Obama is ahead in delegate count, popular vote, number of states won, (and extremely likely to stay that way through the remaining states … at this point, even if Michigan and Florida are counted as is, with no redo or nothing) and pulling even in superdelegate count… And yet those folks think he’s pulling off some sort of tricksy jedi mind voodoo in convincing us all that he’s wining…
Very odd…
-me
And, just to add to that … even if they were absolutely 100% correct, even if all that pretzelized logic actually made sense … wouldn’t the fact that he’s managed to pull off this feat mean that he’s simply the better politician, and thus the better candidate?
-me
Does the “magic number” go down because of the respective demise of Lantos and Spitzer, or are they replaced? It could be that close if HRC blows out Penn by more than 10%.
And I always thought that the “we create our own reality†mentality was a Bush administration phenomenon. Boy was I wrong.
The hardcore Hillary supporters have been becoming more like the Bushies every day – and this is a prime example of that.
Sad.
Ian – You took the words out of my mouth. The only metric where Clinton has a claim is ‘big states’. But New York & California will go Democratic no matter what, Texas will go Republican. So when you start to analyze the swing states, it’s going to depend on turnout – and Obama has done the most to energize the party since JFK ran against Nixon. Look at HOW Obama has raised more money than Clinton (or McCain); it’s huge numbers of SMALL donations, not the fat cats of the party donating the legal max, as Clinton did so well.
It’s over for Hillary. Now she’s become the champion of gay rights in her efforts to woo Pennsylvanians. She’s repudiated her husbands don’t ask, don’t tell policy for gays in the military as insufficient to their rights Except for a slight caveat of do-ability, she wants to integrate gays into the military. More power to her if she’s sincere, but where does this newfound concern for gays and their plight for social and legal equality come from? Why no expressed concern for gays when she was stumping through the bible belt?
It just seems to me that Hillary will be losing more in potential fodder for the Republican slime machine should she get the nomination, than she could gain from liberal support in the remaining contests to get the nomination. Like at this piont..don’t even touch that issue…unless you’re desperate.
Sorry, I couldn’t read the whole thing. It turned into mush right before my eyes. NBC, Obama News Network. Pahleeze. So when Clinton gets trounced in PA and Obama goes on to win the nomination, do they recommend we vote for McOlderThanDirt, or what??
In order for white people to avoid seeing black people as human, we like to assign all kinds of mysterious attributes to them. They are magical beings possessed of supernatural abilities, not to mention their latent athletic, sexual and musical powers. Just ask Spike Lee.
This reminds me of people calling Karl Rove the genius architect. Gosh – how can we compete with that kind of power?
Yes, the level of vitriol and tortured logic coming from the Hillary supporting side of the left blogosphere has reached the level of parody at times.
Personally, until the hard hitting anti Obama tactics started in the Clinton camp, I thought that the anti-Hillary types were narrow minded and mean spirited. A lot of them are. Now a number of the Hillary supporters have institutionalized that mindset against Obama. Not the blue collar racism of Gerraldine Ferraro but with a sour grapes sense of entitlement.
Initially I liked Chris Dodd, then due to his progressive pro worker platform, John Edwards. Hillary, despite some support from my favorite NY Times columnist, has never been a favorite – largely because she strikes me much as McCain does, a craven opportunist who will say, posture and vote to better her chance of winning. The vote on Iraq was hard to forgive, but the vote empowering the Bush administration to attack Iran by calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization – not so much, the Commander in Chief thing where she put the Republican opponent above the likely Dem – a classic Tonya Harding move, even less so.
Hillary’s main qualification has been her proximity to Bill and frankly he has lost esteem in my eyes during this campaign (and over Rwanda but the entire world shares that one). I’d vote for her over McCain of course, but she has no more qualification nor experience than Obama. They are both more qualified, intelligent and capable than McCain and although not ideal liberals, pretty good liberals are the best we can get elected.
So why do the hard core Hillary supporters feel so cheated. Barack has more votes. If Hillary were leading by the same amount I doubt that we would have the same petulance from his supporters, with the exception of a small percentage of trouble makers that are on both sides. Obama supporters are thrilled and many of us have only taken to donating to his primary since Hillary started to go all Lieberman on us.
For me the weirdest thing about it is… well, the premise. Nevermind the fact that Obama happens to be leading in all the ways Ian mentioned. The title is “When Did The Pledged Delegate Count Become The Holy Grail? How The Obama Camp and NBC Made It So.” Wasn’t it Clinton’s campaign who initially told us to remember the pledged delegate count, because the individual primaries weren’t breaking very well for her?
If I’m misremembering this, please tell me, because I’m confused as hell.
If you take the Talk Left post to its logical conclusion, it says that primaries and caucuses are both meaningless, and it should be entirely up to the inner circle of the party to choose the nominee.
The answer to “When Did The Pledged Delegate Count Become The Holy Grail?” is, whenever it was that the parties decided to hold primaries to determine the nominee.
Ian, Maha, and others have it right. All I can add is just how stupid I consider this whole primary system is. If your going to let each state vote thats one thing, but why add a complex statistical analysis to each states delegate count? What the heck were places like Washington or Texas doing with both elections and caucuses? What on earth is a super delegate? Why can’t this be simpler? Maybe these things should be decided in smoky rooms after all.
