The Obama Rumor Mill

Hindoo · June 12, 2008, 9:49pm

Interesteddad–Here’s an interesting, and seemingly unbiased article on Obama’s energy bill vote. It makes him look both good and bad, which is pretty par for the course for any major political figure. They’re going to do things wrong now and then, like Hillary Clinton did when she gave Bush the go-ahead to start a war.

[David</a> Roberts: What Does the 2005 Energy Bill Vote Say About Obama? - Politics on The Huffington Post](<a href=“HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost”>What Does the 2005 Energy Bill Vote Say About Obama? | HuffPost Latest News)

calmom · June 12, 2008, 9:51pm

Another false claim debunked by factcheck.org, at [FactCheck.org:</a> Did Clinton win the popular vote?](<a href=“http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_clinton_win_the_popular_vote.html]FactCheck.org:”>http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/did_clinton_win_the_popular_vote.html)

Q. Did Clinton win the popular vote?
Did Hillary Clinton actually end up with more popular votes than Barack Obama? Given that there is some discussion on whether to count the popular votes of Michigan and Florida, as well as how to count caucus votes, who did end up with the higher count?

A: Obama won more votes unless you count Michigan, where he wasn’t on the ballot.

After the primary season wrapped up on Tuesday, Clinton commended her supporters and claimed once again that she had won the popular vote: “Nearly 18 million of you cast your votes for our campaign, carrying the popular vote with more votes than any primary candidate in history.”

Did she? Now that all the primaries and caucuses are over we can take one, final look.

Obama won more total votes than Clinton in the contests where they both appeared on the ballot. Clinton won the popular vote only if you count votes from Michigan, where Obama’s name did not appear on the ballot.

Any way you cut it, the candidates’ vote totals are within less than 1 percent of each other. Both candidates got roughly 18 million votes, but since four states don’t list official counts, the precise totals can’t be known.

The political Web site Real Clear Politics has an excellent tally, with links to official reports from state election authorities. Those show that even counting Clinton’s win in Florida, where the two were on the ballot but did not campaign due to the state’s violation of party rules, Obama beat Clinton in the popular vote by 41,622 votes a small margin, only 0.1 percent. Obama’s margin grows to 151,844 votes, or 0.4 percent, when estimates are included for Iowa, Nevada, Maine and Washington, which did not release official totals of popular votes.

Only by counting Michigan, where Clinton’s name was on the ballot but Obama’s was not, can Clinton claim to have won more votes. Counting only officially reported results, Michigan puts Clinton’s total ahead nationally by 286,687 votes or 0.8 percent. Once estimated votes from the four non-reporting states are included, the margin becomes less significant: 176,465 votes, or 0.5 percent. And if Michigan’s “uncommited” votes were accorded to Obama, he’d have a 61,703-vote lead (0.2 percent), counting estimates from the non-reporting states.

For the record, Clinton hasn’t always been so eager to count Michigan votes. On Oct. 11, 2007, she said of the state, “It’s clear, this election they’re having isn’t going to count for anything.” But that was when she was wooing New Hampshire voters, who cherish their first-in-the-nation primary and who were upset that Michigan was violating party rules designed to protect it. She was responding to an interviewer for New Hampshire Public Radio who asked, "So, if you value the DNC calendar, why not just pull out of Michigan? Why not just say, ‘Hey Michigan, I’m off the ballot?’ " Clinton went on to win the New Hampshire primary.

calmom · June 12, 2008, 9:58pm

As long as we are at it, here’s a new video posted on Factcheck.org :
[FactCheck.org:</a> And They’re off!](<a href=“http://www.factcheck.org/just-the-facts/and_theyre_off.html]FactCheck.org:”>http://www.factcheck.org/just-the-facts/and_theyre_off.html)

marite · June 12, 2008, 10:00pm

Winning the popular vote:This is rather a tiresome question.

Obama ran a campaign that was designed to win electoral votes, which was the name of the game. He never lost sight of the fact that the Democratic nomination process was based on proportional voting (something that Penn allegedly forgot). Had the the process been about winning the popular vote as opposed to electoral votes, he would have run a very different campaign.

Clinton did not win more electoral votes than Obama, unless she is given all the Michigan votes that she received and Obama gets none of the uncommitted ones, which is preposterous; and if caucus states are not factored in.

But, even if Clinton had won the popular vote, what mattered were the electoral votes, district by district. And that’s something that Obama focused on.

1sokkermom · June 12, 2008, 10:08pm

“Obama won more total votes than Clinton in the contests where they both appeared on the ballot. Clinton won the popular vote only if you count votes from Michigan, where Obama’s name did not appear on the ballot.”

Bingo. Therefore Hillary did NOT win the popular vote.

rocketman08 · June 12, 2008, 10:17pm

As with most things, the truth is in the fine print ;-)

vicariousparent · June 12, 2008, 11:08pm

marite, small correction- Obama was trying to win the delegates, not the electoral votes. Now for the general election, of course, he wants to win the electoral votes and seems to have adapted his strategy for the new reality.

menenz · June 12, 2008, 11:43pm

between a woman and a man, we choose a man
between a black man and a white man we prefer the white man

and we preach we are not racist !!
its high time we practice what we preach

rocketman08 · June 12, 2008, 11:57pm

Slow down there… wait until November and see what happens…

interesteddad · June 13, 2008, 2:11am

So, Clinton did indeed win the popular vote, unless you don’t count her votes in Florida and Michigan.

