After advising that "Hillary Should Get Out Now" in a column last week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter was patching a leaky argument in yesterday's column before Clinton wins in Ohio and Texas put a couple of torpedoes below the water line. In his most recent column "Hillary’s Math Problem" he says to "Forget tonight. She could win 16 straight and still lose."
He does a lot of arithmetic to arrive at the conclusion that Democrats should ignore the "will of the people" in Ohio and Texas in order to maintain the integrity of the "will of the people" in the undemocratic Democratic Party nomination process:
"So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal."- Alter
Alter's problem is not math. It is word comprehension. The problem with his thesis is that he conflates a lead in pledged delegates with "the will of the people". The pledged delegate total is many things, but the one thing it is not, is the "will of the people". The pledged delegate lead is polluted by many and significant non-democratic elements in the peculiar byzantine Democratic Party nomination process. Among these are: Caucuses that have absolutely nothing to do with the "will of the people" in their states; Weird delegate allocation rules like in Texas that make some voters "more equal" than other; And, of course, ignoring all of the voters in two of the biggest and most important states in the union.
The pledged delegate total is certainly important. Very important. It could have been decisive yesterday if Obama closed the deal in either Ohio or Texas. He certainly spent enough to do so. But the delegate allocation rules are the rules and this is the way the Democratic Party nomination game is played. Obama did not make the rules and may yet win the nomination by piling up an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates as Alter suggests. But, at this point, the pledged delegate total is just one more piece of data for superdelegates to consider, and has little more inherent validity or claim on the "the will of the people" than the preferences of the superdelegates.
If the undemocratic superdelegates reverse a narrow undemocratic pledged delegate lead, well - that is also the way the game is played. Clinton did not make the rules. Obama failed in Ohio and Texas to render the superdelegates moot. And there will be no party "suicide" as Alter invokes, and no disunity if the superdelegates mandate Obama as VP at the same time as they install Clinton as the nominee.
Better get started on next week's column Jonathan.
x-posted from "Divided We Stand United We Fall"