Hillary Clinton Lies Again

Hillary Clinton quote taken from this CNN story: “We’ve had an extraordinary series of contests. I’m ahead in the popular vote; Senator Obama is ahead in the delegates. They’ve never been separated before.”

#1 She’s not ahead in popular vote unless you count Florida & Michigan. Clinton & Obama both agreed not to campaign in Florida & Michigan. Both agreed with the DNC’s decision that the votes there would not count. And in Michigan Obama was not even on the ballot.

Clinton continues to say she’s ahead in the popular vote without noting this rather important point. Leaving out a point that important is also known as lying. At best it’s incredibly misleading. How can you possibly count the votes in a state everyone agreed would not count (the candidates & the party) and where the other candidate wasn’t even on the ballot? That’s madness. Clinton herself said that Michigan would not count for anything. Why is the press giving her a free ride on this?

#2 The popular vote has absolutely nothing to do with the nomination process. You cannot use a popular vote metric when the states all use different election systems. Some have open primaries, others have semi-open primaries, and others have closed primaries. Some states have caucuses (14 states in all) and their votes are greatly under counted with a popular vote metric. 4 states are not counted at all.

But it’s more than that. Clinton’s statement that the popular vote and the delegate vote leader have never been different before is flat out false. In 1968 Hubert Humphrey was 8th in the popular vote with just 2% of the vote while Eugene McCarthey was first in the popular vote with 39% of the vote. Despite that huge differential, Humphrey had over twice as many delegates as McCarthey at the time of Robert Kennedy’s assassination (Kennedy was 2nd in delegates and popular votes.) It seems that Clinton would have some knowledge of this primary given her comments about RFK’s assassination.