Fork Hillary 3: The Final Forking

Great Debates
141

Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding!!!

And we have ElvisL1ves for the most obtuse statement of the thread!!!1111

Let’s trace this thing here. RTFirefly said, which was unattributed in your quote, that he couldn’t explain it better than Harborwolf, who was talking about your statement that Hillary had offered Barack the VP slot as a conciliatory measure. The point that Harborwolf made was that it’s insulting and presumptuous for her to offer it since she is by all measures behind. The fact that you put that up as some kind of good will gesture by the Clinton camp is really pathetic. So you come along and snipe at RTFirefly for agreeing with Harborwolf for hitting the nail on the head? What is going on here?
Riddle me this: Just how do you think it will turn out? How can HRC do this without ruining everything altogether? And while we’re getting all Realpolitik about it, what will the Democratic party do about the black vote once they are done disenfranchising all of them? Let me tell you a little secret. Black people don’t like being told their vote doesn’t count. They had enough of that before the civil rights movement. I can understand. So how are you going to explain this to this key demographic that “We had to pick Hillary instead because…” I’m waiting?

See, the problem with Hillary supporters is this…

What is your basis for the superdelegate victory other than, “it’s allowed by the rules”? Because firstly, the superdelegates aren’t going to do that. That’s a plain and simple fact. That’s why we all want her to drop out now. Not because we don’t like votes to be counted, but because we don’t like Hillary’s (And really she was the only one who ran this type of campaign) festering rotten campaign. But secondly, she really has nothing left other than a miracle. Explain EXACTLY how she’s going to do the following:

Win the rest of the states by a margin of 60 percent or more when by all estimations she’ll only win PA.

Win over the superdelegates when by all accounts she’s picked all of her low-hanging fruit and will have not won more pledged delegates or the popular vote

Win the African American groups (not to mention the youth that Obama has brought in) and educated elite who have put so much effort in the good-faith rules?

It’s a good-faith election these days. Ask anyone involved. Take a poll, I’m sure there are several out, asking the public’s opinion of a superdelegate putsch. I’ve read a few and it is a disastrous idea.

So with all of these factors against the Hillary, how is she going to win? Why does she need to answer these questions? Because she runs a retched and filthy campaign which only helps her and not her party. I guarantee you if it were anyone else than Hillary you wouldn’t hear these cries for him to quit because nobody ran such a lousy campaign.

142

I’ll try. Let me state, as I have in other threads, I’m not a Hillary supporter. In fact, I have no dog in this fight; I’ll be voting for McCain. Here’s what I posted in the thread about Obama giving Gore his delegates:

So, from my perspective, this is not potentially a “just because the rules permit it” scenario that lets Hillary get a legitimate nomination. It’s that the rules were specifically designed for just such a situation (should it turn out that way). That’s why the Dems have superdelegates–to overturn a popular sentiment they they, in their judgment, believe is leading to the wrong outcome. That’s not a corruption of their system. That is the system, as designed.

Now, it may not turn out this way. Obama wins PA, let’s say. But if I were a superdelegate, and my belief was that with MI and FL in the mix the popular vote would be a virtual tie, the delegate count would be less than a hundred, Obama’s polls were tanking because of backlash over Reverend Wright, Hillary has won every big state but IL–then, yes, again, I’d feel it was my duty to execute the exact role I was put in place to do. We’re not there yet, of course. But I just don’t see the “untouchability” of a narrow Obama lead that some here seem to.

143

Stratocaster, I appreciate your analysis, but I see daylight between your earlier position and your current one, as stated. I don’t think that was intentional on your part, so let me explain what I mean, and maybe you can clarify.

I’m good with the superdelegates’ “chang[ing] the tide in an election with a razor-thin margin when their judgment tells them they should.” If the margin is razor-thin, then there isn’t much of a tide to change, it isn’t clear what the popular will is, and ultimately someone’s going to have to simply call the nomination one way or the other.

But that’s different - to me, at least, from “That’s why the Dems have superdelegates–to overturn a popular sentiment they they, in their judgment, believe is leading to the wrong outcome.” If there’s a clear popular sentiment, then we aren’t talking about tipping the coin that somehow has landed on its edge.

I’m not sure if you intended these to be two different things or not. But I hope you can see why they look different to me, and maybe you can clarify what you meant.

But a couple of thoughts that aren’t dependent on that clarification:

  1. Overturning a popular sentiment they the SDs believe is leading to the wrong outcome.

I think I’d be OK with this ONLY if it was clear that a good chunk of the primary electorate had changed their minds since voting for the leader, and not just for a moment, but for enough time to make sure they weren’t likely to change their minds right back in a few days.

