You know what really grinds my gears? Clinton supporters who show their support for her by utterly ignoring her and insisting that they will not support Obama and will instead support John McCain. It may well be true that if all 50 states had primaries rather than caucuses and delegates were assigned by state-wide proportional representation instead of district-level, Hillary Clinton would have won. And Al Gore would have won in 2000 if national popular vote elected the President. But just as Gore understood the rules of the 2000 election, Clinton understood the rules of the 2008 primary. Not only did she lose fair and square by the legitimate metric, but by every other metric you can rationally use given the turnout under the present rules.
These anti-Clinton Clinton supporters have formed up under the title PUMA (either People United Means Action or Party Unity My Ass) and this is how they think, as revealed in interview by David Shuster, notable for the Chelsea Clinton pimping remark, a joke I had made previously, as I am fond of Chelsea and there wasn’t any other way Sen. Clinton was going to get my vote.
Of course, these are the same people who would be offended if Obama picked a different woman to be VP. Just as they consider progress for women to be progress only if it is their woman, they consider democracy to be democratic only if it picks their preference (which I should point out isn’t democratic). The best news is that they are entirely irrelevant, a tiny cabal of elites who stand to have no electoral impact.
- VWI
