Clinton Campaign: The Memos

When was the first time that Hillary Clinton or anyone in her campaign asked for either reinstatement or a re-vote? Hint: it was after she had any credible path to the nomination without them. Before that, she was very clear that they had violated party rules and shouldn't be counted.

I agree that, by the letter of the law, the ruling of the DNC could have been overturned. But the suggestion that those voters were being disenfranchised, raised ONLY after it became Hillarys only hope, was one more in a long line of things her campaign did to place herself above party by creating an utterly false idea that Obama was for disenfranchisement of voters. What he was against, as you well know, was changing the rules (even by a legal overturning of them) in the middle of the game.

The bottom line is that these were acts of a desperate, losing campaign, whose best hope was to damage the prohibitive frontrunner such that, at the last minute, a DNC ruling she had previously supported would be overturned and supers who had already signaled private support to Obama would find his campaign so badly damaged that they would all change their minds, though none of them had shown any taste for doing so.

The bottom line is that this race was never close after February if by close we mean winnable by the underdog without utterly destroying the frontrunner.

It is revisionist history of the worst sort to suggest otherwise.

 

p.s. I'd love to see a statement from you, from Hillary or from any of her surrogates, prior to February, that there should be a re-vote in Michigan.

This was not a position predicated by principle, though the Hillary campaign tried after the fact to make it a cause that way. It was predicated only by a desire to win by any means necessary.

 

Except you're still arguing based on this bizarre premise that Romney only had 3 to 5 percent to make up. In the tracking polls conducted in the week before Romney dropped out, here are McCain's edges over Romney: 24 points, 28 points, 12 points, 18 points, 23 points and 15 points. Links are here:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ep...s/republican_presidential_nomination-192.html

To act as if an average deficit of around 20 percentage points was at any time comparable to what Clinton faced is just silly.

Of course they never moved an inch toward her -- because the hypothetical never came to fruition! Why would the supers move in advance of the scenario? And actually, there weren't "plenty" of unpledged superdelegates who came out and said on the record that they would support the delegate winner in the scenario that the delegate winner wasn't the popular vote winner. There were 5-10. No, not a single one came out and said they'd support the popular vote winner -- and why would they?!? Why would you set yourself in that firestorm until you knew if that hypothetical turned out to be the case! The logical thing to do would be to keep quiet and cross that bridge if and when the time comes. Of course, that time never did come -- but the possibility was very real that it could have.

 

You're acting like there's a letter of the law to the popular vote. There's not. There was never a ruling on what status Michigan and Florida would have in a popular vote count, because there is no official popular vote tally under the DNC at this time. It's a tool to be used in arguments, such as the one Clinton would have made to supers had she taken the popular vote lead. Perhaps you don't agree with the role of superdelegates, but this thing is what it is -- and as such, there was certainly a mathematical chance for Clinton to win. You might not agree with the strategy, but the possibility was there.

 

No it wasn't.

Hillary needed a perfect storm. She needed the following things to happen:

1. Enormous margins of victory in every remaining state after February, especially the big ones. She fell short in all but a few, as all the polls suggested, and those were small states. Her victories in TX, OH and PA, given the reality of the math, were all small enough to be setbacks rather than advances in the feasibility of her capturing the nomination.

2. A retroactive rule change (yes, allowed by DNC rules, but still a rule change) in MI and FL. Even if she had gotten everything she wanted there the result would have been a slim popular vote lead that excluded caucus states where popular votes are not recorded.

3. An overwhelming groundswell in her favor from supers, none of whom ever suggested they were considering such a thing. She didn't just fall short here -- after Iowa, she was overwhelmingly dominated by Obama.

She needed all of those things to happen when not a single one of them was likely and she still would have been the nominee of a party where pledged delegates chose another person.

Given all that, given all of those extremely unlikely scenarios (every single unlikely one of which was completely necessary to any chance of her winning), she still chose to employ the "kitchen sink" strategy. She still chose to run the 3 a.m. ad. She still chose to say McCain was better qualified than the nearly-definite Dem nominee. She still chose to misrepresent the bittergate stuff. She still chose to play cute with the Wright stuff and the Rezko stuff and every other thing she could find to damage Obama so badly that he would be completely unacceptable to a vast segment of the Democratic party. We are paying for that still today.

And she did all that with about a 1% chance at best of victory.

