Saturday, April 05, 2008

Chess is not Checkers

Why do I even get surprised anymore? Why do I turn on the computer and read something that TH is doing and always seem to be baffled? Not only do I do that, but I continue to get in heated debates on blog forums and still come across the same ever-evolving methodology that TH use's to justify the campaign.

Today I came across this chart.



It is what many Clintonites are now using as their reasoning to stay in. Do you notice the problem? They are only primary totals and and it leaves out caucuses. This is insane. All we hear from TH is that every vote should count and the will of the people shuold be represented. Yet, when actually counting the total vote, they choose to leave out all the states who happened to have caucuses. If by winning the popular vote, TH means the votes you get while ignoring caucus states like Iowa, Maine, Washington, Nevada, and allocating votes in two primaries that were declared in advance not to count, one in which Obama wasn't even on the ballot, then yes I guess so.

I'm sure there are all sorts of ways we can count the vote in which one person wins or the other. But in the actual real world according to the system we have set up, what difference does it make? In that world, in that election, Obama is winning.
They want to sweep his wins under the rug and pretend like Hillary is the champion of voter enfranchisemnt.


The race isn't decided by the popular vote. If it was, presumably all the candidates would have campaigned very differently and it's impossible to know what the result would have been (leave alone the conundrums with the caucus sates and Michigan and Florida). It's as though we were playing a game of chess, and I was winning, and you said, you know. . .if we we're playing checkers, I'd be ahead. And I looked at the board, and yes you would be, but if we were playing checkers I don't think I would have played it this way.

I suppose the bottom line is, can arguments like this convince a large number of super-delegates to ignore delegate totals and switch over to Clinton giving her the race. If they were secretly looking for a way to give the nomination Clinton.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good thoughts, as usual.

But what about the supposed "book bag" story? Hillary claimed to have thrown her book bag across her dorm room in April of 1968 upon hearing of MLK's death. Problem with this??? No one used book bags back then! Make believe...she does better in that world.