Democratic primary

Some aspects of the primary elections (for both parties) have been fairly humorous. However, Hillary Clinton's campaign and supporters stopped being cute and funny long ago and have now definitely moved into the annoying and ridiculous category. I have a number of different grievances with that campaign, their ads, and their tactics. I just want to talk about one in this post.

Over the weekend the Democratic Party's Rules and Bylaws Committee met to decide how to deal with Florida and Michigan. This, in itself, is a farce because last year it was already decided to not count Florida and Michigan because they broke the rules. In fact, Hillary pushed for that herself. For the sake of argument, let's pretend that meeting to discuss this again actually makes sense.

It turns out that Barack Obama pulled his name from the Michigan primary because it did not count. The committee decided to award delegates 69/59 for Clinton/Obama based on a number of different factors. This angered the Clinton supporters. Strangely enough, Hillary could only win 55% of the vote without her arch-nemesis. That would have put her at 73 delegates. Not a big difference, but they are still mad about that.

There still has to be some sort of penalty for breaking the rules, so the voting power of each delegate was halved. That also ticked off the Clinton supporters, since she won in both those states. I say "won," but that is in the same sense as I "win" in tennis if nobody is on the other side of the court.

So the Clinton supporters are all up in arms because they want the warped results of these illegal primaries counted. The really pathetic thing is that they do not do or care about the math. Even with all the numbers playing out the way they want, Obama would still be winning by a lot.

Consider Michigan going 73/55 with full votes to the delegates. Instead of just gaining 5 votes then Hillary gains 18. That's 13 more. Wahoo. Now to Florida, where it could be 105/67. Instead of Hillary just gaining 19, she gains twice that (38). So if it all goes their way, Hillary Clinton only ends up with 32 more votes. Another insignificant dent in Obama's lead.

This is just ridiculous. In the mean time Hillary acts as a wedge for the Democratic party, slowly turning it against itself.

For more information, check out:
http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080601/NEWS07/806010566
http://www.barackobama.com/resultscenter/index.php
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-04-27-1.html