Characterizing the primary battle as a close race, after February, is completely false.

 

Even in caucus states, you can multiply the official percentages by candidate to the overall vote total and come extremely close in an estimate for popular vote totals. And as addressed earlier, why would the supers suggest they were considering such a thing, when the hypothetical in question (Clinton leading the popular vote) wasn't the case at the time? Why would you put yourself out there like that until it actually happened? I don't understand it.

Was it likely? Of course not. But I think the odds were a lot better than 1 percent, and certainly better than Romney overcoming a 20-point deficit in the polls (which would have grown even larger due to McCain's Super Tuesday momentum).

 

You're right. There's not a letter of the law to the popular vote because it isn't supposed to count. But I agree it could be used in an appeal to supers. In that case though, I should think we could all agree that any popular vote count be fair. In order for HRC to claim popular vote victory, she had to not only include totals from states where the candidates had pledged not to campaign and agreed wouldn't count but also leave out the caucus states!!

Her argument basically boiled down to, "If you count the states where I won and don't count the states where Obama won, I'm ahead!"

You should also stop saying I'm against the superdelegates and their role here. I might be for a change that way in the future but I wasn't for a change in their role in this election. All I did was suggest that if they waited until after the primaries to express their preference and then expressed a preference at odds with the vote totals it might be bad for the party in November. What I was doing when I said that was making the case for my candidate, just as Hillary was and you were; I was not advocating for changing the rules.

I agree that there was a "mathematical" chance for her to win. Where we disagree is on the odds. You act like until May it was 50-50. I am telling you her chance was less than 5% after February. All empirical evidence supports my case here and thwarts yours.

But none of that means she should have dropped out, only that she shouldn't have done everything she could think of to damage the person we all pretty much knew was going to be the nominee while whipping her supporters into such a lather that many of them think he cheated her out of something that was rightfully hers.

 

That's exactly why the argument wasn't persuasive! I have always advocated a popular vote count that included the caucus states, based on the estimate from total voters and percentage by candidate. RCP kept a running popular vote tally that included those states, and that's the one I went by. It didn't happen, and thus she didn't have a popular vote victory. But it could have, and the odds weren't as long as you suggest.

But there is no empirical evidence! To logically expect evidence of Clinton's argument to show up among supers when the numbers never reached that point makes no sense.

Also, last I checked -- 17 percent of Clinton voters claim to be voting for McCain. That's really no different from the percentage of Republican candidate (other than McCain) voters that won't vote for McCain. The "whipping her supporters into such a lather that they think he cheated her" is a media-created myth that all polling evidence in recent weeks rejects. Sure, there are a few nuts out there -- just as there are with the supporters of any losing primary campaign.

 

"A lot better?" That she would all of a sudden win every remaining state by 20%+ AND get FL and MI to count AND get the overwhelming number of undeclared supers to declare for her?

Come on, man. She needed Obama dead or in handcuffs to have a better than 1% chance. I would never say she wanted him dead, but the only way her chances were better than 1% was that she would be successful in damaging him SO BADLY that nearly everyone left with a vote to cast would find him completely unacceptable.

When we're talking about her doing everything she could to make the all but sure nominee completely unacceptable to Democrats, that is person over party defined.

But I'll agree it was "mathematically possible." We can stop arguing about this whenever you're ready to acknowledge that, after February, it was never close.

 

I didn't realize I said otherwise in this thread. No, it wasn't all that close. The only time I referenced the degree of closeness (well, until this tangent) was to reject the bizarre notion that the odds were the same for Romney (when polls showed him 20+ points down) when he dropped out as they were for Clinton when she didn't drop out. Clinton was down a significant amount, and it would've taken a persuasive argument that needed to catch a big wave of super support for her to win. She never got the votes she needed to make her argument persuasive, and thus here we are. But I'd estimate the odds at around 15 to 20 percent until after PA -- and thus more than enough reason to to stay in and fight.

 

Find me those RCP totals if you want me to acknowledge it was closer than I'm suggesting. I was watching them too and if you looked at the ones that included estimates of every caucus state and yes even FL and MI, she never had a chance of overcoming him without gigantic wins in remaining states, the sort of which were always unrealistic according to all polls of those states.