Let’s say, for instance, that the Wright mess doesn’t blow over, and that for a several weeks running, Hillary runs 5-8 points ahead of Obama in the Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls, and other polls taken along the way show similar results. At that point, I’d say it was the superdelegates’ place to decide whether to (a) swing the nomination to Hillary, or (b) decide that the sniper-fire lady’s also too problematic, and start brokering a deal for Gore or Edwards.

  1. What does ‘razor-thin’ mean?

I remember doing the math right before Super Tuesday, when the CW was that if Obama could keep Hillary’s lead down to ~200 delegates coming out of Super Tuesday, he’d be close enough to make a run in the subsequent primaries. What I realized at the time was that 200 delegates was a ginormous lead, the way the Dems do things. The only way to overcome a lead that big is if the leader takes a serious nosedive.

100 delegates is a solid lead, and 200 is ginormous. That’s our scale.

So ‘razor-thin,’ as I see it, is much smaller than 100 - certainly in the low double digits. I wouldn’t even think of a 40-50 delegate lead as ‘razor-thin’; you’d have to go lower than that.

Right now, Obama’s got a lead in pledged delegates of between 155 and 171, depending on who’s counting. Hillary would have to win a series of impressive victories in the remaining states to get that lead down to, say, 90; she can’t get it any lower without Obama’s support collapsing overall.

Hillary has a lead of 34-37 superdelegates (same link), depending on who’s counting. So even if she closed the pledged delegate gap to 90, her overall deficit would be ~55, absent further SD commitments.

At least my my standards, that’s not a razor-thin margin; that’s still the sort of lead that, absent extraordinary circumstances, the SDs have no business reversing. And I think that’s the sort of thing we Obama supporters worry about. If the shoe were on the other foot, Hillary would be declaring victory, the party would be closing ranks around her, and Obama would be told to quit the race for the good of the party.

144

A little bit of me-too with RTF but Stratocaster you said it yourself

Popular vote? Very few superdelegates will count MI as is, since he wasn’t even on the ballot. Recent polling puts it about even there and they’s probably count that as a split. Counting Florida she is currently behind by over half a million votes, over 400K even not counting caucus states, and over 800K counting all the states that count by the rules. The possibility of bringing to a “virtual tie” here is a remote possibility if you allow that the supers will choose to count Florida and not the caucus states and she blows him away from there. But possible.

Getting the pledged delegate count to within a hundred? Winning PA big, a few others moderately and keeping her loss in NC narrow might get her up by as many as 30 delegates from here. Say she does twice that good by some unimaginable miracle. She still hasn’t come within that 100 cut off that you, rightly I believe, use as an outer limit for the supers to think about going against. This one is beyond a remote possibility without both real votes in both Florida and Michigan and her winning both of those by blow-outs. Since those have both been eliminated that is now removed as even a remote possibility.

Obama’s polls tanking? The supers have seen that this hardest hit yet against Obama was weatherable. He bottomed out quickly and is apparently already making up for lost ground. Zero reason to believe that he will totally tank in the national polls. Bleed some maybe. Tank, no.

You’d need all three of those to get supers to consider going against the pledged count and then you’d need to get more than two thirds of them convinced of it, another improbablilty given that some leadership (as represented by Pelosi but certainly not her alone) believe that the pledged count should rule. And others who would be horrified at how badly doing that would effect various Congressional districts even if they somehow believed it would help win the Presidency.

There is no real chance of this occuring. Barring say video evidence of Obama giving a Wright sermon while in bed with a dead boy and a live girl.

So on to Elvis’s request for leadership. Leadership is now indeed called for. Hillary needs to told it is time to concede to the inevitable, name a price other than the VP spot. Then Michigan and Florida will both be seated as is. That leadership seems to not exist and mores the pity. With the leadership that does exist we will see some individual supers coming over to Obama over the next few weeks and others wanting to see how PA and NC play out first. She gets that much play in the line for the same reason that Richardson didn’t endorse before Super Tuesday or certainly before this week: she’s a Clinton. Any othe candidate’s campaign would have been declared dead and the team ridicules for acting as if itwasn’t long long before this. And if that video of Obama giving that sermon in that bed surfaces, then the delegates, all of them, can still nominate her.

145

Leadership does not look first or solely at problems, and then despair of any solution. Leadership *overcomes * problems.

One way might be to acknowledge that the MI and FL situations are indeed fucked up to the point where the will of the people there (we do care about that, don’t we?) can only be expressed with a do-over. A leader interested in showing him/herself as a uniter, wanting to the President of all the United States, just might use his/her powerful influence (you don’t deny that it exists and is powerful, right?) with the DNC and the respective state governments to put that into effect.

Of course, someone interested only in winning, claiming that the rules are more important than justice or unity (depending on the situation, apparently), along with those of that candidate’s supporters who are no more interested than the Republicans in leading as distinct from winning, would be satisfied with stalling and rationalizing.
Give it some thought yourself, and try coming up with an optimum or “least-bad” solution instead of listing obstacles, okay?

