Fork Hillary 3: The Final Forking

Fuck it…I’m done arguing. I’m just going to sit back and vote for Obama on the 22nd and enjoy watching him sail to the nomination. I have no idea why I’m so committed to chewing my liver out over the other candidate’s supporter’s delusions of possibility. My MD and my therapist will both thank me.

Actually, that update is from March 20th. The current maps, seen on the left and right, show that both would lose to McCain with Obama faring slightly better. Obama 265 vs. McCain 273 while on the right side is Clinton 262 vs. McCain 276.

My kid beat me in Scrabble the other day but if triple word scores didn’t count I would’ve won. Therefore I’m really the winner. :rolleyes:

The supers could, within the rules, go against a significant pledged delegate decision and against a popular vote decision. They’d just be idiots to do so. You think risking that Michigan and Florida voters feel “disenfranchised” is bad? Telling an entire Democratic primary voting population that their votes didn’t really matter, now that’s disenfranchisement.
l

And why doesn’t Obama just give Clinton all his campaign contributions too? Sure, it might be the “rules” that money donated him is for him to spend, but those silly rules are just technicalities that Obama went back in time and created to benefit him.

What an absurd little article. Clinton has tried to play Calvinball and bend and undermine the rules at every turn. Obama, on the other hand, has played clean and by the rules. And for that, this person is criticiizing him, acting as if obeying the rules is somehow wrong.

The particular criticism quoted is particularly absurd - he’s trying to imply Obama is guilty of wrongdoing for not handing over un-won delegates to Clinton, something no one would ever do.

Obama has a lot to overcome within his own party if he wants to really impact politics, what with a seemingly significant fraction of Clinton supporters playing as dirty and illogical as she has.
The article also implies that the nomination process isn’t that useful because it doesn’t follow the winner-takes-all format of the general election. Can anyone make the case that this is a logical statement?

It’s a completely different election. It’s not a mock for the general election. It’s done among a subset of voters for different reasons. Why should the same rules apply? Can anyone make a case for that?

Yeah, I hit that limit a month or so ago. I feel extremely fortunate that others (like DSeid, Phlsphr, Shayna, etc.; especially Shayna – thank you for your tireless diligence!) have assumed the mantle. Come to think of it, it’s not so much that I’ve given up arguing. It’s that my threshold has gone up quite a bit…so much so that I find that others post essentially what I would’ve long before that threshold is reached.

I’ve come close to posting objections a few times, particularly when the Clinton camp emphaiszes their “popular vote” argument – y’know, the measure that totally ignores any and all caucus results. Now, granted, Texas has one inexplicably fucked up voting system, but it’s really irritating to be told that my vote – and the votes of other Washingtonians – don’t count. Particularly when the argument almost always concerns, at least tangentially, disenfranchisement of FL and MI voters.

Ah, well, “pick your battles” and such.

I look forward to the committed effort by all of these folks once the nomination is settled to fix this unfair system which allocates delegates according to the way that the system said that the delegates would be allocated before the process started, disenfranchising people and kicking little metaphorical puppies in their little metaphorical puppy balls all along the way.

There will be a reckoning, Democratic party. Expect wholesale upheaval in the name of fairness. Because it turns out that all of these arcane rules and antiquated unfair caucuses established specifically to give the old guard and the party insiders a leg up (wink-wink), strangely they can be manipulated to allow an outsider access to the table.

Lo, the blade shall fall and the blood shall jet.

Oh, really?

The recipient, who wrote the Daily Kos diary I originally linked to, has updated it to link to the letter itself.

But of course it’s all a fake and a phony; nobody is actually that scrupulous, right. :rolleyes:

That is pretty interesting. I read it yesterday, and the whole time I was thinking to myself, “Is this author on drugs? Do they really believe the things they’re saying, or are they just trying to keep moving the goalposts farther and farther?” I mean, seriously.

It’s exactly like a golfer who’s behind on the scorecard, bitching about them not playing match play, because then they’d be ahead. And then making up more and more obscure ways for them to claim they’re in the lead, when really they’re just a shitty golfer.

If we’re gonna do competing glurge, here’s Matt Yglesias’ response:

*Sean Wilentz argues that if we had winner-take-all primaries then Hillary Clinton would be beating Barack Obama handily. This is definitely true if we just hold all the actual voting and campaigning constant, and then reapportion the delegates along Wilentz’s hypothetical lines. However, it seems likely that both campaigns would have adopted different strategies if the rules were different from what they actually are.

