Barack Obama Clinches Pledged Delegate Victory

With Obama’s victory in Oregon (final results not yet known but it was called for Obama immediately) he has clinched the pledged delegate victory. This means no matter what the results are of the remaining contests, Obama is the pledged delegate winner.

This means that the only way Clinton could win is for the superdelegates to overturn the results from the actual contests.

Which brings me to another subject:

HILLARY CLINTON IS CHEATING

The popular vote metric that the Clinton campaign has tried to interject into this nomination after they realized she would lose the agreed upon metric (pledged delegates) is bogus because of the fact that the states all have different voting laws. It greatly undercounts all caucus states and doesn’t count four caucus states altogether! It also doesn’t take into account the fact that some states are “open” while others are “closed.” This obviously gives greater weight to the open states. It’s an entirely unfair metric to use.

The delegates were the agreed upon way of scoring this “game.” (In fact the Clinton campaign themselves often said “this is a campaign for delegates” earlier in the process when they thought they would win.) Changing the way the game is scored so that you win after the game has started is cheating. There’s no other word for it. Hillary Clinton is trying to cheat Barack Obama out of the nomination he has won playing by the rules everyone agreed upon.

Imagine this: Two teams are playing a game of football and one time has scored 4 touchdowns for 28 points and the other team has scored 6 field goals and a touch down for 25 points. At the end of the game the team with 28 points is kneeling down to run out the clock as they’ve got the win in the bag but then out of nowhere the other team calls a time out and says that actually the real way to score the game is just by overall scores, so they say “We’re actually in the lead because we have 7 overall scores and you only have 4.” Would you think that is a fair rule change to make? Do you think the other team may have played differently if they knew the game would be scored in this different way? You’d think it was an utterly ridiculous claim.

Did you notice they left out counting “point afters” as separate scores? Why? Because it didn’t fit in with their claim. That’s what this Clinton popular vote claim is all about; counting things in such a way that they are ahead. It doesn’t matter how ridiculously convoluted the counting system is, as long as they are ahead.

The popular vote claim is just as ridiculous. You cannot change the rules for scoring something after it’s begun. It’s always cheating to try and change the rules in the middle of a game. Hillary Clinton is cheating. And by cheating in this way she’s hurting the reputation of Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, because some people don’t have the logical ability to understand that Clinton’s argument is bullshit.

Furthermore, the only way Clinton has the lead (as she claims) in the popular vote is if Florida & Michigan are counted. This is unfair not only because it discounts caucus states but also because all candidates agreed beforehand that Florida & Michigan would not count. In fact Obama’s name wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan & for Clinton to make her bogus claim of popular vote victory she has to include the over 300,000 votes she got there while Obama gets 0 votes! This is particularly ridiculous because it’s likely that Obama would win Michigan if they were to hold another contest there.

Regardless of the Clinton campaign’s shenanigans, Obama reached a very important milestone tonight by clinching the pledged delegate victory and I believe many more superdelegates will be announcing their support for Obama soon. Although it’s possible that Obama may hold them back from announcing just yet for political reasons (ie doesn’t want to be seen pushing Clinton out of the race even though it’s clear to everyone paying attention she lost any real shot at winning a long time ago.)