DSeid, you’ve at least taken a shot at saying what leadership for Clinton would consist of, even you’re just assuming your preferred result. But can you do that thought experiment for Obama too? In what ways do you think *he * could demonstrate that uniting leadership he puts at the top of his qualifications list?
RTF, great contortionist act there. Did you used to be in the circus? :dubious: Let’s untangle that “argument” of yours: “Michigan and Florida would be Obama Country if they were only better informed. But they’re not, so we have to save the country from them.” That’s your claim in essence, right?
merwurk, you don’t get a response until you’ve wiped that foam off your chin; there’s a good lad. Then you can go review what the superdelegates’ purpose is, and even perhaps provide your own thoughts about the merits of following the rules vs. providing uniting leadership.

146

Yes. Thanks for restating it.** Now answer the question of how leadership overcomes those problems.**

Covered this too. Only problem is that this doesn’t actually solve anything. Problems have been listed. Your simply stating that leadership solves them is handwaving. It’s not even close to a solution. Even if Barack Obama were to stand up and say “Let’s have a revote,” it wouldn’t pay for a revote. Hillary has already stood up and said “let’s have a revote,” and that didn’t pay for it either.

Of course, someone interested only in slamming one candidate over a percieved failure in “leadership” wouldn’t actually answer the question, but keep restating their initial claim of failure rather than describe how they think the problem could be solved.

Nope. It’s your claim that Obama is failing to show leadership by not pushing through the revote. It’s your job to show how you think “leadership” could actually solve the problems at hand. If Obama were to endorse the revote, how would that overcome the problems of cost?

147

No, Elvis, not by my preferred result, even though Obama has been my preferred candidate, but by the facts on the ground.

As to how Obama should lead, given these facts … well I have to preamble by mentioning that I’m a pediatrician and in pediatrics we know that often the best thing to do is the hardest thing to do, which is do nothing but let a process take its natural course. Be it to not treat a cold or to ignore a tantrum.

It sometimes takes confidence and courage to do nothing, but as far as Michigan and Florida goes, that is the best leadership he can offer. Don’t be threatened into pandering to the bratty behavior of the State leaderships.

In this case the most Obama should do is work the supers to acknowledge the reality and end this thing before the party as a whole needlessly suffers as a result.

148

That might be a little more convincing if you had stated what other alternatives you considered, and why doing nothing (i.e. stalling and rationalizing, as I already stated) is the best approach for the party, the country, and the world, if not for a particular candidate’s political fortunes. As it is, you do leave your motives in some doubt, you know?

Tell me, are candidates, certain nominees at that by a frequent assertion here, who can’t even find a way to influence a state organization of their own party ready to be President of the United States? :dubious:

Too late for that. The situation is what it is. The supers’ role is what it is too, under the rules, since you bring them irrelevantly into the FL/MI discussion.
The problem statement is more like “What is the best thing to do for the party, the people of the nation, and secondarily of the candidate’s image as a uniting leader among the general electorate and in the world?” Some of you instead seem to be using the formulation “How can we get the bitch to just go away so our guy can win?” Well, what’s the point of not being Rove Republicans if you’re going to act just like them?
HW, if you had a thought-out answer to the question instead of simply more SDMB-Obama-supporter-style invective, no doubt you’d offer it. Oh, well, typical …

149

ElvisL1ves,

Just answer the question then? How does Hillary win?

Does she expect the superdelegates to overrule 700,000 popular votes? That’s the size of a large city. How can she do this other than saying, “Well, it’s allowed by the rules”

You have to translate these delegates into the amount of actual votes they represent to get a clear picture of the lead that Obama has. so 120 delegates or so = 700,000 votes. This obviously is a tricky number, but it’s a rough estimate. I’d say that a “Razor thin” margin would be a lot smaller than that.

Also note that Obama’s vote totals don’t include caucuses. If you do he gets another 110k.

But please, tell us how Hillary wins it?

This is the problem that I have with Hillary supporters because they won’t stop at any level to win. There’s so much allowed by the rules that simply shouldn’t be done. Nowhere does it say in the rules that you shouldn’t play the race card. That is a completely legal tactic, of course it shouldn’t be done and will be punished.

Same goes for what Hillary is trying to insinuate that she’ll be given the nomination based on non-vote factors. It’s in the rules, sure, but it’s not going to happen.

And we don’t have to go through the various iterations of the Clinton campaign’s opinion on “what matters” It has changed in so many ways now that I can’t even see straight.

Care to opine on how she can do this without ruining the party? Or are you just going to take another cheap shot?

150

If you had a thought out answer to the question instead of more SDMB-Obama-basher-style handwaving, no doubt you’d offer it. Oh well, typical.

