Saturday, May 31, 2008

It's Pointless to Argue About Michigan . . .

. . . because Planet Hillary simply is not interested in honest debate. (h/t Plunder)

Nonetheless, consider this. Forty percent of the voters cast a ballot for "Uncommitted." In other words, those forty percent took the time to go to the polls and to pull the lever/punch the chad/fill the oval/touch the screen for NotHillary. So if we just give Hillary her delegates and leave it at that, are we really "counting all the votes" in the sense of making them count?1 We aren't. The people who voted Not Hillary expressed wishes that are being ignored under the "solution" proposed by the Clinton campaign.

The truly "count every vote" solution would be to subtract from Hillary's vote total those voting NotHillary and tally her delegates based on those votes.

Of course that will not satisfy Hillary. The Tubbs-Jones complaint betrays the strategy we all know is at work. A half-strength delegation does put Hillary any closer to Obama in terms of the number of delegates needed. But a full-strength delegation gives the appearance of diluting the magnitude of Obama's lead, and the whole game is convincing the supers that the voting result is sorta kinda a tie.

I'll admit I have doubts about Obama as a candidate. His experience is thin, he isn't enough of a politician to ditch his fringier friends, etc. But the Hillary campaign's craven, cynical, dishonest closing argument has not simply finished her with me. The whole enterprise so infuriates me that I have difficulty respecting people who will not join in denouncing it, much less those who continue to mouth such nonsense.

1This being the only sense in which the "Count every vote" trope makes any sense at all, given that the votes have been literally counted. Planet Hill doesn't just want them counted, they want them to be given effect.

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