Why Hillary Must Be the Democratic
Candidate
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
March 22, 2008
One of the most fascinating, although
predictable, phenomena of the current Democratic primary has been the
insistence by the most left-leaning of the party's stalwarts that Hillary
Clinton drop out of the presidential primary race and surrender the nomination
to Barack Obama. On the one hand, it's pretty typical of Democrats not
to want to fight for anything, as they've demonstrated by their repeated
attempts to undermine America's interests in the fight against Islamist
terrorists. They're making the same argument to Hillary about the primary
as they are to the American people about Iraq: the fight is lost, pull
out.
But the reason Hillary can't pull
out lies in the numbers. Hillary Clinton is, by any sane tally, nearly
ahead of Obama in the popular vote right now. Not only that, she will
be ahead of him by the time the primary season ends. Let's take a look
at some of those numbers.
Right now, Obama has an "official"
total of 13,155,209 votes to Clinton's 12,638,123, a "lead"
of approximately 717,000. If you factor in the Florida and Michigan votes,
giving the "Uncommited" Michigan votes to Obama, the picture
changes dramatically. Obama captured about 814,000 votes in those two
states, while Clinton won about 1,200,000, a 386,000 vote margin in Clinton's
favor. When you subtract Clinton's 386,000 vote lead in those two states
from Obama's official lead, the latter's margin shrinks to about 331,000.
Now the question becomes, where did
the votes that give Obama his "official" lead come from? The
answer is: Illinois. Obama won his home state of Illinois by a whopping
650,000 votes over Clinton. Not only that, he won his home base of Cook
County by some 429,000 votes! These are huge numbers. In fact, they're
so huge that even without Michigan and Florida, if you subtract his Illinois
victory margin from Obama's official lead, it shrinks to about 59,000.
And if you add in Hillary's victory margins in Michigan and Florida, she's
ahead by more than 300,000 votes.
And if you're going to argue that
you can't take the Illinois votes away from Obama, you're going to have
to answer the questions that arise about what his victory margin there
means. And what it means is that Obama's popular vote lead comes almost
entirely from his victory margin in a single state, and further, from
a single county in that state! Democrats are in effect arguing that Cook
County should be the single deciding factor for the entire country in
this primary. The votes in Illinois amount to a statistical anomaly and
nothing more.
And if you're going to argue, on
the other hand, that you shouldn't count the votes in Florida and Michigan,
then you're going to have to answer to the voters in those states, who
are going to be justifiably incensed if they don't have a voice in the
choice of their party's candidate, and to the point where they fail to
vote in the general election in numbers large enough to give those states
to John McCain.
This is not just a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" conundrum;
it's a situation where the Democratic Party is showing not only its leftist,
anti-democratic tendencies but the fact that its party leaders are blind
to the fatal flaws in Obama's character and his political inclinations
and associations, flaws that may well sink his candidacy if he ever has
to run against McCain.
The Dems' own highjacking of the
primary electoral process, worthy of the Stalinist reprobates they remain
to this day, was instituted in the early 1980s after the 1972 George McGovern
debacle. It was designed to put the power in the hands of party leaders
and not the voters so the party could avoid putting forth a candidate
of precisely Barack Obama's ilk. The irony is that they're stumbling into
the very blind alley their primary process reform was designed to prevent!
For Barack Obama is so McGovern-like,
so far to the left, his policies so distant from what even mainstream
Democrats consider rational, that, once they're more broadly exposed,
they'll prove to be his undoing. That they haven't been exposed as we
might have expected by now is largely due to the fact that the mainstream
media are so infatuated with Obama that they're unable to do anything
but coo his praises. By the time the Dems' error in highjacking the electoral
process and shoehorning Obama into the candidacy is realized, it will
be too late. In a McCain-Obama presidential contest, the results might
just skew so heavily to McCain that he'll sweep Republicans along with
him into the House and Senate, at least narrowing Dems' majorities in
those bodies, and possibly enabling Republican majorities to prevail.
We can only hope Democrats don't wake up and realize the error of their
ways before their primary is decided by imperial decree.
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