Hillary's Shocking Florida Gambit

[Herb Schaffler]

From New Republic:

21.05.2008


Clinton's Shocking Florida Gambit

Hillary Clinton's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. about counting the results in Florida and Michigan is simply incredible. Her speech compares discounting the Florida and Michigan primaries to vote suppression and slavery:

She said "there's a reason why so many have fought so hard and sacrificed so much. It's because they knew that to be a citizen of this country is to have the right and responsibility to help shape its future. Not just to have your voice heard but to have it count. People have fought hard because they knew their vote was at stake and so was their children's futures.

Those people, she said “refused to accept their assigned place as second-class citizens. Men and women who saw America not as it was, but as it could and should be, and committed themselves to extending the frontiers of our democracy. The abolitionists and all who fought to end slavery and ensure freedom came with the full right of citizenship. The tenacious women and a few brave men who gathered at the Seneca Falls convention back in 1848 to demand the right to vote.”

It's worth repeating: They supported this "disenfranchisement." Here's a [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. , headlined, "Clinton, Obama and Edwards Join Pledge to Avoid Defiant States."
Moreover, it's obviously true that Obama not campaigning, organizing, or advertizing in those states hurt him, and helped the more familiar candidate in Clinton. She decided to campaign to change the rules only after it became her interest to do so.
This gambit by Clinton is simply an attempt to steal the nomination. It's obviously not going to work, because Democratic superdelegates don't want to commit suicide. But this episode is very revealing about Clinton's character. I try not to make moralistic characterological judgments about politicians, because all politicians compromise their ideals in the pursuit of power. There are no angels in this business. Clinton's gambit, however, truly is breathtaking.
If she's consciously lying, it's a shockingly cynical move. I don't think she's lying. I think she's so convinced of her own morality and historical importance that she can whip herself into a moralistic fervor to support nearly any position that might benefit her, however crass and sleazy. It's not just that she's convinced herself it's okay to try to steal the nomination, she has also appropriated the most sacred legacies of liberalism for her effort to do so. She is proving herself temperamentally unfit for the presidency.
--Jonathan Chait

[nohil-billy]

She's definately off the chain with her latest remarks regarding slavery and the sufferage movement. That's all ancient history anyways. All she had to do was go back 8 years ago to December of '00 when the Democrats couldn't count Florida's votes enough.

[Herb Schaffler]

From Andrew Sullivan at Atlantic.com:

Lanny Davis' "Compromise"

26 May 2008 06:00 pm
I guess he does make a good lawyer, if you count pushing the envelope to destroy any semblance of fairness as being a good lawyer. But this should make any sane person [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. :

Go back, in effect, to the status quo ante and make some reasonable and fair adjustments. In Michigan, Clinton received 55 percent of the vote. According to Thegreenpapers.com, she thus should receive 73 pledged delegates based on that percentage. What about the 50 remaining uncommitted delegates, and 7 collectively cast for Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who were also on the ballot? Some of those 50 delegates might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama...

"Totally unfair". The rationale? I hope you're sitting down:

One little known fact: Clinton complied with party rules by allowing her name to remain on the ballot, as did Dodd and Kucinich. Obama was not forced by party rules to remove his name — he chose to do so.

And so he should be punished. The upshot of Davis' chutzpah is that Clinton should get 102 out of 130 delegates in Michigan.
So Michigan isn't penalized for breaking the rules (can you imagine what that precedent will do for future primary schedules?). Clinton isn't punished. She is rewarded with a number of delegates she would never have won in a normal primary. Obama is punished. And Clinton gets almost 78 percent of the delegates from Michigan in a state where she was running neck and neck with Obama before the illegitimate primary.
Recall that 538's [LINK POSTED BY MEMBER] Only Members Can View This No Hillary For President Forum Link. of how Obama would have done in Michigan if it had been counted as a regular state (and not broken the rules) is as follows: 65 to 63 for Obama. There is no conceivable way that Clinton would have won Michigan by a margin of 102 - 28, or 78 to 22 percent, a far bigger margin than Clinton win in any other primary or caucus. And yet that's what the Clintonites are demanding.

This is what they are aiming for: stealing this nomination by the Rules Committe and then corralling the super-delegates to back them. If the supers do not go their way, they have already warned that Florida and Michigan Democrats may not back Obama in the fall.
The thought that these creeps could find their way back into the White House is terrifying