Truly, mind-bogglingly amazing…
Obama is ahead in delegate count, popular vote, number of states won, (and extremely likely to stay that way through the remaining states … at this point, even if Michigan and Florida are counted as is, with no redo or nothing) and pulling even in superdelegate count… And yet those folks think he’s pulling off some sort of tricksy jedi mind voodoo in convincing us all that he’s wining…
Very odd…
-me
And, just to add to that … even if they were absolutely 100% correct, even if all that pretzelized logic actually made sense … wouldn’t the fact that he’s managed to pull off this feat mean that he’s simply the better politician, and thus the better candidate?
-me
Does the “magic number” go down because of the respective demise of Lantos and Spitzer, or are they replaced? It could be that close if HRC blows out Penn by more than 10%.
And I always thought that the “we create our own reality†mentality was a Bush administration phenomenon. Boy was I wrong.
The hardcore Hillary supporters have been becoming more like the Bushies every day – and this is a prime example of that.
Sad.
Ian – You took the words out of my mouth. The only metric where Clinton has a claim is ‘big states’. But New York & California will go Democratic no matter what, Texas will go Republican. So when you start to analyze the swing states, it’s going to depend on turnout – and Obama has done the most to energize the party since JFK ran against Nixon. Look at HOW Obama has raised more money than Clinton (or McCain); it’s huge numbers of SMALL donations, not the fat cats of the party donating the legal max, as Clinton did so well.
It’s over for Hillary. Now she’s become the champion of gay rights in her efforts to woo Pennsylvanians. She’s repudiated her husbands don’t ask, don’t tell policy for gays in the military as insufficient to their rights Except for a slight caveat of do-ability, she wants to integrate gays into the military. More power to her if she’s sincere, but where does this newfound concern for gays and their plight for social and legal equality come from? Why no expressed concern for gays when she was stumping through the bible belt?
It just seems to me that Hillary will be losing more in potential fodder for the Republican slime machine should she get the nomination, than she could gain from liberal support in the remaining contests to get the nomination. Like at this piont..don’t even touch that issue…unless you’re desperate.
Sorry, I couldn’t read the whole thing. It turned into mush right before my eyes. NBC, Obama News Network. Pahleeze. So when Clinton gets trounced in PA and Obama goes on to win the nomination, do they recommend we vote for McOlderThanDirt, or what??
In order for white people to avoid seeing black people as human, we like to assign all kinds of mysterious attributes to them. They are magical beings possessed of supernatural abilities, not to mention their latent athletic, sexual and musical powers. Just ask Spike Lee.
This reminds me of people calling Karl Rove the genius architect. Gosh – how can we compete with that kind of power?
Yes, the level of vitriol and tortured logic coming from the Hillary supporting side of the left blogosphere has reached the level of parody at times.
Personally, until the hard hitting anti Obama tactics started in the Clinton camp, I thought that the anti-Hillary types were narrow minded and mean spirited. A lot of them are. Now a number of the Hillary supporters have institutionalized that mindset against Obama. Not the blue collar racism of Gerraldine Ferraro but with a sour grapes sense of entitlement.
Initially I liked Chris Dodd, then due to his progressive pro worker platform, John Edwards. Hillary, despite some support from my favorite NY Times columnist, has never been a favorite – largely because she strikes me much as McCain does, a craven opportunist who will say, posture and vote to better her chance of winning. The vote on Iraq was hard to forgive, but the vote empowering the Bush administration to attack Iran by calling the Iranian Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organization – not so much, the Commander in Chief thing where she put the Republican opponent above the likely Dem – a classic Tonya Harding move, even less so.
Hillary’s main qualification has been her proximity to Bill and frankly he has lost esteem in my eyes during this campaign (and over Rwanda but the entire world shares that one). I’d vote for her over McCain of course, but she has no more qualification nor experience than Obama. They are both more qualified, intelligent and capable than McCain and although not ideal liberals, pretty good liberals are the best we can get elected.
So why do the hard core Hillary supporters feel so cheated. Barack has more votes. If Hillary were leading by the same amount I doubt that we would have the same petulance from his supporters, with the exception of a small percentage of trouble makers that are on both sides. Obama supporters are thrilled and many of us have only taken to donating to his primary since Hillary started to go all Lieberman on us.
For me the weirdest thing about it is… well, the premise. Nevermind the fact that Obama happens to be leading in all the ways Ian mentioned. The title is “When Did The Pledged Delegate Count Become The Holy Grail? How The Obama Camp and NBC Made It So.” Wasn’t it Clinton’s campaign who initially told us to remember the pledged delegate count, because the individual primaries weren’t breaking very well for her?
If I’m misremembering this, please tell me, because I’m confused as hell.
If you take the Talk Left post to its logical conclusion, it says that primaries and caucuses are both meaningless, and it should be entirely up to the inner circle of the party to choose the nominee.
The answer to “When Did The Pledged Delegate Count Become The Holy Grail?” is, whenever it was that the parties decided to hold primaries to determine the nominee.
Ian, Maha, and others have it right. All I can add is just how stupid I consider this whole primary system is. If your going to let each state vote thats one thing, but why add a complex statistical analysis to each states delegate count? What the heck were places like Washington or Texas doing with both elections and caucuses? What on earth is a super delegate? Why can’t this be simpler? Maybe these things should be decided in smoky rooms after all.