To put it another way, you don’t have an answer do you? It’s your claim that “leadership” would fix the revote problems, yet you still haven’t spelled out specifically how, preferring to dismiss my questions by stating that I am an Obama supporter. How does this make my questions any more relevant or the problems any less formidable?

**Once again. How can “leadership” overcome the problems relating to the Michigan and Florida revotes? **

151

Doesn’t matter if you’re ElvisL1ves,

It’s just ad-hominem and rules-lawyering with this guy. I’d love to see him present a plausible reason for hillary to still be in it, yet he doesn’t seem able to do so.

152

With my admittedly limited knowledge of these issues, I am still very interested in seeing an answer to this question.

The Florida and Michigan primaries were held in defiance of clear rules, yes? So how is it “leadership” on anyone’s part to demand that the rules be ignored?

I leave the issue of “superdelegates” to those who actually understand it, it’s beyond my poor Canadian brain . . .

153

Well I think the point here is that the fact that “the rules can be changed” is actually in the rules. Whoever controls the “rules committee” gets to make up the rules, they are the rules.

So it’s not against the rules to change them as you go along, technically…

154

Elvis I will once again go explicitly go through the alternative. Obama and the DNC could alternatively reward Florida and Michigan for ignoring the DNC’s authority to decide who goes fist and allow each state to continually leapfrog over each other in their desires to be more important than the other states out of fear that Florida and Michigan might alternatively hold their breath until they turn blue … or red in this case. That is not leadership. The long term good of the party would be served poorly by giving in to such bratty behavior even if the party needed to risk losing a general election in the process. (Which I do not believe it does.)

No candidate controls state actors all that well in a short term. Their actions will have implications for the long term however. Do you send a message that any state organization can do whatever it wants no matter what rules they had agreed to ahead of time or do you support the authority of the national organization? Which action is more appropriate for a President to take?

The supers role is what it is: to look out for the long term good of the party. That includes increasing the odds of a Presidential victory, the odds of winning a maximum number of congressional seats, and the ability to have something other than anarchy in future election cycles. Those ends are all served by recognizing that the voters have spoken, that there is no realistic way for Hillary to win and that continuation of the fight will only diminish the odds of the first two and that the third goal is best served by ignoring the tantrums of the Florida and Michigan leaderships.

155

Ahem!

Has everyone gotten all of their comments on the debating styles of other posters out of their systems?

Knock it off. No more comments about how anyone expected another poster to respond or how anyone is simply repeating the same idea without proving it.

Come up with some genuine arguments with facts and logic and leave comments on other posters for the Pit.
[ /Moderating ]

156

I see. Well, I think in my dim way that is a bad thing. Any change in the rules ought to come after this campaign so as to be in place for the next one. And then stuck with.

This is such a serious and important matter that I find it quite incredible that the situation as it exists ever came to be. What were the Floridans and Michiganites thinking?

157

In both cases, a Republican dominated legislature made changes while disregarding the Democrat perspective.

In Florida, it was simply a power move that deliberately stomped on the Democrats. In Michigan, more Democrats were actually persuded to go along with it, but it was still a Republican effort to play games that might hurt Democrats withourt actually affecting Republicans (who have a different set of rules).

158

(BTW: It is not Michiganites. For most real peninsula dwellers, it is Michiganders while, for some limited number of followers of Silly Billy Milli-ken’s effete snobbishness, it is Michiganians.)

159

I humbly apologize!!! Having been called by the wrong name by many people throughout my life, I know the pain only too well.

leaves, muttering, “Michiganders, Michiganders”, over and over again . . .

160

Again, tom, you seem to be disregarding the fact that the DNC has rules in place that allow for Democrats who are minority parties in their states, to appeal to the DNC if they feel they’ve been unfairly railroaded by their Republican majorities. If they can show that they made “provable, positive steps” to oppose the legislation, they DO have recourse within the DNC rules.

And in the case of Florida at least, they did take their case to the rules committee of the DNC, who found no compelling evidence that they had, indeed made “provable, positive steps” to block the legislation.

However, they were given some alternatives to not having their delegates lost at the convention. Make the first primary a “beauty contest” and hold a separate caucus for the presidential race. They declined, stating that caucuses were “undemocratic”, nevermind that numerous states use that method to determine their nominee, and nevermind that it would certainly be more democratic than what they’re whining about now, which is complete “disenfranchisement”.

Their second reason was that people wouldn’t want to come out to vote on property tax issues one day, and come back to vote for their presidential nominee on a different day. That’s utter nonsense. An electorate that understand that it’s a choice of not being included at all, versus having to go to their polling places twice, would, in all likelihood, overwhelmingly choose to show up twice. And in fact, that’s what many have been arguing for weeks now to be able to do!

If the Florida Democrats really gave a damn about their constituents being heard in this race, they would have bent over backwards to comply with how the DNC told them they could be counted, in spite of their Republican overlords evil moving of the primary date. They chose not to.

They chose wrong.