The empirical evidence was the margins of victory she had to achieve in every state after February, even if every single remaining super went her way -- all while she lost the super race every month, every week and almost every day since Iowa. Every time a state voted those needed margins rose. That is your empirical evidence.

You started out suggesting that this race was close until May. It wasn't. At least now you've backed off and are just calling it mathematically possible. I understand being a homer. For the entire Steve Francis era, I similarly argued that it was possible for us to win the championship even when it was incredibly unlikely we'd make the playoffs. The difference between you and me here is that I never suggested we were "close" to winning it all, only that it was possible.

As for the last bit, that about whipping Clintonistas into a lather, explain PUMA. Explain the video of HRC saying her name should be put into nomination (and that supporters could do it without her say so) and suggesting the need for the "catharsis" re-opening those old wounds. And explain Bill Clinton recently dodging the "Is Obama ready to be president" question with "nobody's ready to be president" after he said months ago on Charlie Rose that Hillary, Biden, Richardson and Dodd were all ready to be president.

I'm trying to make the main takeaway of these memos that it was Hillary's campaign that behaved badly rather than her and that she just took bad advice. You're kind of making that difficult for me.

 

Click on the individual poll links, on the left. While RCP deleted Romney from their individual chart, you can still see where he stood by accessing the specific polls cited. Romney dropped out on February 7, so I looked at polls taken from Jan. 30-Feb. 6.

You're right that there were significant non-McCain votes out there, but you also have to consider how long Huckabee and Paul stayed in the race. Unless both of them dropped out (and they didn't for some time), Romney never had a chance.

I've got to go to work -- I'll address the second half in a bit...

 

The "genius" Mark Penn didn't realize that primaries such as California weren't winner take all. The sooner people stop paying attention to those Washington hacks, the better.

 

I think it's more than a little silly to act as though making a decision to "piss off" Obama supporters would crush the future of the party. In every presidential poll that I've seen, generic "Democrat" outperforms Obama by 10 or more points. You're acting as though Obama is carrying the party, when in reality it's the party name that's carrying him.

I also think you're oversimplifying a little. The firestorm, in that hypothetical, would come when their constituents would inevitably take those comments out of context. They'd be accused of trying to overturn the will of the people because Obama was leading by every single metric at the time. The context of it being only a hypothetical would be lost -- you know how the media works, especially with talk radio and blogs. It's all sensationalism, all the time.

Do I think it would have happened? Probably not. Like I said, I put the chances in the 15-20 percent range.

 

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_vote_count.html

The popular vote count, counting every caucus state and NOT counting Michigan, gave Obama a spread of 151,844, or 0.4 percent. (For the record, I agree with this count -- there was a good article in the Post that I can't find at the moment, but basically it analyzed whether voters in FL/MI behaved in a manner in which they believed their vote mattered. Short answer: Florida did, Michigan didn't, even if you give the "uncommitted" to Obama.)

Anyway, to put it in perspective -- if she did approximately 3.5 percent better in Pennsylvania and Ohio than she did -- she'd be in the lead. 3.5 percent, in two states. Not counting MI. I don't find that unrealistic.

Where?!? Show me a link. I never said it was close until May. The only time I even referenced May (in the beginning of this thread) was to say that it wasn't until May that her odds became as long as Romney's were when he dropped out (down 20 points across the board). Do you not understand that there are varying degrees of not close? I never said she was! All I said is that the percentage chance was never equal to Romney's until May. That does not COME CLOSE to me saying the race was close or that her chances were good.

Show me the numbers. In the case of PUMA, you're talking about an extremely small portion of her voters -- about 17 percent, last I saw. That is not out of line with typical voting patterns, and to me, 17 percent doesn't qualify as "many." As for the rest, look at the context of that video. She was clearly trying to rein in her supporters, for one. But more importantly, this is a difficult dance -- her supporters are incredibly passionate, and many of them so for unprecedented reasons -- and she simply can't ignore them and ignore how strongly they feel about her. She has to gently tip-toe between their hard feelings and the greater good of Obama becoming president, and I think she's done a damn good job of it. I'm not sure how anyone could objectively look at the body of work she's done for Obama since June 3 and question the dedication she has to his campaign.

And I don't know why I would even need to explain Bill's statements -- this is about Hillary, not him.

 

The Cat:

You are right about the May thing. Sorry. I misread you there.

