Though the tortured logic of the Clinton campaigns efforts to move the delegate-count goalposts has been laughably transparent - bordering on pathetic - it seems that football is, perhaps, the wrong sports metaphor to use.
George Will, of all people, says it best . .
She may think, or at least would argue, that when she was 12 her Yankees really won the 1960 World Series, by standards of "fairness," because they trounced the Pirates in runs scored, 55-27, over seven games, so there.
Unfortunately, baseball's rules -- pesky nuisances, rules -- say it matters how runs are distributed during a World Series. The Pirates won four games, which is the point of the exercise, by a total margin of seven runs, while the Yankees were winning three by a total of 35 runs. You can look it up.
Now we'll leave unaddressed the question of whether the Yankees are hers or not . . . let's just chalk it up to one more politically expedient misrepresentation of the truth. The best parts of Will's scathing deconstruction of Clinton's 'logic' is further along.
More unexpected Will humor after the jump.
I actually found myself chuckling at . . .
After Tuesday's split decisions in Indiana and North Carolina, Clinton, the Yankee Clipperette, can, and hence eventually will, creatively argue that she is really ahead of Barack Obama, or at any rate she is sort of tied, mathematically or morally or something, in popular votes, or delegates, or some combination of the two, as determined by Fermat's Last Theorem, or something, in states whose names begin with vowels, or maybe consonants, or perhaps some mixture of the two as determined by listening to a recording of the Beach Boys' "Help Me, Rhonda" played backward, or whatever other formula is most helpful to her, and counting the votes she received in Michigan, where hers was the only contending name on the ballot (her chief rivals, quaintly obeying their party's rules, boycotted the state, which had violated the party's rules for scheduling primaries), and counting the votes she received in Florida, which, like Michigan, was a scofflaw and where no one campaigned, and dividing Obama's delegate advantage in caucus states by pi multiplied by the square root of Yankee Stadium's ZIP code.
Please note, the above blockquote may be long, but it is one run-on sentence, full of the nonsensical drivel we've endured for the last few months.
Now, anyone who recalls the GHWB as lapdog moment of the 80s will know Will has enmity for the Bushes, and he compares Clintons electoral fantasy to Poppy's son's non-reality based policy making apparatus.
"We," says Geoff Garin, a Clinton strategist who possesses the audacity of hopelessness required in that role, "don't think this is just going to be about some numerical metric." Mere numbers? Heaven forefend. That is how people speak when numerical metrics -- numbers of popular votes and delegates -- are inconvenient.
But the most scathing and spot-on criticism of Clinton's overall strategy in attempting to tear down her opponent is not a jab, but a right hook . . . to the jaw.
Or perhaps she wins if Obama's popular vote total is, well, adjusted, by counting each African-American vote as only three-fifths of a vote. There is precedent, of sorts, for that arithmetic (see the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, before the 14th Amendment).
In a sentence, Will has summarized the craven, cynical and dog-whistle race baiting that has tainted this entire campaign for months.
I can't believe I'm saying this but . . . .
Well done Georgie! and thanks.
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