Meanwhile, the actual race is close enough that I have no doubt that there’s some plausible alternative candidate-selection mechanism under which Clinton would win fairly comfortably. Equally, though, one can imagine alternative mechanisms under which Obama would win comfortably (something very much like the current system, say, but in which California holds a caucus instead of a primary). It’s just not clear what the significance of this sort of thing is. I definitely regard the current method of candidate selection as flawed and think we should change it moving forward, but the alleged desirability of some change (and the changes Wilentz proposes are not, I think, actually desirable) hardly retroactively invalidates outcomes already achieved. *

And Scott Lemieux’ at American Prospect:

Sean Wilentz has an exceedingly weak piece arguing that Clinton would be the easy winner in any fair primary system. Now, the primary system is full of irrationalities, so one might think that it would be possible to come up with a decent argument, but alas he fails at the task. Rather, the core of his argument is to assert again and again that the GOP winner-take-all model is only only fair way of apportioning delegates because…that’s how we do it in Presidential elections! But, of course, winner-take-all plurality voting is notoriously the least accurate of vote count systems commonly used in liberal democracies, and it is precisely that feature that led to the popular vote winner losing in 2000 and given different weather patterns in Ohio could have very easily led to the popular vote winner losing in 2004. Indeed, not using winner-take-all is one of the very few defensible aspects of the current primary system, and certainly Wilentz doesn’t even begin to make an argument about why PR is so much worse as to render the winner illegitimate (and I’m not counting “we do it that way in other parts of our anachronistic election system” as an argument.)

Normally, I’d make my own arguments, but since you’re not gonna bother, and I read various rebuttals yesterday, I thought I’d just respond in kind.

Meanwhile, the latest Quinnipiac poll has Hillary’s lead in PA down to 6%, and Survey USA shows Obama up by 10% in Oregon. We’re closing in.

So, if Hillary wins by 5%, which seems not improbable, what are we looking at, delegatewise? Anyone have a district by district probable breakdown yet?

And if she wins by 5%, is she forked more, or the same?

The conventional wisdom is that Obama’s strong districts are more reliably Democratic than Hillary’s and are somewhat overrepresented in delegates because of it, therefore If Hillary wins 53-47 or so, then Obama would get somewhat more than 47% of the delegates.

More forked. I don’t know the district breakdown, but if we talk pure percentages, and assume, (very generously) that Obama only splits North Carolina and Oregon, and won the rest of the states by FORTY (40) points, she’d still be behind in pledged delegates.

American Postal Workers Union endorses Barack Obama.

The Portland Tribune: Obama is best for Democrats.

The Charleston Gazette Obama Presidential endorsement

I lost count on how many nails that is Shayna :slight_smile:

I heard this on public radio the other day and thought it was interesting

So, regardless of what the guy really thinks and feels is best for the nation if he doesn’t vote their way they’d rather see a republican win than him?

and

If I truly felt Clinton would surely win, and could and would bring about the needed and desired changes I could see the logic in letting her go this time and saving Obama for 2016. I don’t have that confidence in her. I can’t be sure Obama will succeed in changing things but I feel more positive about giving him the chance.

This is what will make Altmire vote for Obama from your article:

That’s what is eventually going to make Obama win the nomination as well. People on his team don’t have to play catchup, they simply call back. Whereas HRC’s camp wasn’t even going to fill out a full delegate platform in PA. And she didin’t. Speaks volumes. She is lucky PA has a demographic that has been habitually supporting her…but that demographic is fading. Look at the lastest endorsements for Obama and the latest polls.

It’s beginning to seem as if it’s more nails than coffin.

Good point. Maybe after this election cycle they can truck it out to Darwin, MN, set it out behind the world’s largest ball of twine, and charge people a quarter a look.

Things are getting really weird in polling. Real Clear Politics’ aggregate poll has just about stopped making sense for some reason.

RCP Average 04/03 - 04/08 - 49.2 41.3 Clinton +7.9
InsiderAdvantage 04/08 - 04/08 681 LV 48 38 Clinton +10.0
PPP (D) 04/07 - 04/08 1124 LV 46 43 Clinton +3.0
Rasmussen 04/07 - 04/07 695 LV 48 43 Clinton +5.0
SurveyUSA 04/05 - 04/07 597 LV 56 38 Clinton +18.0
Strategic Vision ® 04/04 - 04/06 LV 47 42 Clinton +5.0
Quinnipiac 04/03 - 04/06 1,340 LV 50 44 Clinton +6.0

According to Team Clinton, Obama is catching up in the polls in PA because he’s a liar.

They’ve also moved the goalpost, as expected.