Rossputin.com: Rational Thinking About Our World

see "Both Obama and Clinton camps claim lead in popular votes", AP, 4/23/08
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gddKleD2qYirWThIy2QEDnn5Z1TAD907Q61G0

Hillary Clinton is on the campaign trail claiming that she leads Barack Obama in the popular vote. To get there, she's including the vote counts from Florida and Michigan, the latter of which did not even have Obama's name on the ballot.

The AP notes that even if you accept Clinton's counting method (which of course nobody does, but I'm glad she's trying), her lead is not likely to last long since she's likely to lose North Carolina by a wide margin and will probably not be able to make up that gap with the small contests after North Carolina.

The reason this is so beautiful for non-Democrats is that it adds to the somewhat legitimate arguments Clinton can make to the "super-delegates", trying to convince them to swing the nomination to her.

She does have a serious argument about her winning the big "blue states", whereas Obama has won a lot of caucuses in states which are likely to go for McCain anyway. If she could claim, even in a tortured Clintonesque way, that she won the popular vote, that would tremendously damage Obama's perceived inevitability, though I believe he's still inevitable at this point.

I and others have written about it before, but it bears repeating: There's simply no way the Democratic super-delegates can give the nomination to Clinton without costing the party the Black vote that they can not win without...and maybe costing them that vote for the next two or three federal elections.

The beauty of the situation is two-fold. First, the better Hillary believes her case is, the more likely she is to fight all the way into the Denver Convention. Second, the better she can make her core voters, especially single women, believe her case is, the more likely they will not support Obama when he eventually gets the nod.

The type of voters who supported Hillary in Pennsylvania, for example, including particularly "Reagan Democrats" who like their churches and guns, are far more likely to vote McCain than Obama. There is a similar demographic in Ohio, and in parts of Florida which the liberal media don't even know exist. In other words, in crucial states for the Democrats, Obama really is the far weaker candidate. But no matter how weak he is not, it will never bother me to see him tarnished even further, decreasing his chances of being our next president.

[For those of you who haven't been reading my work for a long time, let me make very clear that my problem with Obama and Hillary has nothing to do with their race or gender, but with their utter lack of respect for liberty, free markets, or our Constitution.]