Why Hillary Clinton is staying in the race.
People usually base this conclusion on the idea that she can't possibly win in November if she gets the nomination after a floor fight that leaves then Democratic Party a wreck. They either think she's in denial about the damage it'll do to the Party if the supers give her the nomination, or she just wants to see Obama lose and doesn't care if she loses too.
The first would be really stupid. I can think of a lot of unflattering adjectives that can be fairly applied to Senator Clinton, but "dumb" is absolutely not one of them. There's no question she's aware of the strain this would put on the Party.
The second would be extremely petty. Now, I know the Clintons have a reputation for being vindictive, but it sure didn't stop her from going and asking Richard Mellon Scaife for an endorsement, or running ads on Rush Limbaugh's show. Clearly holding a grudge isn't more important to her than winning.
So what's left? I think Clinton and her campaign must think that McCain is a laughably weak candidate. She thinks she can beat him even if the Democratic Party is a smoking ruin in the aftermath of Denver. This might mean she's preposterously overconfident, but after the sort of campaign she's run against Obama, I think "overconfident" is one of those unflattering adjectives we can apply fairly to Senator Clinton.
This also means that the attacks on Obama's electability are part of a huge scam, but we knew that already. It means that she probably thinks there's no way her attacks could actually make it so that Obama will lose to McCain, so there's really no downside to her continuing as long as she's got even a slim chance of being the nominee (and thus, in her mind, being a shoo-in for the Presidency).
Note: I originally posted this as a comment here, but thought it was long enough to merit its own post.
Yeah, I think you're right.
Moreover, I think Hillary is right. I think McCain is a pretty weak candidate. As Josh keeps saying, he's running even with the Democrats now, and this is going to be the low point for the Democratic nominee.
In short, the Democratic primary is being fought so hard because it may be 75% of the game this time around.
April 27, 2008 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
Foolish foolish foolish...Dukakis was 15 points ahead of George Sr. in July of 1988 too. and how could w be re-elected with what was going on in Iraq? And now it looks like we have a candidate that despite infinite funding and constant praise from MSNBC, Stephanie Miller, Dowd, etc. etc. couldn't deliver one big state. Not one--besides IL.
AND, he is also a candidate that dragged his feet to disenfranchise Florida and Michigan voters.
Hillary is still in the race because more people have voted for her so far, which should count for something, right?
April 27, 2008 9:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
A week ago that was not the case. In two weeks time it will once again cease to be the case. Do you really mean to say that she has stayed this long in the campaign simply because for two weeks in late April and early May she would briefly command a lead in "the" popular vote? Surely not?
April 27, 2008 9:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
No. Clinton does not lead in popular vote. Not even if you count the pre-season exhibition games of Florida and Michigan, ignoring how fundamentally dishonest and dishonourable a thing that would be.
April 27, 2008 11:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
You could very well be correct. Once we get back to states that no Democrat can win in November, Obama may again pull ahead, but nonetheless, it's a compelling reason to stay in the election campaign, that in May of 2008 you have more popular votes than any other candidate--and you have won all the big states and the big states than hold their primaries like actual elections, not bully-sessions.
As a progressive, I'm glad we still have one candidate in the race fighting for universal health care, which she has been doing since 1993.
April 27, 2008 9:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will skip over the troll and agree with the original poster.
Sen. Clinton knows McCain is weak.
I think the thing she refuses to realize is how much of the country really doesn't like her.
Clinton has consistently had the highest "negativity" polls of any candidate and is currently getting right wing support because as weak as McCain is, they have a chance against Clinton.
Both Clinton and the VRWC (and Fox, and ABC, and CNN) know that Obama will beat McCain in November. Thus the "unholy alliance."
April 27, 2008 9:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hillary only leads in the popular vote IF you include Florida & Michigan.
That's a little dishonest, dontcha' think?
The way the Democratic party measures victory is by delegate count. Period. Last time I checked the numbers, Hillary was mathematically out of contention.
April 27, 2008 9:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
So is Obama. Neither candidate can win on the basis of the pledged delegates. More importantly, though, is the shift in the narrative around the super delegates. Both Howard Dean and Barack Obama both conceded today that the super delegates will cast their votes on the basis of their view of the electability of the candidates. That is an incredible concession that seems to have been overlooked by Obama's supporters today. As usual, Obama himself is out in front of the echo chamber. He is planning to make his case for electability with the super delegates. I think he has information that leads him to believe he is going to win Indiana.
