big states is to spin a huge defeat. The big ones were the only ones she held onto because there was too little time to turn around big states. She basically lost everything that wasn't nailed down.
In short, she's behind not because the system was rigged against her, but because she ran such an incompetent campaign and was such a weak candidate that she couldn't even win with a system that was rigged expressly for her.
Etc.
But *my* main point is: the party's got a classical problem that requires a good trick to solve: the margin of victory is smaller than the slush pond of fishy votes. Which is to say, it's a political dead heat. Which means you haven't got a legitimate victor.
Superdelegates could be used to solve that problem -- to inflate the margin in a way that doesn't outrage anyone -- but only if they vote for the winner in the simple conventional sense. Then the little legitimacy of that small margin would be padded by votes that would be legitimate precisely because they ratified it -- and voila, you get a large margin of legitimacy and an unquestioned victor.
But if you spend your superdelegate option on something else -- if you make them into another caucus -- then you won't have solved the original problem of having no legitimate winner. What you'll have done instead is created vast new pools of fishy votes -- and delegitimated your victor instead of legitimating them.
But of course I could be too clever by half.
And maybe there's another legitimating trick you could use in place of them I haven't thought of. Like some way you could convince the loser to be Veep.
But like I always say, nobody's paying me to guess ahead of time. I'm perfectly happy to wait and see what happens.
Michael