I have not been posting much lately, mainly because I have been very busy... but a lot has been going politically on which has gotten me riled up, I just have not been able to blog about it. I'm just bursting to be able to discuss the injustice of the Bear Stearns/JP Morgan bailout, but I'll save that for another day.
However, for today, you might want to read this article about how there is essentially no chance for Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic presidential nomination. I've been reading shadows of this argument for a few weeks now, especially in reading through the lines in various NY Times articles... however nobody has really come right out and made the argument like I've seen it here.
One big fact has largely been lost in the recent coverage of the Democratic presidential race: Hillary Rodham Clinton has virtually no chance of winning.
Her own campaign acknowledges there is no way that she will finish ahead in pledged delegates. That means the only way she wins is if Democratic superdelegates are ready to risk a backlash of historic proportions from the party’s most reliable constituency.
Unless Clinton is able to at least win the primary popular vote — which also would take nothing less than an electoral miracle — and use that achievement to pressure superdelegates, she has only one scenario for victory. An African-American opponent and his backers would be told that, even though he won the contest with voters, the prize is going to someone else.
People who think that scenario is even remotely likely are living on another planet.
But even some of Clinton’s own advisers now concede that she cannot win unless Obama is hit by a political meteor. Something that merely undermines him won't be enough. It would have to be some development that essentially disqualifies him.Simple number-crunching has shown the long odds against Clinton for some time.
But let’s assume a best-case scenario for Clinton, one where she wins every remaining contest with 60 percent of the vote (an unlikely outcome since she has hit that level in only three states so far — her home state of New York, Rhode Island and Arkansas).
Even then, she would still be behind Obama in delegates.
That means Clinton would need either some of those pledged delegates to switch their support — which technically they can do, though it would be unlikely — or for the white-dominated group of superdelegates to join forces with her to topple Obama.
To foster doubt about Obama, Clinton supporters are using a whisper and pressure campaign to make an 11th-hour argument to party insiders that he would be a weak candidate in November despite his superior standing at the moment.
“All she has left is the electability argument,” a Democratic official said. "It’s all wrapped around: Is there something that makes him ultimately unelectable?”
Her advisers say privately that the nominee will be clear by the end of June. At the same time, they recognize that the nominee probably is clear already.
What has to irk Clintons’ aides is that they felt she might finally have him on the ropes, bruised badly by the Wright fight and wobbly in polls. But the bell rang long ago in the minds of too many voters.
Comments