Posted by Jed Lewison on Mon Mar 3, 2008 at 7:57 AM Pacific
Team HRC's new pitch for superdelegates: She's winning white Democrats
Hillary Clinton's Delegate Hub web site is her campaign's main vehicle for making the case that superdelegates should support her campaign.
Delegate Hub's newest line of argument? Hillary Clinton is winning white Democrats.
I've never seen anything like it.
The Delegate Hub is a set up like a blog (sans comments) and mixes original content with excerpts from journalists and other blogs.
The Delegate Hub post in question, which I've copied below (verbatim, with emphasis added) promotes a blog posting on Slate.com which in turn summarizes the work of another blogger.
Slate 'Trailhead': A Number You Probably Haven't Seen2/29/2008 9:56:42 AM
By Christopher Beam
Over at the Perfect World, Cal Lanier crunches the numbers and finds that Obama, despite being ahead among pledged delegates, has fewer total votes among people who identify themselves as Democrats. (He has 7,392,809 votes; Clinton has 8,229,063.) That gives Clinton as lead with 52 percent of Democrats. Lanier also breaks the numbers down by race and points out that Obama has won white Democrats in only two states: New Mexico and Illinois.
That this is material cut-n-pasted from the Slate.com blog is important to note, but does not excuse the Clinton campaign.
Campaign blogs aren't for pointing out "interesting facts" -- they exist to elect candidates. Delegate Hub was specifically created to make the case that superdelegates should support Hillary Clinton.
In other words, the campaign is responsible for the material on they publish on their own site even if it originated elsewhere -- especially material promoted front and center like this one.
If they present material with which they disagree, they have an obligation to make it clear that they reject the content of the material.
In this case, the Clinton campaign clearly posted this this excerpt from another blog to help make a case that superdelegates should vote for Hillary Clinton because (in their view) she's winning amongst white Democrats.
Can you imagine the furor if Barack Obama so much as linked to Louis Farrakhan's web site without offering an accompanying condemnation?
Talk about rejecting and denouncing.
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The notion that superdelegates prioritize the votes of white Democrats over other Democrats is inherently offensive.
But beyond that obvious point, the information on the Delegate Hub is at best misleading.
The study cited by the post included Florida and Michigan but all caucuses and also Washington's meaningless primary. Obama did not campaign in Florida or Michigan and was not even on the ballot in Michigan. Moreover, no delegates were at stake in those contests, just like Washington's primary (which Obama won).
By failing to include caucus participants -- of all races -- the study marginalized a significant chunk of the electorate, including some of Obama's most loyal supporters.
Is Clinton only running to win the vote of white Democrats in primary states (unless she loses the primary and no delegates were at stake)?
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Another important question the study fails to address is what impact gender has on the results of their subset of states. It also ignores the fact that since Super Tuesday, Obama has won more support from white voters overall than has Hillary Clinton.
Going down this road is silly though: it buys into Mark Penn's vision of an America, in which different racial and ethnic and gender groups each occupy their own segments.
Penn presents this analysis as objective, dispassionate research, but that's not true -- the reality is that the approach candidates take to campaigns has an impact. One year from now, one of these individuals will become president, and if their campaign has been based around winning white soccer moms with message x and second-generation Hispanic men with message y that person will have a tougher time as president making the case for a shared American experience.
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One final note: the other notion in the blog entry, the one about Democrats -- is also false. Including caucuses (the participants of whom generally must join the Democratic party), Obama and Clinton have each won about 7.5 million votes.
Since Super Tuesday, however, amongst these Democrats, Obama has won 1.5 million votes to Hillary Clinton's 1 million votes.
In other words, Obama has won three out of five Democrats since Super Tuesday -- a twenty percent margin of victory.
If these are the kinds of arguments that Hillary Clinton plans to continue making to superdelegates, she hasn't got a prayer of getting them to overturn the judgment of the voters.
More important, however, the idea that somehow Republicans are taking over the primary is just ridiculous. The number of self-identified Republicans who have voted is incredibly small - no more than 2% of all primary voters. Figuring out the margin of error for whom they voted would take a serious statistician -- if it is even possible.
The bottom line is that anyone who votes in the Democratic primary or participates in a Democratic caucus is a Democratic primary voter.
We're all equal. At least that's what most of us think.
© Jed Lewison