I also agree with you about 95% that Hillary's been great since conceding. She could have done better with her supporters last week. She could have not referred to Obama as "my opponent." She could have not raised the idea that her delegates didn't need her permission to continue pushing her candidacy at the convention. She could have said point blank, this was a hard race, we fought hard and I understand bruised feelings, but it is OVER. Instead of pushing the idea that Obama was the lesser of evils, which is pretty much what she did, she could have said Obama stands for everything I stood for in the campaign and it is time now (not after some roll call "catharsis") to get behind him and work enthusiastically for his campaign.

But you're right that she's been very good so far generally. Apart from last week's video she's been picture perfect. And I agree she's done more for Obama than recent also-rans have done for their party's nominees. But she had also had a lot more bad blood to make up for.

As for Bill having no relevance here, that's nonsense. Bill is and has been more a meaningful part of Team Hillary than Michelle has of Team Obama. As the most recent leader of the party he needs to get over this crap and get over it yesterday. And don't think for a minute Hillary doesn't have the power to tell him that. Until he does, they are sending good cop/bad cop messages to her supporters.

But what bothers me most is that you still seem to be defending HRC's tactics from February to June, in some cases implying again that she lost in a way that wasn't totally fair and square.

Major explained that the tactics were NOT the same. I don't know enough about the Kennedy/Carter battle to speak in an informed way about it but I do know you have to go that far back at least to find a major Democrat who, having been all but mathematically eliminated, employed such extreme tactics against the all but certain nominee. Implying a double standard to very different sorts of campaigns in the face of that doesn't make sense. Hillary's campaign's tactics (especially the C-in-C thing, but I've listed at least five egregious acts here too many times to count), especially after February, were deplorable by any standard. No double standard is required. And if you think your blood boiled during all that, rest assured that mine did at least as much.

When you post something like this you continue the myth that she was in any way cheated. She was outworked and she lost fairly. The continued insistence of her supporters to suggest otherwise is really unfortunate on a lot of levels.

To Hillary's credit, she apparently vetoed the extreme xenophobic strategy pushed by Penn. That hardly absolves her of the Commander-in-Chief quotes, given after she had slim/no chance of being the nominee, that are now starring in McCain's ads. She DID cross lines that she shouldn't have crossed as a member of the party. And it was on the day that she crossed that particular one that I started the thread saying I wouldn't support her if she somehow became the nominee. I continue to be amazed that her supporters here and elsewhere were not outraged by that quote. It was truly outrageous and I stand by my suggestion back then that it was grounds for revoking her credentials to the convention.

So far he hasn't. So far he has seen the exact same attacks he saw from Hillary. The exact same ones. In some cases, he uses her own face and voice to deliver them.

 

So even including Florida, Hillary lost the popular vote. Her argument to supers back then was not the count you decided you agreed with; it was a count that included FL and MI, gave no uncommitted votes in MI to Obama, and counted no caucus states.

And she and her surrogates were on TV every day saying she'd won the popular vote.

She even said it the night she was mathematically eliminated but was introduced by McAuliffe as the next president of the US and refused to concede. In order to make that claim she had to use fake math: math that was favorable to her in the extreme and unfavorable to Obama in the extreme. Dishonest math. And she continued to do it, that night at least, even after she had definitively lost.

The point is it was a bogus argument and one she didn't even try to make until she knew it was her only shot at a still extremely unlikely victory. Overnight, FL/MI went from definitely not counting (in her own words) to being compared to slavery. That was so ****ty there aren't even words for it.

But I want to say again that these memos make me feel better about Hillary, not worse. A lot of people have been trying to give McCain the benefit of the doubt lately saying that his campaign is responsible for his less than honorable moves over the last month and that they're not really his style. I don't know if that's true or not. But I always hoped it was the case with Hillary. These memos seem to bear that out.

And, again, if it wasn't for Bill's continued crappy disposition and the unfortunate video of Hillary's C-in-C comments, at this point I'd be a strong advocate for her as VP.

All things considered, I think she's been fantastic beginning with her concession speech (which was brilliant) and ever since, with the very small exception of last week.

 

Of course she tried to spin the numbers to her benefit, like most losing candidates would. But that's not the point of this argument -- or at least it's not what I'm talking about. It's about whether in March and April -- before Pennsylvania -- she had a reasonable chance to win the popular vote, by a logical count. Even though she ultimately did not, the chances were legitimate.