Obama, Hillary or McCain ... does it even matter?

Outstanding debate here. Very interesting.

I'm certainly voting in November ... because I believe this time, it does matter. The biggest issue to me is that the fate of Iraq and the Middle East is not worth the lives of any of our young men and women. And I believe different things will happen in this area with each of the three principals.

But this is something which I will never agree with. I have the right to complain if I sit outside the township building in November and cut farts all day.

 

I did not mean to imply that you have no protest rights. I am a firm believer of the First Amendment and agree that you can sit outside and complain all you want.

What I meant was, literally, you cannot complain about the decision that was made to the point of thinking it should be something else. The rule is majority, electoral college wise, wins.

Although I have voted against the winner the past 8 years, I accept it because they won by the rules (well at least as far as the facts as we know them) and as a citizen I have had to accept that and hope for change in 2008 (and its here now!)

 

That isn't entirely fair to Bork. Bork told Richardson and Rickelhaus that eventually someone would have to fire Cox -- Nixon was just going to keep going down the list until someone did -- so he might as well end the bloodshed by firing Cox and then resigning himself. Richardson told him that if he was going to do that, he shouldn't resign and should stay on so that someone would be left to run the DoJ in the interim.

 

But there is a gulf between Bork and Fortas that would take three 747 flights, a puddle jumper and a three-day jeep ride to traverse. There were good reasons, outside of Fortas' judicial philosophy, to nix his nomination to be CJ. He had a slush fund of former clients and partners paying him to give speeches and he has was giving LBJ political advice when he was an associate justice. His independence deserved to be questioned. And his post-nomination time on the court proved those suspicions were wise.

Bork was qualified to sit on the court based on education, experience and independence. Is he a wingnut? He is a wingnut to end all wingnuts. But his was the first nomination rejected solely over ideological differences. His was the one who started the current state of affairs, where litmus tests reign supreme, a paper trail is a negative and nominees don't get within 20 yards of their true feelings during the nomination hearings.

 

Bork may have been a wingnut, but prior to his nomination, the rules were that a nominee would be questioned about his qualifications to sit, not to determine what his decisions might be.

At that time, Bork was a qualified candidate. Although I disagreed with his prior decisions, in my mind, there was no dispute regarding his qualifications.

With respect to Thomas, what did we get? Someone who served as head of the EEOC then served 11 mos. as a circuit court judge. He was not a stellar academic nor a great lawyer. The American Bar Association was split between rating him "not qualified" and "qualified."

 

TO: Superdelegates

FROM: David Plouffe, Campaign Manager

RE: An Update on the Race for Delegates

DA: May 7, 2008

There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.

With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.

Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68% of the remaining delegates.

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.

If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement. We played by the rules, set by you, the DNC members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality.

We want to be clear – we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates. According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.

But of course superdelegates are free to and have been utilizing their own criteria for deciding who our nominee should be. Many are deciding on the basis of electability, a favorite Clinton refrain. And if you look at the numbers, during a period where the Clinton campaign has been making an increasingly strident pitch on electability, it is clear their argument is failing miserably with superdelegates.

Since February 5, the Obama campaign has netted 107 superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign only 21. Since the Pennsylvania primary, much of it during the challenging Rev. Wright period, we have netted 24 and the Clinton campaign 17.

At some point – we would argue that time is now – this ceases to be a theoretical exercise about how superdelegates view electability. The reality of the preferences in the last several weeks offer a clear guide of how strongly superdelegates feel Senator Obama will perform in November, both in building a winning campaign for the presidency as well as providing the best electoral climate across the country for all Democratic candidates.

It is important to note that Senator Obama leads Senator Clinton in superdelegate endorsements among Governors, United States Senators and members of the House of Representatives. These elected officials all have a keen sense for who our strongest nominee will be in November.

It is only among DNC members where Senator Clinton holds a lead, which has been rapidly dwindling.

As we head into the final days of the campaign, we just wanted to be clear with you as a party leader, who will be instrumental in making the final decision of who our nominee will be, how we view the race at this point.

Senator Obama, our campaign and our supporters believe pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded. It is simply the ratification of the DNC rules – your rules – which we built this campaign and our strategy around.