As we all know, the Democratic Party decided to not count her votes in Floridan and Michigan.

calmom · June 13, 2008, 2:14am

No, interestedad, it is ONLY the Michigan vote that puts Clinton over the top – Florida isn’t enough to help her. And then ONLY if you do NOT count the “uncommitted” as being for Obama (even though those are clearly votes against Hillary) and completely disregard outcomes in caucus states.

marite · June 13, 2008, 5:00am

Vicariousparent, Thanks, you are correct, of course.
and I agree with calmom, Clinton can only be said to have won the popular vote if we don’t assign any vote to Obama in Michigan, which would be preposterous and if we don’t count any of the caucus states.

We advise one another to love the child we have, not the child we wish we had. Obama ran the campaign with the rules that were in place, not the rules that one might wish had been in place. I don’t like them, Clinton did not like them, many don’t like them. But they WERE the rules, and what’s more, they’d been put in place thanks partly to Harold Ickes.

Remember the slogan “people who play by the rules and pay their taxes?” I believe Bill Clinton campaigned with that slogan. Obama played by the rules and won. Case closed.

marite · June 13, 2008, 5:36am

Here’s an article on Obama’s delegate counter:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had just declared victory in the Nevada caucuses when most campaign reporters heard Jeffrey Berman’s voice for the first and only time.

Berman, Sen. Barack Obama’s director of delegate selection, chimed in during a conference call with the media to make an unexpected case: Despite Clinton’s popular vote victory in Nevada and an authoritative Associated Press count giving Clinton the edge in the Nevada delegate count, Obama had actually won the state by the only measure that mattered.

“Obama had a majority in the district that had an odd number of delegates, so he won an extra seat,” Berman told the puzzled press; the Associated Press delegate expert, on the call, promised to revise his count.

Obama’s Nevada delegate victory was widely viewed at the time as a curiosity, an asterisk to Clinton’s win. But in February, as Obama amassed delegates despite losing big states, the shape of the race became clear: The name of the game was delegates.

It was the game Berman and a friend, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, had been playing all along. And as Clinton’s staff scrambled after Super Tuesday to remake her strategy to meet that reality, it began to become clear that Berman had helped build Obama a lead too big to surmount.

[The</a> Obama campaign’s ‘unsung hero’ - Politico.com Print View](<a href=“http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=D4452740-3048-5C12-00E911BC9240011F]The”>http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=D4452740-3048-5C12-00E911BC9240011F)

3bm103 · June 13, 2008, 6:44am

No. Between THIS woman and THIS man.

rocketman08 · June 13, 2008, 7:15am

No. She lost, period. She lost in delegates, she lost in popular vote, she lost in superdelegates.

She may not have liked the rules, but she really only started complaining about them when she started losing. As an earlier post pointed out she was quite determined about not counting Michigan until she started losing… then she started using some silly math where counting ‘all’ the votes isn’t really counting all the votes and considering it fair to say you won more votes than your opponent in a state where your opponent wasn’t even listed on the ballot.

It’s this disconnect with reality in this and other departments that ultimately doomed her campaign.

marite · June 13, 2008, 7:27am

Very funny. In past elections, it’s been “between THIS man and THAT man, we choose THIS Man (or THAT man).” We could also say, that it’s been “between a man and a man, we choose a man.” And that would have been correct.

This year, as 3bm103 points out, it’s been “between THIS man and THIS woman, we choose THIS man.”

Of course, there are those who, after THIS woman lost, are choosing THE OTHER man.

1sokkermom · June 13, 2008, 8:07am

For all the die-hard Hillary supporters who just can’t let go, please re-read post # 95. It hits the nail on the head. Great post !

Woodwork · June 13, 2008, 9:05am

I don’t know.
These post are all entirely too hyperbolic, for me.

There is gracious winning and there is gracious losing.
The first is to be expected – the second only hoped for in the very best of circumstances.

Neither applies here.

But to be sure, graciousness is more to be expected of the winner. The victor not only has the power and the prestige, the victor needs more of the same if the game is still afoot, and it is. Which is to say that Obama and those who preferred him need the support of those not falling into the true believer category, including those on the fence that are less ideological and do not vote in lock step on the certainty of the much vaunted “issues”. They tend to be less pedantic, self-righteous and ideological. Even more, these folks do not, as a rule, see vengeance as a virtue.

The ad nauseum insinuation and analysis of white racists voting (“Your White is Showing”), sexism and skullduggery; this bizarre new fascination with placing the rules and fate of a political party above the representation of the voters etc, etc is certainly not a winning strategy for a fair minded people.

Only a vindictive fool could think so.

If it is true that Obama won, act like winners!
–there is an etiquette rightly expected of honest and good natured winners. That is why we can and do so often refer to “sore losers” --but not “sore winners.” Here, it is beginning to appear that, for many, the ultimate goal was not so much to win with the better candidate but to win so as to destroy the much dreaded candidate. There is more antipathy expressed in this forum towards the other Democrat than to the Republican. How’s that?

That, you can be sure, is not a winning strategy.
Neither does it deserve to win.
It is just rabble rousing foolishness.

.

Hindoo · June 13, 2008, 9:10am

You’re right, Woodwork. … But after a long, unbelievably hostile inter-party campaign, it takes a while for the bitterness to dissipate.

alwaysamom · June 13, 2008, 9:18am

woodwork, you have hit the nail on the head. This has been the case throughout the primary campaign, and I had hoped that things would change after the winner was determined. How disappointing that the same old nonsense and constant criticism of Hillary continues, rather than positive forward thinking towards beating McCain. I was, and have been, a supporter of Hillary for years but will happily and enthusiastically vote for Senator Obama. Let’s move on, folks.

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