Tuesday, June 10, 2008

AFTER MATH: HOW DEMOCRATS FAIL MATH, LOSE ELECTIONS,THINK MC2=E AND THEN IMPLODE.


This has been a historic primary. Historic for many reasons but it was historic in one way that hasn't gotten a lot of attention. This was the first time in the history of Democratic Presidential primaries that the person with the most votes lost.

This came about because the insane Democratic apportionment system which gives almost as many delegates to a landslide loser as a landslide winner, didn't produce a clear cut nominee. So super delegates are asked to do something you hate to see a Democratic elected official do -- exercise their political judgment and pick the candidate they think has the best chance to win in the fall.

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Howard Dean insisted it had to be done now even though the convention was 2 months away. And why? Because Pelosi, Reid, Dean and the Obama wing of the party are trying to sell a candidate with a resume and a list of accomplishments that you can read faster than a value meal menu and they didn't think Obama could stand up to 2 more months of Hillary Clinton. Given the way Clinton finished and Obama limped to the finish line they might have been right.

But what did super delegates do when they exercised their political judgment? They looked at the popular vote and decided to choose the candidate the majority of voters in the Democratic Party voted against. They looked at the delegate count and saw that, not counting the 55 disputed Michigan delegates, Obama ended with a delegate lead of 77 out of over 4000 even though the democratic apportionment system awarded Obama over 700 delegates in states where he lost by landslide margins. They saw that Clinton was the winner of the 13 biggest and most populous states in the country won every big state in the northeast, took the industrial midwest, the entire southwest from Oklahoma to Nevada, Kentucky, W.Va Tennesse, Florida, Michigan, and California by landslide margins and decided they wanted the loser. And now they've got him and half the Democratic Party is ready to defect.

Clinton's 19 million voters are not politicians.They wont say one thing and do another. If 50% - 80% of them say they will won't vote for Obama they wont vote for Obama. They will vote for McCain or a third party candidate or not vote but they will not vote for Obama.

Exit polls showed 80% of Clinton voters in Kentucky said they won't vote for Obama, The same is true for W.Va. Exit polls in Ohio and Pa, showed that at least 50% of Clinton voters said they won't vote for Obama. In New York the number was 30% but its a good bet that if 30% are saying it 60% will do it. So how is Obama going to possibly win without the support of half the Democratic Party? Almost everyone agrees the Democrats needed Florida to win. So what are Obama's chances of winning Florida? About the same as Fidel Castro's.

The way it looks now there are going to be mass defections from the Democratic party and its not going to be as Clyburn or Obama may try and make it appear, over race. Its going to be because of an spectacularly unqualifed candidate, an unfair process, blatant sexism, party elders that played favorites and said nothing when Obama attacked Clinton in an underhanded way but was all over Clinton if she hit back and pressuring super delegates to declare now and to declare for the pledged delegate winner when the all the primary results taken into account showed that Clinton was clearly the stronger candidate.

They short circuited a process that should have been allowed to play out at the convention by more of out of their own fears than anything else. And by not letting it play out at the convention all they did was create a hornets nest of angry and resentful Clinton voters who felt that Obama was the candidate the party elders wanted in the first place and stacked the deck against Clinton. And now more than half the party is going to defect in the fall.
Because the results of the primary was so close and both were groundbreaking candidacies and given how much there was at stake, there was nothing very smart, politically or otherwise, about not giving everyone time to let things sort themselves out.

If they had allowed super delegates to take their time and wait until August, let everyone have their say, let the process play itself out, let everyone air their thoughts and feelings and let everyone make their case until a decision was made at the convention there might have been time to mend fences and everyone would have gotten what they had to say out of their system which is partly what the convention is supposed to be about in the first place.But that would have been too smart for Pelosi and Dean.

Instead the Democratic leadership ( if that isnt an oxymoron I dont know what is) decided to play Mayor Daly with Clinton voters ( for those who don't get the reference Google "Mayor Daly,Democratic Convention, 1968), out of fear that the process would go on too long and possibly damage the Obama kewpie doll, so they shouldn't be too surprised if what they get at the convention is protests of every kind, delegates getting up and walking out, delegates refusing to make the nomination unanimous by acclimation, a party split in half and the potential of Obama giving his acceptance speech in a half empty convention hall.

What the powers that be in the Democratic party want in August is a coronation and so they forced the issue, and super delegates actually ignored the math instead of using it. Then they selected the weakest, most unqualified unprepared candidate for President in history. Which may be this year's punch line to the question, "how are the Democrats going to lose this time?" Instead of a coronation what they might have to look forward to is a revolution. Unless they can figure out some way to fix it.

