The Last Dog

Conventional wisdom outside the blogosphere seems divided between those who think Senator Clinton will bow out of the campaign in the next few days and those who think she’s in it ’til the last dog dies.

Most of us bloggers think the demise of the last dog won’t even slow her down. In fact, I think the pooch may have croaked already.

The Daily Mail (not the strongest source) has a story running in tomorrow’s edition saying she’s going to re-open the Florida and Michigan issues and fight on to the convention. In a rational world, this plan would make no sense. The DNC committee vote was unanimous on Florida. Even Clinton’s supporters on the committee voted for it. There were eight votes against the final resolution on the Michigan vote. But even if Clinton gets all the Michigan votes she thinks she is owed it would not give her the nomination.

However, we’re dealing with the Clinton campaign. Who’s talking about rational?

The Clinton campaign is pushing the Senator’s alleged lead in the popular vote. This fella says there is no such lead. See also “Clinton Math.” As you regular readers know, I don’t do numbers. Look at the evidence and make up your own minds.

On the other hand, Mike Madden writes,

Clinton went ahead and declared herself the winner of the national popular vote Sunday, based in part on the Puerto Rico results and in part on the primaries she won in Michigan and Florida, which the Democratic National Committee recognized, in some fashion, at Saturday’s meeting. “We are winning the popular vote, now there can be no doubt,” she said. “The people have spoken, and you have chosen your candidate.”

But most major presidential candidates wouldn’t have spent six hours dancing to Willie Colón on the back of a pickup truck near the end of a close national campaign that they still thought they could win. This couldn’t possibly have been the most efficient use of Hillary Clinton’s time, unless she had nothing better to do than try for a few more votes in a primary where she was already virtually guaranteed a victory.

There are two remaining primaries, South Dakota and Montana. Obama is comfortably ahead in the polls for both. I read somewhere today that Clinton isn’t even going there; she’s heading back to New York now.

Word is that after Tuesday Obama will need only a couple dozen superdelegates to clinch the nomination, and he’s supposed to have at least that many “in the bank.” Many anticipate that after the Tuesday elections he will trot out his remaining superdelegates and declare himself the winner. My sense is that most of the Dem leadership is desperate to declare a winner and get on with the general election campaign. If Obama gets to the magic number this week, I think the party heads will be solidly with him. And if Clinton continues to fight the nomination she will look more and more pathetic.

4 thoughts on “The Last Dog

  1. IIRC correctly, Mitt Romney was ahead of McCain in the popular vote when Romney dropped out. Perhaps he perceived that hanging around and complaining actually accomplishes little.

  2. I suspect they’re gonna pull the plug on her after Tuesday. But I am looking forward to her riding a mechanical bull when she campaigns in Montana. Really, don’t be surprised if she shows up wearing buckskins and a coonskin cap to try to woo some of Montana’s more remote population. If riding in the back of a Toyota pick-up truck like a Taliban fighter and singing boleros in Puerto Rico seemed like a good campaign ploy, there’s no telling what to expect in Montana.

  3. Perhaps, if Senator Clinton had been effective in efforts to create a single, national primary system, the “popular vote” might matter.

    But we have a federal system involving individual states, who each make their own decisions, and apportion their own delegates. And they have. So this “popular vote” thing is meaningless noise.

    It’s not the team that gets the most hits that wins the baseball game, it’s the team that scores the most runs.

    Besides, speaking personally, I’m not a fan of a math that claims to be all about the importance of the popular vote while throwing out my vote and the votes of my neighbors who spent hours involved in casting them, along with those of all the other Democrats in other caucus states. Who was it who was talking about Zimbabwe, again?

    But of course, that’s just me being sexist again.

  4. “It’s not the team that gets the most hits that wins the baseball game, it’s the team that scores the most runs.”

    A better analogy is: It’s the team that wins four games that wins the World Series, not the team that scores the most total runs in the seven games.

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