Nerve Endings Firing Away

Clinton’s continued presence in the Democratic Primary race coupled with Obama’s losses in the conservative states are giving pundits fresh ammo regarding the electability issue. Obama’s 41-point loss in West Virginia followed by a 35-point victory in Kentucky seemingly put in doubt Obama’s ability to win in November. Bill Kristol, the columnist added to bring ‘fair and balanced’ perspectives to the New York Times wrote in his Monday column:

On Tuesday night, while the G.O.P. Congressional candidate was losing in a Mississippi district George Bush carried in 2004 by 25 points, Barack Obama was being trounced in the West Virginia Democratic primary — by 41 points. I can’t find a single recent instance of a candidate who ultimately became his party’s nominee losing a primary by this kind of margin.

Bloggers were quick to pounce on this ridiculous claim and the problem with reality as Colbert says, it too can have a liberal bias. I’ve nothing against conservative columnists and actually enjoy reading David Brooks and Clive Crook but when a columnist makes a factual error to base his opinion on, it is unforgivable. Glenn Greenwald, the liberal watchdog blogger says, he took less than 2 minutes to disprove Kristol and he didn’t even venture beyond this year’s primary results. The results for Utah were extraordinarily skewed; Romney – 90%, McCain – 5%, Paul – 3%, Huckabee – 2%. Now of course, Kristol has never seen the eventual nominee being trounced by 85 points let alone 41, right? If you think Utah is an outlier, then McCain also lost Arkansas to Huckabee by 40 points and Kansas by 36 points. Surely Kristol wouldn’t summarize McCain would have a problem winning in Arkansas or Kansas, right? In fact, McCain regularly gets only ~70% of the votes in the simultaneous Republican primaries and considered rest of the contenders have overwhelmingly endorsed him and campaign actively for him, it is more cause for worry.

Why just examine Republican margins of victory? A commenter on Greenwald’s blog pointed out that Clinton lost Kansas to Obama by 49 points; lost DC by 51 points; lost Hawaii by 52 points; and lost Idaho by 62 points. The problem is that these states didn’t go to polls in the endgame but were part of those 12 states Obama won on the trot. To be fair, NY Times added Greenwald’s corrections to Kristol’s column. Now that must hurt.

Given the way Democrats allot delegates proportionally, I don’t even see why winning states matters anymore. Usually momentum-building exercise, winning early states is more important than winning the last five states. At the end of the day, it is the pledged and super delegates that will elect the nominee but Clinton knows her politics well. Being a typical politician, she will not let of the spotlight so easily. and will continue to claim to stand up for Florida and Michigan voters by comparing it to the civil rights movement. But that is a different topic altogether. Never was the hunger for power this evident.