15 comments:

Dragonfly said...

Dear Marc and bloggers, if you are interested in writing a letter of protest to Howard Dean, please add your thoughts to our blog - we are trying to get to 1000 letters by tomorrow at noon. Please spread the word. Thank you (and I hope the link came through).

http://blog.pumapac.org/2008/06/08/1000-reasons-puma-democrats-are-protesting-the-2008-presidential-election/

Anonymous said...

Bravo!

Another brilliant post which expresses what many of us are thinking and feeling...
but not able to express as eloquently or forcefully.

Hope you are finding a way to share widely as you were able to do with taylormarsh.

(Realize she's become an Obama supporter...so not sure that is influencing where your great posts appear there.)

But if not there...other places...I hope.

Your insightful and powerful writing is needed now MORE THAN EVER!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

CORRECTION
to above.

Meant to say (referring to Tay.ormarsh.com)

"Realize she's become an Obama supporter...so not sure that is influencing whether your great posts appear there."

Anonymous said...

Marc

I first became aware of your great talents as a poster at TM, however, I am now a poster at bitterpoliticz and i hope that some day you will come and give us another great post like this. You capture everything that myself and my husband feel. And you do it with such finese. But I still come and look for your great posts as they are so inspiring to me. Keep up the the great work!!!

Anonymous said...

Great post.

I'm trying to regain my life and only read blogs at night instead of ALL DAY (I used to read the comments at TM while I made phone calls for Hillary).

I still can't sleep well because I'm just haunted by how the Dem Party, the DNC and the media tore both Clintons apart.

Still hoping something will happen to make the super ds see the light in Denver...

Anonymous said...

Marc,
I have been reading your blog for months. It is the most well-reasoned, insightful writing on the primaries that I've come across in the blogosphere.

Anonymous said...

Marc,
If the democrats will not wake up, I'll vote for McCain.

We should boycott Taylor Marsh, she easily give up.

Anonymous said...

great stuff Marc!

your blog is probably the best written one around...

i've quit watching the news so just get updates from your site and noquarter and several others...

i've just set up a website last night that i hope will be a platform for Hillary supporters voting for McCain can get involved and protest at Obama events...

check it out at http://aHillarybMccainAmericaFirst.com/

its still pretty rough looking but should improve greatly in the next few hours... still trying to sort out google maps so that people can find events near them etc etc...

any volunteers to help with the writing, organizing of the site feel free to contact me...

keep up the great work!

-gerard

Anonymous said...

The DNC learned it's leasons well from the republicans in 2000. They saw that the American people really did nothing when the Supreme court appointed George W. Bush our 43rd president.

The DNC decided that why not just find a candidate of our own, reapportion the small caucus states, disenfranchise a few large states then appoint the candidate we want in a 30 person committee.

What will the voters do? They didn't do anything but complain in 2000, who cares, we have our puppet!

SOOOO Scary to be an American in the 21st century. I guess we are not only "post racial" but we are also a "post democratic nation".

Anonymous said...

Hats off to you!
Since recently banning mainstream print and broadcast media sources, I've narrowed it down to visiting a handful of editorial news sites and PUMA Pac. Your political insights, 'wordsmithing' and bottom-line candidness has your column at the top of my short list.
Thanks for what you do here.
Looking forward to your next read.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Marc. This is exactly how I see it; I have been frustrated because I live in a state Obama won handily (WI), but I know full well from the other states I've lived in (NE, IA, CA, FL, CO) that Obama can't win the election as POTUS without massive voter fraud in his favor.

The way the DNC has behaved though, it makes me wonder if they've already set it up to rig the election in the fall! Because I don't trust the DNC; I don't believe them. They must know this man cannot win; Obama cannot win NE, a state he won via the caucus system. (Mrs. Clinton might've won in the fall, mind you, and the nonbinding primary showed that it was much closer -- 49% Obama, 46% Clinton -- when it was run a few weeks ago.) I doubt Obama can win CO -- the demographics are against him, and really, it's conservative Dems who win there, or at least moderate Dems (Obama is not seen a as a moderate Dem there by the friends I still have there).

I don't know why Howard Dean is behaving the way he is; it's like he's still mad he didn't win in 2004 and he's going to pout about it by taking out the strongest candidate we had left, Hillary R. Clinton. (I still think he pushed John Edwards out too soon. Can't prove that Dean pushed Edwards out, mind, but that's what it sure looked like.)

