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.