Hillary Clinton is setting herself up to be Al Gore (w/ POLL)
Wed May 21, 2008 at 08:33:55 AM PDT
I don't think this is being said at all on the blogosphere or in the mainstream media, but Hillary Clinton is steadily but surely moving toward making herself Al Gore of this primary contest, the candidate who 'really won' even though she lost the nomination. Now, this may assure her spot at the top of the ticket in 2012 if the democrats lose this fall, but it will be incredibly damaging to our chances in 2008.
Make no mistake, from Hillary Clinton's recent speeches and the messages being put out by her surrogates on TV the last few weeks, Hillary Clinton is going to declare, in June, that although she won the popular vote, the superdelegates overruled the real will of the people and went with the pledged delegate winner, Barack Obama.
She has had her people consistently say that she has won the popular vote. It doesn't matter how much twists and turns you have to do, how many conditionals you have to place on that declaration, her camp has firmly decided to play this message nonstop over the past few weeks and will continue to do that until June.
Her camp has also consistently played up the bogus scenario that Obama has stopped the will of the voters in Michigan and Florida from being counted. And unless the May 31st meeting is decided completely in Clinton's favor (Obama getting no delegates from Michigan, and her getting the full amount, and Florida's delegates counted in full as is), her camp will play the victim card saying that the will of Michigan and Florida was not justly portrayed by the democratic party 'elite'.
Then, a few days later, the contests will be finished and it will be superdelegates that put Obama over the top. (He'll get around 20-25 delegates from Puerto Rico, 17-18 from South Dakota and Montana).
Where will this lead us? To a party where almost half of the primary voters feel cheated out of the election the same way that democrats as a whole felt cheated out of the 2000 election. And that will spell doom for the fall.
And even though Hillary Clinton won't explicitly say that she lost on technicalities like Al Gore, many of her surrogates and supporters (especially online) will take the ball and run with it. And the Clinton camp wants this because it is their best shot at getting the presidency now, a 2012 run against McSame.
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