Thanks for talking sense, stoli. It’s been in short supply here.
But I’d expect a negotiated settlement of some kind before a do-over of the MI/FL primaries (talking about “changing the rules”, huh? :dubious:). The smoke-filled room has never truly left American politics, it’s just been more hidden in recent decades, and it can easily make a cameo return. Shayna, you do know the superdelegates’ decisions about who to support are their own and not those of their supportees, right? Please give me some hope here.
Oh for GOD’S SAKE, give me a break here! You DO know that BOTH sides have been campaigning HARD for the support of the superdelegates, right? How that doesn’t equal INFLUENCING them in your world, I have no idea.
I’m with cricetus, I’m going to get lunch. You’re a hopeless cause.
Well, I don’t mean his supporters per se. I am an Obama supporter and you just heard me say that it would be wrong. Just his official proxies.
I think it’s probably the right message for Clinton’s press people to make noise about seating Michigan and Florida- they don’t risk much and if it works out it is good for their candidate. It’s a bit politics-as-usual-y, but they are running on knowing how to work the system, they seem willing to risk it and I think that is good judgement on their part, if the goal is to win the election.
Why? If you insist on spouting nonsense and outright falsehoods here, you should *expect * to get called on it. What do you think this board is for?
You claimed that Clinton somehow has superior “control” of people who are making up their own minds. You also are implicitly claiming that the superdelegates are in control of the seating of other delegates. You “have no idea” why those statements are being pointed out as false? *That * is worrisome.
You have absolutely no authority to complain about the lack of sense-talking in this discussion. Nobody has aspired more to make it less sensible than you have.
So did anyone here the story about candidate Pot calling his political rival Kettle out for being, and I quote, “black”?
I have a friend who was originally supported Edwards, who dropped out before we caucused. She chose Obama specifically because Hillary was talking about seating the delegates from MI and FL and she was put off by the blatant cheatinglikeness of it.
I am not “justifying wrongdoing”. I am saying that, in the political calculus, it makes sense to me that Clinton will lose less by asking to seat those delegates than the odds it will happen times what she stands to gain. I’m trying to remove morailty from it, not to excuse it. To your other point, I specifically said that she risks losing votes, they just don’t think they risk very many. And she thinks she will do so much good as president that it is OK to bend things around.
I think the calculus would be the same for Obama, but there’s no real way to know. A test of Obama’s morals vs. political expediency will be upcoming if he moves to the general and McCain continues to make noise about the “public financing” promise. I imagine that Obama will not limit himself to public financing. And he will be right to do so, because he feels that he can do so much good when elected that it will outweigh the little wrongs he did to get there. This is politics.
Difference would be that the outcome of the contest hadn’t been decided then whereas Hillary wanted to seat the delegates after she won both Michigan and Florida.
For instance, in that particular case, because Obama had sponsored the bill to begin with, clearly he couldn’t cast a ‘Nay’ vote on it because he was most assuredly not against the bill passing in general. But a ‘Yea’ vote was problematic on this version of it (he’d voted ‘Yea’ on the first incarnation of it to go through the Senate), in that a later addition to it appeared to be in violation of the First Amendment. His ‘Present’ vote indicated his unwillingness to support the bill as it was written, not as a whole.
And he was right to do that. The version the Senate brought before the Governor was vetoed. The version Congress submitted, that didn’t include that language, was passed into law.
“A top Hillary Clinton adviser on Saturday boldly predicted his candidate would lock down the nomination before the August convention by definitively winning over party insiders and officials known as superdelegates, claiming the number of state elections won by rival Barack Obama would be “irrelevant” to their decision.”
Would someone please remind Senator Clinton that this is supposed to be a democracy… damn, the dictatorship I live under in the UAE seems pretty good compared to America these days.