April 27, 2008 11:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Certainly Obama's spreadsheet of election predictions from late Jan has him winning Indiana (interestingly enough, by about the same margin that his campaign was predicting that he would win NC). Evidently, then, his demographic number crunchers must feel that the state is fertile ground for his message. More to the point, however, if he thinks that he is going to win IN he is in good company. Nearly every polling firm working in the state thinks the same thing, including SUSA (ARG is the only one still predicting a Clinton victory).
April 28, 2008 1:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'd say any projections based on January are completely obsolete and ready for the incinerator.
April 28, 2008 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I don't think it's a concession; it's a repositioning. Previously the line had been that the supers should back the pledged delegate leader. At this point, Obama is certain to be the pledged delegate leader. So why would he back off that line now unless he knows he has the superdelegate support he needs independent of that? Maybe he's already successfully made his case with enough of the supers, regardless of Indiana.
April 28, 2008 3:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
The DNC is not seating the delegates but 2.3 million people did go out and vote. Actually, Obama campaigned in Florida too. He spent millions on nation-wide cable spots. He had active groups in MI urging them to vote "other."
It's just the truth, so, no I don't think it's dishonest to say that those votes should be counted. Especially since the good people of MI and Florida (of all states!) will be voting in November. Obama will have a tough time in those swing states since he was not an advocate for them counting or at least getting to re-vote.
April 27, 2008 9:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
Counting FL is defensible. I think it's a bit silly, but not completely ridiculous.
Counting MI doesn't pass the giggle test, though. Let's overlook that, though, and accept, for the point of argument, that this is true:
If that's the case, shouldn't we count the roughly 240,000 uncommitted votes in MI for Obama? If we do that, Obama's still in the popular lead, even with MI and FL.
April 27, 2008 9:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
"He had active groups in MI urging them to vote "other."
If that's the case, shouldn't we count the roughly 240,000 uncommitted votes in MI for Obama? If we do that, Obama's still in the popular lead, even with MI and FL."
NO--He took his name off the ballot, bad move, but his move to make.
April 27, 2008 9:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, your argument is every bit as specious and internally inconsistent as I thought it would be.
April 27, 2008 9:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
great response. Empty. Hey, that has a familiar feel lately!
April 27, 2008 10:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let's put it another way, then.
Your argument is that the vote in MI is legitimate, despite the fact that Obama wasn't on the ballot, simply because he somehow had his people spread the word that Obama supporters should vote uncommitted, thereby participating.
However, if he was participating by getting his supporters to vote uncommitted, then those uncommitted votes should be counted in his favor, since his participation was the very basis for your contention that MI is legitimate.
You really can't have it both ways.
April 27, 2008 10:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
How many of the uncommited votes should Edwards and others who weren't on the ballot get?
Forget MI. All he has to do is beat her in Indiana and all of her arguments fall apart. She'll concede if he beats her in Indiana. If you want to win the nomination, do everything you can to help him win Indiana.
April 27, 2008 11:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
Anyway, if she stays in, she stays in. I think it might be a problem if she fights to the bitter end in Detroit, but wrapping up the primaries has upsides in terms of party unity. Contrary to popular belief, I doubt she's hurting Obama that badly by staying in the race.
April 27, 2008 11:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
You shouldn't count Florida because Hillary's name recognition at that early point in the campaign would have given her the advantage. For this reason, you cannot consider it as a fair contest.
April 28, 2008 12:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
The popular vote is a talking point sham.
It is irrelevant. It is a delegate race.
Pocket Nines over at DailyKos gives a nice review of the myth of the popular vote.
Check it out here:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/4/23/01152/2705
Also, to even get Senator Clinton ahead in the popular vote requires so many "if's" it is laughable.
Perhaps she should just be renamed the "If" Candidate.
April 27, 2008 9:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
The Clinton's motto seems to be "win now, apologize later" when it comes to campaigning. They don't care who has to get hurt in their quest for their goal.
Hillary is anything but stupid. She knows what dissension she's causing, she just doesn't care. She believes she can make up later after people's emotions aren't so high. That seems to be a pattern.
She knows she can't win the nomination. But she can make Obama unelectable.
By 2012 Obama will have lost the previous election, everyone will be sick of the Republicans, and she can come rescue us.
Let's just hope she doesn't say I told ya so.
April 27, 2008 9:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Some people cared about the popular vote in 2000.
It may be unlikely she can be the nominee, unless the superdelegates realized that he is a very weak general election candidate that has written off Florida and MI and can't win PA or OH.
