Reality Bites

Howard Dean seems upset that we will not all join him in his bout of CDS and are instead asking him to please get professional help on how to conduct legitimate elections.

The purpose of voting is to create outcomes viewed as objectively fair. They are intended to be cold, hard evidence of the will of the people, and are not to be confused with conventional wisdom, gut feelings, or informal surveys. As we have seen in a number of situations, what we believe to be true because of polling has not turned out to be true when actual ballots are counted.

Arguing that we cannot allow a revote of Florida and Michigan because it could change the outcome of the nomination process to Hillary's favor is simply a facile way to avoid the fact that failing to do so deliberately penalizes her and denies Hillary her actual electoral support. The POINT is to confirm the will of the voters, not make a guess or try to persuade us that we don't really want that candidate, even if we say we do. Confirming the the will of the people is a feature, not a bug, of elections.

Given his performace on the talk shows, Dean feels no obligation to count the votes cast for Hillary. Dean and the rest of the Obamacans (I refuse to call them Democrats as they are substituting their own desires for the interests of the Party) have bought into the narrative that Hillary is not a legitmate candidate (Everyone hates her! We all know that!) and, thus, those who vote for her are likewise illegitimate. They are turning upside down the principle that legitimcay is bestowed by the electoral process. The Obamacans have bought Obama's propaganda that he is the Inevitable One who is going to sweep to victory on the back of the Unity Pony, mostly because it reinforced their own CDS narrative of the evil Billary monster. Not even millions of votes by rank and file Democrats can shake their faith that no one can possibly actually support Clinton, so it is fine to manipulate the election in favor of another.

The problem for the Obamacans is that the country is bigger than their bassackwards opinion of it, and the people who vote for Hillary expect their votes will be counted. I hate to break the news to you, guys, but if Hillary has more votes and more delegates across all 50 states, she deserves to be the nominee. That's how elections work, y'know...

If Dean had been paying attention to electoral reality, as soon as we got into the February primaries, he would have advocated for Florida to be seated at 50% and would have revoted Michigan before Ohio and Texas while his preferred candidate was on a roll. Obama probably would heve eked out a narrow victory in Michigan and would have avoided looking like he personally was blocking votes in Florida. A Michigan win might have bumped his popular vote count up in Texas. But insisting on a revote would have meant acknowledging that Hillary was a legitimate contender with legitimate support which Obama would have to better through transparently legitimate wins of his own.

Now, it is too late for the Obamacans. The outcome of the primaries has been hamfistedly altered by the anti-Clinton faction in the Democratic Party. These people appear determined to stop at nothing to prevent a Hillary nomination and force their candidate on the electorate. They will literally do anything to win, including stealing votes, threatening super delegates, rigging delegate selection and throwing away ballots to get their way. They will do this even as their actions undermine their candidate's legitimacy and all but guarantees a loss in the general.

The fair resolution that every American understands and trusts is to put it to a vote. This will establish the legitimacy the nominee will need to be competitive in the general, and applies even more to Obama than to Hillary.

Anglachel