Nancy Pelosi apparently has no conception of the hornet's nest she's helped to kick up (good analogy, btw). Neither does Harry Reid, although at least in Reid's case, he can't get immediately voted out. Ms. Pelosi had best worry at least in part about Cindy Sheehan -- because Ms. Sheehan is definitely anti-war and Ms. Pelosi hasn't really done very much to get the US on out of there.

My two Democratic Senators were pressured to support Obama, and both supported him the day after the last primary ended. It's possible Feingold would've supported him anyway, but I doubt Herb Kohl would've, as Kohl used to own several businesses and still owns the Milwaukee Bucks professional basketball franchise; Kohl knows that you have to be a capable chief executive or you don't get anywhere. (At least, I hope he's learned that from the trials and tribulations the Bucks have endured over the past few years, if he hadn't learned it before.)

I keep trying to wake up from this nightmare, where our voices have been taken away from us -- where the Democratic Party, my home of 24 years, basically told me it didn't want me any more by putting up this inexperienced, unqualified candidate and trying to ram him down my throat.

Well, I did what I could -- I'm now an Independent (not hard to do in WI, as we don't have to register by party) -- and I will continue to tell my elected representatives that I do not appreciate Obama as the nominee and will not vote for him. I don't care if they talk about Supreme Court justices until they're blue in the face; I still won't vote for him. (The same goes for Roe v. Wade, though I doubt McCain would work for its overturn.)

I think at this point that while I can't vote for McCain, he'd be the lesser of two evils -- he'd be a moderate Republican along the lines of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Obama would be (at best) another Jimmy Carter -- and at worst, perhaps another Warren G. Harding (Harding, as you might know from reading history, was a nice man, personally, but all his associates were crooked).

The Democratic Party is wrong to have brought us to this path. We deserve better. Refusing to let Mrs. Clinton be heard or her delegates be heard or her voters be heard is just asking for trouble -- and trouble, it shall be. (Nonviolent trouble, I hope. But trouble, all the same.)

We've warned you, DNC -- Marc, the other bloggers responding here, and now, me. You are wrong. Back off, and let this play out.

Or prepare yourselves for Pres. McCain.

georgiapeach said...

If they had let it play out until the convention, they would have also had the added benefit of BOTH HRC and BO pivoting to campaign against McCain. He would probably be at least 10 points behind in the polls by now, even without a clear opponent, than polling within the margin of error in an election Democrats should have won in a landslide.

Anonymous said...

"If they had let it play out until the convention, they would have also had the added benefit of BOTH HRC and BO pivoting to campaign against McCain"

Obviously that would have been too smart for them but we may try and force the issue at a new org.

www.thedenvergroup.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

crowd control just might be a problem with a good portion of them MIGHT JUST BE PLEDGED DELEGATES.. inside the convention

ONE FOR HILLARY said...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Philip J. Berg, Esquire
555 Andorra Glen Court, Suite 12
Lafayette Hill, PA 19444-2531
Cell (610) 662-3005
(610) 825-3134
(800) 993-PHIL [7445]
Fax (610) 834-7659

philjberg@gmail.com

A Plea to Democratic SuperDelegates and Delegates to Nominate
the Candidate who can Win in November 2008 - Hillary Clinton


Obama is not the person he has portrayed; a candidate without depth or experience;associations with questionable persons; gaffes numerous and embarrassing; platform leaves a lot to be desired; and credibility an issue with recent "Flip-Flops;"


A Petition that is "A Plea for SuperDelegates
and Delegates to Nominate the Candidate
that can Win in November 2008 - Hillary Clinton"

(Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania – 06/27/08) - Philip J. Berg, Esquire, [Berg is a former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania; former candidate for Governor and U.S. Senate in Democratic Primaries; former Chair of the Democratic Party in Montgomery County; former member of Democratic State Committee; an attorney with progressive view points with offices in Montgomery County, PA and an active practice in Philadelphia, PA] released a Petition calling for "A Plea to Democratic SuperDelegates and Delegates to Nominate the Candidate that can Win in November 2008 - Hillary Clinton" on Petition On Line.
.
The essence of the Petition is that Obama is not the person he has portrayed to the electorate; a candidate without depth or experience; one with associations with questionable persons; one whose gaffes are numerous and embarrassing; one whose platform leaves a lot to be desired; and credibility is an issue with his recent "Flip-Flops;" and his wife has raised issues that are a real concern.

The Democrats can only win in November 2008 with Hillary Clinton, a dynamic leader who has been totally vetted; who won the majority of popular vote and won the big states.

The Petition is at: http://www.PetitionOnline.com/Nov2008/petition.html

Thank you.
Respectfully,
Philip J. Berg