There is no nominee

[illusionofjoy]

I just unsubscribed from Barack Obama's mailing list. In doing so, there was an optional field asking why one was choosing to unsubscribe. I kept it to the point: "I no longer support your campaign."

In all honesty, I stopped supporting Obama's campaign quite a while ago. His tactics for gaining support and winning became anathema to my personal values and what I expect from a Democratic candidate. If you recall, there was a time when I would have been willing to support Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee, despite the fact that he was far from my first choice. Now, I simply can not support him - and I doubt he can, or even wants my support anyhow. I'm not part of the "new" Democratic Party. Sorry kids, I like my old classical liberalism tied to FDR and JFK - this new flavour just doesn't taste right to me.

So, let's play with the numbers, shall we? With all of the primaries and caucuses wrapped up, here are the spoils of war:

	Popular Vote	Pledged Delegates
Hillary Clinton	17,785,009 (50.43%)	1639.5 (48.14%)
Barack Obama	17,479,990 (49.57%)	1766.5 (51.86%)

Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote by less than one percentage point. By contrast, Barack Obama wins the pledged delegate count by nearly four percentage points. You'll note that I did not tabulate any totals for superdelegate endorsements, which were the metric used by Obama and the mainstream media to coronate him as the "presumptive nominee" last night. There is a good reason for this: until the votes are cast at the convention in August, superdelegate endorsements carry only a symbolic meaning (albeit, a potentially ephemeral one, as superdelegates can change their pledge at any given time up to and until the convention votes are cast). In effect, Barack Obama, the mainstream media and the Democratic National Convention are all lying: no candidate has reached the new magic pledged delegate number of 2118, ergo there is no nominee.

Hillary Clinton knows this, which, I suspect, is one among many reasons she did not give a concession speech last night. While all of the Obamaheads in the country were gleefully getting off at their man's "victory," Hillary politely told the conformist masses to get bent. And this is why she is the only candidate for me. All the way to Denver!

Well behaved women rarely make history.

Comments

[zzxno.livejournal.com]

Your arguement is technically correct but logically flawed. Specifically yes, more people cast a ballot in a primary election marked 'Hillary Clinton' than 'Barak Obama'. However, that completely ignores the results in four states that decide their delegate counts based on caucuses. As a Hillary supporter can you tell me why it's ok to count the votes from Michigan and Florida, where the elections were highly tainted by voter supression (i.e. when you tell voters their vote won't count the they don't show up which causes the results to not really be a reflection of the will of the electorate) while ignoring the results from four caucus states that followed every rule of the DNC and did not engage in voter supression?

Check some sources that are at least neutral and you'll find that I'm not the only one who finds the popular vote claim to be completely without merit:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_clinton_win_the_popular_vote.html

http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/06/02/clinton-s-popular-vote-claim-close-but-no-cigar.aspx

It was a close race and Hillary was a good candidate but the end result was that she lost fair and square. Trying to change the rules because things didn't go your way doesn't help the Democratic party and it doesn't help America. Hillary sees this, it's unfortunate that you do not.