The one and only thing that Clinton has absolutely mastered in this campaign is telling the media which states they should be paying attention to. Incidentally, those are the states that she can win in.
Anyway, even if Clinton has a point, it’s still pretty free of logic. “He’s not winning by as much as he could, so vote for the person who isn’t winning at all.” Where does that make sense?
It’s simple: Obama can’t close the deal because Hillary won’t go away. Any other reasonable candidate would have left the race under mounting pressure from the party, but Hillary has enough resources and clout to continue campaigning against her party’s blessing.
Any time any other candidate has started with the resources, name recognition, and party support Hillary began with, they’ve won the nomination handily.
I guess that she’s technically right in that “closing the deal” means getting enough delegates to be over the limit. Neither has that right now without the superdelegates, and neither is likely to do so before the convention. And since the superdelegates aren’t obliged to follow the popular vote, the deal isn’t closed until they commit. So she’s essentially challenging the superdelegates to push her out of the race.
Thing is, that’s to a large extent a product of the peculiar process the Dems set up for choosing their nominee. Still, that process is what it is, and was put in place by the Democrats for whatever reasons they had at the time. You can’t go back and change that.
Eh? Then where are they now?
I think there is an underlying message. She has a readily identifiable group of supporters who for whatever reason won’t vote for Obama. It’s a message to the Supers and it’s bound to resonate. I think the party going to fracture over this election.
FWIW exit polls in Pennsylvania showed the following:
Although I think their wording is a bit loaded. “One in four” sounds a lot worse than “sixteen percent”. It is 25% vs. 16% so while certainly in HRC’s favor 9% is not all that huge in these things and some of that could (possibly) be made up between now and the general election.
Well, some were elected, others lost. We were talking about Democratic candidates in previous elections, in case you missed it.
You might want to read the thread.
Reminiscent in some ways of a certain butterfly ballot, which was perfectly fine until it didn’t give the results the Dems wanted. Or perhaps more the discussions on what to do in states with too-early primaries.
Regards,
Shodan
[QUOTE=Shodan]
[li]the self-reinforcing nature of the groupthink here - “Hilary sux” has succeeded “Bush sux” as the meme here (and will be replaced with "McCain sux’ as soon as the Democratic nominee is selected, regardless of who it is[/list][/li][/QUOTE]
No; that would be something going on in your imagination, not on the SDMB. If you think “groupthink” is the word, then you haven’t been reading as much as you’ve been posting.
No, that shouldn’t be the question, because it’s based on a false premise. The “process” usually involves all the candidates but one gracefully bowing out once it becomes clear they can’t realistically make it. It’s different this time, because there are two very strong, well-financed candidates with large groups of fervant supporters, and neither one of them is going to concede. As I believe a number of people have already explained to you.
Not really.
Any election process is going to have a margin of error. Generally we all are ok with that because perfection is probably impossible to achieve and almost always the margin a candidate wins by is well past the margin of error anyway making it a non-issue.
In Florida it happened that it did matter. That a few hundred votes determining who is President of the US out of millions of votes is an insanely thin margin. I have no doubt if it had leaned a few hundred votes towards Gore the Bushites would have raised a similar fuss.
Ah, well in that case you are almost certainly wrong. If John Kerry were running against HRC this year, the contest would still be in doubt at this point, unless she had already won it.
Then why doesn’t Hillary have the nomination wrapped up in the same way that previous Democratic candidates did?
Put another way, why is this question being asked about Obama but not about Hillary?
Because Obama is going to be our party’s nominee.
Some of us are rightfully anxious that, for example, he can’t persuade more than 45% of PA Democrats to vote for him over a detestable liar when he has all the resources in the world.
Doesn’t portend well for November.
IIRC six weeks ago as the candidates headed to Pennsylvania to campaign HRC had over a 20 point lead. Polls suggested only 7% of democrat voters were “undecided”. We also know that Pennsylvania has a large number of traditional HRC supporters (her base if you will).
So, by making it a 10% victory Obama got that 7% undecided and convinced 3% of originally HRC supporters to vote for him. This despite HRC going nutso on Reverend Wright and Bittergate.
Seems like he did a good job all things considered.
At this point, I’ll assume you’re being inadvertently obscure.
Now your choice is between being deliberately obscure, or at least pointing to specific posts that you think I must have overlooked.
Again, not looking at this the right way.
PA was a closed primary (only registered Democrats could vote), and there were two Democrats to choose between, which naturally splits the votes. If we can assume that most registered Democrats who cared enough about this election to go to the primaries and vote, will indeed vote in the General election, and will vote for the Democratic candidate, that means that whoever that candidate is will get closer to 100% of the Democratic vote than either the 54.7% or 45.3% each individually took in the primary.
And even if the 25% of Hillary’s supporters who say they’re going to vote for McCain if Obama’s the nominee were taken into account, that still gives Obama 1,986,282 votes out of the 2,300,851 cast in this primary, which is 86.4% of the Democratic vote, not 45%! And that doesn’t take into consideration the Independents, Greens, Republicans and Decline-to-State voters who will vote for him in an open election.
This is exactly how I see it. At this point it should be a done deal. Obama has money and momentum and votes. IOW, Obama came from behind, has the lead, and has put HRC in a common-sense non-winnable position. Why hasn’t she bowed out yet? Where is the pressure from the Dem leaders? Why hasn’t Obama sewn up the nod yet? These are all fair questions. As to the OP, I think it takes the Dem party to a fracture. I’m not sure how the fracture/schism will play out, but I think it will be of one of elitists vs. working man’s group. Ironically, one would think that the representatives would of each group would be reversed.
You kind of have to know PA to understand how it happened. Obama was NEVER going to win PA, and I submit even he knew it. If anything, Hillary’s campaigning in PA hurt her numbers. Many folks who voted for her were going to vote for her anyway. In fact, I read somewhere yesterday (don’t have the link now) an article that indicated a good percentage had made up their minds weeks ago.
It was always going to be an uphill battle for Obama in PA. I’m surprised he did as well as he did. I predicted a 12 point plus win for Hillary, and I was actually expecting and dreading the plus. That Obama kept it at 10% (or 9.2%) is amazing. But a loss is a loss, and this one will hurt him over the next few days, even if it’s just in perception.
Yes, Hillary has evolved into a somewhat detestable figure, and yes, she does seem to have quite the challenge telling the truth, but it wasn’t Hillary Clinton who beat Obama. Fear and racism beat Obama, and it was always going to. Hillary was just the catalyst who enhanced that most insidious of drug’s potency.
Fallacy of the false dilemma - I can also assume you are attempting another of your ridiculous attempts at a semantic hijack, and dismiss you.
Because he is the front-runner, but can’t seem to wrap it up. Certainly it would equally a legitimate question (if it is) if HRC was ahead in the popular vote and had the most delegates, but Obama couldn’t be induced to concede. But things are what they are.
Certainly you can ask what happened to Hilary’s aura of inevitability, or why the advice of the best pure politician of the last two generations was not enough to secure her the nomination. But that’s “why couldn’t Hilary secure the deal”, not “why can’t Obama close the deal?”
Regards,
Shodan
I think if it were Hillary in the lead the circumstances would be completely different - that being said, that’s not what the OP asked for right, so what can we conclude from where things are right now? Status quo really for another couple weeks. Even if Clinton is leaned on to step down in the next two weeks, she won’t so I think it’ll stay pretty much the same until May 6th. Obama is still picking up Superdelegates as recent as today, and he still has a sizeable lead over HRC.
It is only a fallacy if it is a false dilemma. In this case, I think RT has the rights of it.