Extremely Lame

As Hillary got a marginal victory in Indiana and a trouncing in North Carolina, the pundits on MSNBC were saying that this was pretty much the end for Clinton and she’d probably drop out after scoring a couple easy victories in West Virginia and Kentucky so she could bow out on a high note. Everyone but Rachel Maddow. She said, in essence, if Hillary’s campaign has been operating in a “post-rational world” for the past couple months, why would her campaign start acting rationally now?

Lo and behold, despite the fact that everyone else said the writing was on the wall,  Rachel was seemingly right. I think this is one of the cases where she wish she wasn’t.

First off, there’s the fact that Senator Clinton has donated over eleven million dollars to her primary campaign. That’s eleven million she ain’t getting back if it’s not paid back to her before the convention in August. Over half of that money was lent to the campaign after April 1st, so this isn’t just old debts from Super Tuesday.

Secondly, not only is she not letting up with regard seating Florida and Michigan’s delegates, her campaign’s actually stepping it up. And no, she’s not going to accept a 50/50 split of delegates, she’s not even accepting a 10 delegate leg up on Obama. She wants all the delegates seated as is. That’s contrary to the fact that Michigan and Florida broke the rules and had their primary elections early. It is contrary to the fact that Clinton initially supported not seating them back when she thought she’d just coast into the White House. It also doesn’t take into count that over half the Democratic delegates weren’t even on the ballot in Michigan. That seemingly doesn’t matter. If Hillary Clinton were the only name on the ballot in Michigan, she’d be arguing that the delegates would have to be seated as is. I wonder what her campaign would have done if the only names on the ballot were people who had already dropped out.

This effort to make Florida & Michigan Democrats feel disenfranchised by the Democratic party doesn’t benefit her in any way. All it does is hurt any Democrat in November. People have been saying since Obama won all eleven contests between Super Tuesday and Ohio and Clinton’s doggèd insistence of using smear campaigning that she’s doing more harm than good. It’s argued that Hillary is running for President because she feels that she deserves to be President and that if she can’t be President, then she’s going to scorch the earth and make sure that no Democrat wins in November so she can point from the sidelines and say “I told you so.” The longer this goes on, the more believable it makes those accusations look.

Too bad there’s not 10-run rule that prematurely ends a contest like there is in little league. She’s been behind in the pledged delegate count since Iowa and the gap just keeps growing. Even counting Michigan and Florida, Clinton can’t catch up unless she wins something like 80% of the vote in every state remaining. I don’t even see that happening in the states she’s supposed to win, like West Virginia and Kentucky, let alone the northern plain states and mountain states that have been going overwhelmingly for Obama.

Actually, someone has a different take on why Hillary won’t concede defeat.

“Hillary’s hanging on to the contest dramatically proves to me that she is unfit to be our president. It is so Bush-like, is it not? It’s her Iraq. She has obviously failed, yet she keeps on just to prove she’s not a quitter. Where have we heard that lately? How can we depend on her? Like Bush, she cannot admit a mistake. She can’t admit failure. She is not rational. She’ll take us down with her.”