Armando:
If Obama is the pledged delegate leader and the untainted popular vote leader, then I will be up in arms if the Super Delegates deny him the nomination. But I do not claim for a second that this violates the rules. It clearly does not. The whining about the existing rules comes from Kos and Josh Marshall and other die hard Obama supporters. THAT is a fact.
Well, given that Clinton cannot win the pledged delegate count, and that it would essentially require Obama to quit the race to lose the popular vote count, the only route to the nomination for Clinton would be one that would have Armando "up in arms".
Nowhere have I said that this would violate the rules. You too, Jerome. All I have said is that it would be a coup by super delegate -- the overturning of the popular results by the party elite.
The rules state that Michigan and Florida don't count. The rules state that all other states -- even the small ones, the ones with blacks, and the ones which have coffee drinkers -- matter. The rules state that this is a delegate race, with voters directly electing pledged delegates at (mostly) the congressional district level. None of this helps Clinton out, so she and her surrogates have set out to make arguments that seek to minimize and belittle the system we have now, whether it's the caucuses, or "small states", or "black people", or whatever.
While a coup by super delegate wouldn't violate the rules, the arguments that the Clinton campaign are advancing to those super delegates, the media, and their supporters make a mockery of them.
Makes sense. When your only path to victory requires making a mockery of the rules, I suppose you have nothing left but to mock the rules.
Still, if the supers overturn the popular will by siding with Clinton, they will spur civil war ("up in arms", as Armando says) -- not because they broke a rule in pulling off their coup, but because they will have subverted the will of the party electorate.
(Title aside, which I don't agree with (it's really just Clinton spin), Booman has more.)