Can we focus on John McCain now please?
I haven’t exactly kept it a secret that I’m a Barack Obama supporter (since John Edwards dropped out of the race, anyway). Now it’s all come full circle and John Edwards has endorsed Barack Obama. So can we please quickly finish up with the remainder of this primary season lunacy and focus on John McCain?
Yeah, Hillary Clinton, everyone knows you’ve lost. You made a valiant effort, and no one can take that away from you, but in the end there could only be one winner and it wasn’t you. It’s time to accept that, graciously admit Barack Obama’s victory, and endorse him so that we can all focus on John McCain now. This latest win in West Virginia? Meaningless. Keep in mind Barack Obama won ten primaries with larger margins of victories than that. That’s why he’s so far in the lead.
Give it up already. Becoming President Pro Tempore of the Senate, which you’re likely to do if you don’t continue pissing off fellow Democrats, is no small accomplishment. Hundreds of millions of United States citizens never get to be president of the country. It’s okay to be one of us regular “hard-working” folks.
May 15th, 2008 at 09:38
Do I have to focus on McCain? He looks like a marmoset or something, and frankly I can’t stand listening to him talk.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:07
Whats with the tone? Geesh. I think that if Fox were hiring for a liberal version of their news channel you might be high on their list of interviewees.
Perhaps future posts could tone down the foaming-sportsfan and up with the scruting of the inscrutable? I know all about jack shit about McCain’s presumable suckyness … and your hillarys a loser victory dance didn’t leave me any more informed. ;) You can do better.
May 15th, 2008 at 12:14
No no no, you are mistaken! Slamming McCain is for another post. This one was just about Clinton dropping out. It wasn’t supposed to be particularly deep; if it was, it’d be longer.
And I don’t think I’m in Fox News territory here. Just look at the numbers. Out of 426 delegates remaining, Obama needs 137 while Clinton needs 308 to reach the threshold of winning. Given that Obama has been outperforming Clinton overall, there’s just no possible way she can outperform him by more than 2:1 in all of the remaining contests and amongst the undecided superdelegates. It’s simply not in the cards. Merely proclaiming the inevitable does not elevate anyone to Fox News levels of absurdity.
May 15th, 2008 at 17:21
Elections are supposed to be allowing voters to speak – voters, not pundits or politicians. I don’t fully understand your system, but it would seem to me that attempts to “call” elections before they are over, especially for reasons of party political expediences, are precisely what turns voters off. Don’t the views of the people in the remaining states count for anything? Don’t they get a say? In the UK, voter turnout is down, precisely because too many people think “my vote doesn’t count”. Institutionalising that “not counting” for reasons of “party unity”, and then trying to convince the same disenfranchised voters that their vote REALLY matters in November is too subtle for the average joe. If democracy matters, it matters. If choosing is important, then let them choose.
Further, terminating elections because the process is “divisive” and the outcome seen by the political elite as foregone conclusion has some truly awful authoritarian precedents.
(If I was to intrude into American politics, I’d point out we had a candidate once who vacuously and imprecisely talked of change, compassion and modernisation. A young man who sounded as visionary as MLK and as glamorous as JFK. He spoke of hope – and building a big tent. He was all things to all men. We voted for him in droves, and he turned out to be Tony Blair. Sometimes it is better to have the devil you know.)
May 15th, 2008 at 17:56
The thing is though, mathematically, this election is already over. Not only can Clinton not win, but with each passing day Obama is accelerating towards the finish line while Clinton is falling even farther behind (in the past three days, Obama has picked up 20 superdelegates). It would only be calling it before it’s over if both candidates had a chance of winning. We’ve gone beyond that point now.
May 15th, 2008 at 18:11
Democracy is bigger than mathematics. Since hundreds of thousands people will, no doubt, judge it worthwhile to turn up and bast their vote – who are you to say they shouldn’t get to do that.
Mathematically, a communist party candidate has zero chance of becoming a US Senator. Would you therefore remove them from all ballot papers, and chuck out the votes of their supporters, in order to keep things tidier. In an democracy, the election process is an end in itself, not just in the result it gives. Otherwise, we’d not bother people voting in occasions when polsters feel they can predict the outcome.
May 15th, 2008 at 18:53
Well, the fact is that all the primaries should happen on a single day, so that each vote is, in fact, much more likely to count. The Dems could even keep their superdelegates for use in close races, if they wanted to.
The system as it is does allow pundits and party heavyweights to have disproportionate influence, by changing the point in time when candidates choose to leave a race. However, despite the taxpayer money that goes into funding the elections, the parties are allowed to set their own rules as to how they choose delegates; they are private organizations, after all.
May 15th, 2008 at 21:36
Doc: In fairness, it is a really weird system. Most nations are used to long periods of campaigning and then elections within really short time periods. The United States primary season is basically a year of campaigning followed by an election that lasts six months. It is very weird. But it also leads to situations that kind of counter-intuitive to people who are familiar with more, for lack of a better word, saner democratic processes.
When the election lasts for months, you can easily have a situation where one candidate is ahead of the other by a sufficient margin that they are the mathematical winner long before all of the final numbers are in. One way to think of it is 53-46 with 90% reporting; that won’t be overturned even though all the votes aren’t in yet. Whether all the rest of the candidates drop out at this point or not does not change the simple fact that the later votes no longer matter.
Why do you think Michigan and Florida got their delegates taken away? It’s because they moved up in the schedule, because they wanted a larger chance of their votes actually counting.
May 20th, 2008 at 22:15
“The thing is though, mathematically, this election is already over.”
Place your bets at http://www.intrade.com/, then. 1:15 odds doesn’t pay off very well, but compared to a mathematical certainty it’s a good bet.
June 3rd, 2008 at 21:44
[...] it’s finally official*. Even though it’s long been inevitable, it’s a relief to know that Barack Obama has finally secured the number of delegates [...]