Greg Saunders at This Modern World has it exactly right. The nut graf:
Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all of the other Democratic candidates competed under the same rules and Clinton lost. Now she’s trying to work the refs and is trying to change any rules that might keep her from winning. That’s understandable, but when you wrap your attempts to move the goalposts in a veneer of moral superiority and question the values of your opponents (specifically, questioning whether or not Obama supporters believe in voting rights), don’t be surprised if you piss a lot of people off.
Tbogg weighed in yesterday with a post making some of the same points, and received a fair amount of flak. His response:
I’m not going to reward bad behavior by voting for the person who would destroy the party unless they get the nomination. I don’t believe that she is going to get the nomination but if she were to somehow pull enough strings to basically rip it from Barack Obama’s hands, there is no way in hell that she could win. I’m not talking about people who are hard core supporters of either one of them, I’m talking about people who would be so disgusted by her actions and the process that they would sit on their hands rather than vote for her. I know it would happen and you know it would happen.
To put it another way: Hillary Clinton is like a mother standing on a bridge threatening to throw her baby in the river unless she is named Mother of the Year.
That last point may be true, poor baby but I wonder, if in our current political climate if setting, manipulating and changing, very arbitrary rules is not the essence of political skill… it seems quite arbitrary to disenfranchise a couple states worth of delegates because a caucus date. Set the rule, unset the rule, arbitrary political practice.
L DeGroff
May 22nd, 2008
The issue with Michigan is somewhat different from Florida. In Michigan Obama and the other candidates took their name off the ballot. Had they been on there, and the primary contested it’s quite possible, even likely that he would have won. Apparently only about 8% of the voters went to the polls — and Hillary barely won 50%.
Bob Cornwall
May 24th, 2008