She is entitled to represent the 15mm or whatever of us that have supported her without being accused of only doing it to bring down Obama. Very arrogant of Obama supporters to say that.
Obama's campaign has done what it can to undermine Hillary too, calling her the "master of a broken system" and all the effort to denegrate (and distort) her universal health care plan. It is a bias to paint her as the negative campaigner and he the pristine one. Not true at all.
April 27, 2008 9:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think everything she does is a lot more deliberately destructive than you do. I don't think her pursuit of the Scaife endorsement was a sign of humility. If it serves her, she'll take it. I think the Clintons are ruthless and people mistake that for toughness. I think the Clintons are arrogant and people mistake that for courage. I think they're attacking Obama without thinking about the consequences for Obama.
I think the success of the next president, or the country, to be precise, is dependent on our ability to build relationships, not only between parties but between countries.
Old politics is Republicans vs. Democrats. That kind of thinking is too small to flourish in the interdependent world of this new century.
When I think of the Clintons, I think of old politics unaware that we really need to move on.
I respect your opinion though. We'll have to disagree on this one.
April 27, 2008 9:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I find it rather amusing that Obama's supposed to exhibit the "new style" of "why can't we just get along", yet when Hillary shows she can sit down with old adversaries (Robert Byrd, Newt Gingrich, Richard Scaife) it's just "cynical politics". Even more amusing is that a recurring theme amongst the "let's work together" bunch here is that Hillary is completely unacceptable as a VP candidate. This is truly bizarre. Beside the idea that the new kids can't seem to fully fathom forgiveness and compromise, they also seem willing to toss out a woman who's earned half the vote and brought out quite a lot of enthusiasm this year in exchange for a nobody that will likely spark 1/10th of the support. If they express it as succinctly as it seems to come across, white blue-collars and old people aren't important to the party and should fade away, while women are okay, but we prefer 3rd wave feminists (read: minorities) to those rather crufty old 2nd wave feminists.
You may think these millions of voters don't matter (including those who physically went to the polls in Michigan and Florida), but may I suggest that dismissing a bloc of equal size to your own would be a rather large mistake? (And I say exactly the same in terms of dismissing Obama voters, even though it is fun to get them riled up with a latte or kool-aid comment here and there).
April 28, 2008 9:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
We simply disagree, I respect your opinion too, and maybe there is a certain mix of cynisim-and-reality that I am employing.
I think the republicans don't want to work with any democrat to reverse the dramatic tilt toward inequality that has been going on for 30 years--save for a period during the clinton administration. No Republicans will work to achieve universal health care, especially if whomever it is, does not even seek that. Republicans don't want to work with liberal to use government, regulation, and the tax code to revise our unfettered capitalistic economy into one that is more managed-capitalism, and that is exactly what we desperately need. Do you think they are sitting there wanting to have their taxes raised, inconvenienced for the environment? etc etc.
It would be great if there were something so special about obama that he would be able to get these interests to sit down and concede anything, but based on past experience with them, and based on his performance in the primary, I am not one who believes he is messianic in his ability to change the right wing. Just look at what Hannity et al have already unleashed on him.
April 27, 2008 10:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Obama is not expecting that the Republicans will all of a sudden play nice. He's counting on an energized electorate to either pressure their existing Republican congress person to go along, or to (preferable) get a Democrat elected instead. Obama says over and over, that gaining the White House isn't enough. There must be a governing majority created.
Remember when Obama spoke of Reagan being a transformational president? Reagan didn't move toward the center, he instead set the country on the conservative course its been on for the last 25yrs. I think that Obama believes that now is the opportunity for a Democratic president could similarly set the country back on its traditionally progressive course. Do we have the courage of our political convictions to find out?
The brand of centrism the Clintons are offering joins a neocon foreign policy, with a corporatist economic policy, with a liberal social policy. Is this the combination of policies that we want?
April 27, 2008 10:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't it depend on how those policies are balanced? Johnson let the demands of his neocon foreign policy destroy his liberal social policy. Will Clinton make the same mistake? I don't know.
What Obama believes is irrelevant unless it's true or he can somehow make it true. Obama hasn't shown me that he really understands what the Progressive course is, let alone how to return the county to it. He's not a visionary, he's an opportunist. If you think the country has been on an uninterrupted Conservative course for 25 years, try to imagine what the country would look like if the Clintons had not broken the Conservative wave.
