Tuesday, 03.04.08
A Win Is Not A Win
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Take two: Hillary's choice
November 2006
Joshua Green profiles a Senator on the rise.
Ohio And Clinton
4 March 2008
An Andrew Sullivan readers explains Clinton's appeal in Ohio.
Staying In
4 March 2008
Matt Yglesias ponders whether Clinton will remain in the race.
And now for the Clinton comeback?
4 March 2008
Barack Obama's still-likely nomination owes a debt to John Rawls: the inequalities built into the Democratic delegate selection system benefit the little states and history's most aggrieved figure -- the liberal activist. Let's say Hillary Clinton romps to victory in Ohio and Texas and Rhode Island. Tens of thousands of extra voters. At most, a few extra delegates. But a win is a win, right? Twenty-four ... okay, forty-eight hours later, when the afterglow has faded and the Hill raisers are on vacation, Clinton delegate guru Harold Ickes will sit down at his desk, scratch his chest through the open folds of his shirt, and have the same problem he has right now: Barack Obama's earned delegate lead is virtually insurmountable.
There are a variety of delegate calculation spreadsheets floating around, and I've plugged numbers in all of them, using the red-rosiest scenarios I could contemplate for Clinton. Under a fairly neutral scenario, she needs about 55 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to catch Obama, assuming she takes half the remaining superdelegates. (A generous assumption, given that his rate of superdelegate acquisition is about four to one right now.) To get 55 percent of the remaining pledged delegates, she needs to win about 72 percent of the popular vote in most of the rest of the 18 or so states that haven't voted. Clinton has won, in truth, nearly as many actual votes as Obama, and most of the biggest states. If merit governed the delegate selection process, Clinton would have an equal claim to the nomination. But merit, in this process, is a lower order principle.
Does not computeTry Slate's delegate counter to see if you can push HRC over the edge. |
Should I stay or should I go?Election guru Mark Halperin on the 10 insiders and 13 outsiders who might persuade or call for HRC to drop out. |
The bloom is off the roseDana Milbank chronicles the moment the press finally turned on Obama. |
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If this guy is one of your "marquee writers," you'd better hunt up some marquee copy editors to look over his stuff before it gets posted. "Built in to" needs to be two words, not three. "Fourty-eight" is just stupid. Or sloppy.
I think you're missing an important point.
The system wasn't designed at all for a two-person race.
It was designed to make things as balanced as possible in a 3- or 4-way race, with each of the candidates getting a reasonable percentage.
The proportional setup would mean that you wouldn't have candidates being withing striking distance (as Romney was this year) but having to drop out very early (as Romney did). McCain wasn't particularly overwhelmingly stronger than either Mitt or Mike... but in winner-take all, he just had to cross the finish line first.
That being said, perhaps there's an addition that could be made to next cycle's Democratic setup:
Have 75% of a states delegates awarded proportionally (and according to CD or however they want to do it), with the remaining 25% going to the overall winner.
That would eliminate the weird setup we have this time in a race between two fairly equally-matched contenders, where so many states have ended up with 50-50 delegate counts, and it's been very difficult for either candidate to pull appreciably ahead
What about Michigan and Florida?
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Unless HRC and her henchmen bully and cajole the DNC into admitting the FL and MI delegations. Sure, it would be a transparently disingenuous maneuver on her part, but what else is new? Add to that her superdelegates who believe they're endowed with the special privilege of overriding the outcome of the democratic process, and you have HRC clinching this nomination. And probably the utter destruction of our party along the way.
If Florida and Michigan delegates are given to Hillary I think there will some serious repercussions to the Democratic party and the validity of the delegate process. This is not to say that Hillary cares about the damage to the party over her possible candidacy but it might be a point that could well lose her the election.
Democrats need to look ahead to November. In-fighting between Clinton-Obama only helps McCain. Since neither can actually get the required delegates, they should stop beating each other up, and wasting the money on TV and other ads. Let the voters decide the rest of the race. The money saved and raised from now on should go to a democratic fight fund to be used to paint Macain and selected republican senators and key representatives as a bush clone -- run aggressive campaign to associate bush-McCain for the November election. The goal of all democrats, independents and progressive Republicans should be to sweep the WH, senate and the house fort he next 16 years...It can be done, let's be visionary...
Yes Med,let's be visionary,Visualize no democrats
You're right that Obama's ahead, but you're wrong about why.
Yes, it's true, states are assigned delegates according to their democratic vote in a prior election. And in some states, that benefited Barack Obama. But you're grossly exaggerating the extent of it.
You're forgetting, for example, that in some states the delegate formula benefited Hillary. For example Obama won more votes in Illinois than Clinton did in New York. But New York was worth 100 more delegates.
After you've let all the factors and counterfactors take effect, you're left with the fact that Barack won more states, won more delegates, and won a majority of votes cast.
And if you're counting at all fairly, it's not all that close - in fact, it's not far off from the delegate gap.
To say that the race has been "close" is not the same as saying she won. In presidential politics these days, winning by 4-6 points provides unusual clarity.
Posted by TedL | March 4, 2008 7:20 PM