As I stroll through the various lanes that are the political discourse on the internet, I find time after time that there are certain questions people have or misconceptions about what's going on. Some of the misconceptions are held by a great many people, others only a few. And sometimes the talking head repeat these same foibles on national TV. These questions and instances of not understanding the situation of the politics of today are so glaringly obvious sometimes that it just drives me up the wall.
The origins of these gaps in knowledge can come from lack of experience, or perhaps someone is just not well read up on an unusual aspect of our democratic processes, or perhaps the misunderstanding is propagated intentionally, similar to a smear campaign but harder to spot as its not peddling known untruths, but peddling unkown untruths. So I thought maybe its time to compile a list of some of the most obvious one's that bug me.
In the primaries, the popular vote is... - Unknown. Because some caucus states (like Iowa) do not report the individual support levels for the candidates, just the delegates. So it is impossible, without strong arming several states or state parties into reporting the raw pre-delegate numbers, to known the true popular vote in some caucus states.
Obama should pick Hillary for VP/Clinton should pick Barack for VP - Sorry dorthy, ain't gunna happen. In order for such a possibility to of even been viable it would of meant that both Clinton and Obama would of have run campaigns of similar styles. This is the same reason Kerry could not of picked Dean in 04 (scream or no scream), but had to go with Edwards if he was going to (and did) pick someone else who ran for the sake of party 'unity'. Edwards, like Kerry, had a more conventional campaign. Sure the personalities were different, but neither was acting as an insurgent candidate, as Dean was. This round Obama is the insurgent, and Clinton the conventional. The core message of the two types of styles creates a narrative about the candidates that sticks with people, and places their candidacies on the top of their respective piles. If Obama were to pick Clinton, at the back of people's minds they might observe that he's basically embraced the conventional side of things, which would run against his entire campaign. If Clinton picked Obama, the same would happen to her, but instead it would be her giving up here whole 'experience' thing and embracing the very person she's claimed was too inexperienced. This latter argument has been a bit more obvious the last number of weeks, but still people repeat the claim...
Group X, Y, or Z will stay home or never vote for so and so! - Have you forgotten the whole reason for standing up for our ideas? The premiss goes like this: If you stand up and argue for your positions, you'll convince people that maybe you're right. But if you don't do anything, they won't listen. So, don't be giving up on entire groups of people before we've even gotten a chance to try to convince them! Claiming these absolutes will only discourage you, which is the opposite of what we need right now.
This election will be just like 2004/2000 with the swing states being... - Fat chance! With either democratic candidate still in it we have very different electoral maps. Clintons is closer to the 2004 model, but add in added strength in Arkansas and Florida, and maybe Ohio, with possible weaknesses develope else where and already you have a very different election. For Obama, he could very well do something interesting in the upper and central midwest. Or... we have no clue what the hell things are going to be like months from now. There's a lot of campaigning to go and all candidates could make strange or wise plays for unexpected states. Who knows, this election perhaps we'll see Kansas going for a dem and New Jersey a repbup! I don't know how this will go, and neither do you!
Obama should pick Al Gore for VP! - The last hold outs for a Gore presidency have this thin thread to keep them with us. But really, under what logic would Gore as VP benefit either Obama's electoral efforts or later policy endeavors. For the latter Gore is better suited being an outside force to consult with. This allows Gore to paint himself as an outside policy advisor and could possibly continue to act as such after an Obama presidency. For the electoral bit, he might be able to pull a small edge of people whom liked Gore but not Obama for some reason, but a vast majority of these folks are pretty likely to not like McCain at this point, and will like McCain less the more attention the old wind bag gets.
Obama should pick Bill Clinton as VP! - Uh... this one is actually constitutionally forbidden as Bill has had two terms already and is thus disqualified from being VP (read your amendments!).
My candidate will cary state X! (and yours can't naturally) - See my explanation as the 2004/2000 repetition meme.
Clinton can't win caucuses - Well she did do well in Armenia... Ok geography humor aside, Clinton did at some level win in Nevada. Her issue there was that her win was not geographically diverse thus giving Obama the delegate win. But beyond that, her lack of success in caucuses has less to do with absolute facts and her campaigns choices to ignore most of them until the last minute. If they had given a little more time to some states (Minnesota comes to mind), she might of done a lot better in such states.
The super delegates will give it to Clinton if... - Now bear with me here. This is probably the most controversial one of my list. Basically, the Clinton campaign and legions of her supporters have argued that if Clinton over comes Obama in some particular fashion besides winning delegates, that she'll get the nomination thanks to super delegates. The reason such a thing is incredibly unlikely is because of selectively believing a large portion of the super delegates are ignorant of a particular fact or two. One of the biggest is the caucus popular vote problem mentioned before. The lack of reporting in several states of raw vote totals puts the 'popular vote' win theory highly in doubt. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty sure a good number of our elected dems have some sort of college education, and that people like super delegate Al Gore know how to use wikipedia or to phone up Doc Dean or someone else who knows to find out what's going on with any sort of questions like that. And I have a strong faith that Dean would use what ever influences he has to prevent shenanigans with the supers. As people have argued over and over, including current super delegates of both candidates, they'll support the victor in the pledge delegate count. There is to much danger to the party and our electoral prospects now and for years to come if this comes down to playing with intangible 'results' that one campaign made up to try to sway a few wavering delegates. I repeat, over turning the pledge delegates decision would be the moral equivalent to suicide and I'm pretty damn sure at least 80% of the supers know this. And the other 20% will be told such many times before the convention.
So that's my half rant for today. Feel free to comment if you have any other basic questions or misconceptions you want to debunk. But as its late I'm off to bed!