Obama gets campaign back on track with Wyoming win
The gargantuan task which faces Hillary as she tries to overturn Obama's massive lead over her in terms of delegates was made clear last night when Obama won Wyoming defeating Clinton by 58% to 41%. And yet, under the proportional system, Obama still walked away with only seven delegates to Clinton's five, despite beating Clinton by over twenty percent.
This is the perfect example of why I think Clinton's task is impossible.Mr Obama now has a total of 1,578 against 1,468 for his rival, according to the Associated Press.
She has to, somewhere, find 110 delegates. And that's what many of us can't see her managing to do. She can cling on, she can keep winning the odd big state, but how is she going to reverse these terrible numbers?
Obama's victory in Wyoming is likely to help settle nerves in his campaign. The huge rural Western state might seem an unlikely place for Obama – who is seeking to become America's first black president – to perform strongly. But Obama was actually widely expected to win in a state that is more famous for its cowboys and rodeos than its role in national politics.
Obama has consistently performed well in the smaller states which hold caucuses, rather than primaries, and which reward voter enthusiasm and good organisation.
Obama is now expected to take Mississippi on Tuesday.
And he has given an answer to Clinton's offer of a dream ticket with herself as President and Obama as Vice President.
"You won't see me as a vice presidential candidate - you know, I'm running for president," he told CBS affiliate KTVQ-TV on Friday.
"We have won twice as many states as Senator Clinton, and have a higher popular vote, and I think we can maintain our delegate count."
And so on we go, expecting Clinton to get ever more negative the nearer to Pennsylvania we get. This tactic is not new to Clinton, whose husband once summed it up like this:
Bill once explained his approach to politics with this suitably slasher-movie metaphor: 'When someone is beating you over the head with a hammer, don't sit there and take it. Take out a meat cleaver and cut off their hand.'
The Big Dog has worn a muzzle in public since his abuse of Obama backfired in South Carolina. But the former President's influence over his wife's campaign has, if anything, increased. In the run-up to the Ohio and Texas ballots, the Clinton machine unashamedly announced they were going to throw 'the kitchen sink' at their opponent.
The Clintons did not just throw the kitchen sink at Obama; they bunged in the lavatory as well. For months, the internet has been used to spread smears that he is a closet Islamic radical. Asked whether her opponent might be a secret Muslim, Hillary archly encouraged the slimesters by responding: 'There is nothing to base that on - as far as I know.'
The Clintons will also be encouraged to escalate the personal attacks on Obama because he has shown that he does not always react well under pressure. He looked rattled when he fled reporters who were trying to question him about his relationship with Tony Rezko, the Chicago property developer now on trial for corruption.
The Clintons have several incentives to keep on using the meat cleaver. First, because it has worked. Late deciders in Texas and Ohio, the voters most likely to have been influenced by the ramping up of the attacks on Obama, split heavily against him and for Clinton. The mathematics of this race are also an encouragement for Billary to stay negative.
And this is the problem many of us have with Hillary's tactics. They work, yes. They damage Obama, most certainly. But do they deliver her enough delegates to win the race? No.
In this respect Hillary is operating a scorched Earth policy.
Even if she were to win every remaining primary, itself highly unlikely, no one who has done the maths can find a way for her to overhaul her rival's tally of elected delegates. So her only route to victory is through the support of the super-delegates, the members of Congress, party officials and other panjandrums who have a fifth of the seats at the convention. Her strategists argue that she can win them by questioning whether Obama has the experience to be President and the durability to take on the Republicans. In other words, they want to scorch a path to victory by trying to so destroy Obama's viability as a candidate that the party's bigwigs feel compelled to hand the nomination to her. No one ever said politics was pleasant.It's actually deeply unpleasant to watch the Hillary team attempt to overturn the democratic process and achieve victory, not by winning primaries and caucuses, but by damaging her opponent so much that the Super Delegates might regard him as damaged goods and award her the right to go forward as the presidential candidate.
It's the nastiest campaign tactic - and the least democratic one - that I think I have ever seen. For within her tactic is a tacit admission that she can't win by the rules, she can't overtake him in the delegate count, so she seeks to destroy him in the eyes of the Super Delegates.
I often wonder if her supporters, a group of people who seem to have no understanding of basic maths, really understand what it is that she is trying to do. They argue as if this were a presidential election and states were what mattered. They seem not to have grasped the importance of delegates or the sheer improbability of Clinton overturning Obama's lead.
In their ignorance they are allowing Clinton to take a meat cleaver to the image of the probable Democratic contender. There are many in the party who will never forgive Hillary for what she is doing. And they will certainly never forget the way her supporters encouraged her as she did so.
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