April 27, 2008 11:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
A neocon foreign policy and corporatist economic policies are plainly not progressive. Balance isn't the issue. These two policies don't belong at all.
Your paragraph - repeated below with some minor modifications - now rings just as true for me.
"What Clinton believes is irrelevant unless it's true or she can somehow make it true. Clinton hasn't shown me that she really understands what the Progressive course is, let alone how to return the county to it. She's not a visionary, she's an opportunist."
So, the truth is that none of us knows how either candidate will perform once in office. We only have our opinions and feelings to go by. That's why we have democratic elections.
Lastly, Bill receives a decidedly mixed score card over his two terms. While positive things occurred, budget surplus, etc., the negative things which occurred helped to usher in this disastrous Bush admin.
April 28, 2008 1:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Positive things occurred" - passive tense, don't give credit to Bill.
"The negative things that occurred helped to usher in this disastrous Bush admin" - so let's see, is that Bill's penis we're talking about? Or that Al Gore won the popular vote even while running against his own Administration and being as exciting as sponge cake, but the Supreme Court intervened? Or that Clinton didn't get the health care package passed? Or that he put so many black people to work in government? Or that 4 American facilities were bombed abroad in his 8 years? Or that we converted more to a technical services and marketing economy which had the obvious side-effect of decreasing farming and manufacturing needs? Or that he avoided a land war in Yugoslavia while pushing out Milosevic and didn't clamp down on all that Hussein corruption in Iraq and backed out of Somalia without making a long-term commitment? Go ahead, don't be shy - tell us how Unka Bill paved the way for the Bush Administration and drove his own party into a ditch. We'll sit by the fire and warm our toesies.
April 28, 2008 9:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Wrong!
Hillary's "more voted for me" lie gives "0" votes to Obama in Michigan, although he has about 31 of 36 delegates chosen from the "uncommitted" voters and also gives "0" votes for all the voters in caucus states.
If only Michigan is eliminated and Florida is counted, Hillary is still more than 200,000 votes behind Obama. See
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html
Publius1, you have clearly drunk too deeply from the Clinton kool-aid which has dimmed your powers of independent assessment of facts.
That said, Hillary and Bill are NOT helping the chances of their party to take back the White House this November. Hillary actually loses support (and depresses participation in the primaries) when she keeps up the negative attacks on Obama. All the party pols were appalled (ouch!) when she said that John McCain was ready to assume command but that Obama was not.
No one would mind if Hillary continued the campaign on the issues - including her charge that Obama's campaign is seriously misrepresenting her health care plan. But dealing the race card from time to time and denying Obama's qualified to be president are not legitimate themes in a primary contest.
April 28, 2008 12:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry to disagree, but I think the Clinton's have every intention of taking Barack down. It's their way or the highway...
April 28, 2008 1:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Someone please explain why Obama should be able to count "uncommitted votes" in MI as his?? Let me remind you, he voluntarily took his name off the ballot. I would argue (and did at the time) that it was stupid. Hillary left her name on the ballot...People voted for her despite his groups actively telling people to vote "uncommitted". Now in the discussions of counting popular vote you people want "uncommitted" to county for Obama--now who wants it "both ways". This is very tortured logic!
As for the people that says she can't claim florida b/c she had more name recognition going in, two things--1. He campaigned by airing national cable tv spots--totally violating the spirit of the 'no campaign' pledge. Hillary did not do this. 2. Maybe he should earn his name recognition so we can all get to know him a little better before he thinks he should be the president.
April 28, 2008 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
You want us to interpret "uncommitted" voting as support for Obama when it serves your contention that Obama participated in Michigan, but you don't want us to interpret "uncommitted" voting as support for Obama when it comes to counting the votes.
As for the fact that he voluntarily took his name off the ballot: of course he did. That's the basic reason that the results of the MI primary are irrelevant to any sort of popular vote count in a way that the FL results aren't.
April 28, 2008 11:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
No, the reason the election in Michigan and Florida is legitimate is that 2.3 million voters went to the polls to vote for the nominee for their political party.
I don't want votes for "uncommitted" to count for Obama under ANY circumstances. many of those were voters that would have voted for Edwards. The only votes that should count are for Hillary since she had her name on the ballot.
Him taking his name off the ballot does not invalidate the election. His efforts to cheat by covertly campaigning in those states notwithstanding, he lost, big.
The DNC may not seat those delegates, but in any discussion of the popular vote, these votes should count, using very straightforward logic.
April 28, 2008 3:51 PM | Reply | Permalink