Prospective arguments back and forth in the Democrat presidential campaigns
If Senator Clinton winds up with the most primary votes in June, and Senator Obama winds up with the most pledged delegates, some interesting arguments are possible. Michael Barone outlines a few:
something like three quarters of Obama’s current advantage in pledged delegates comes from delegates elected in caucuses. The Clinton people might argue that these aren’t as legitimate as delegates selected in primaries because they were chosen by so few people (perhaps 1.5 million as against 30-some million in primaries). But the Obama people have a perfectly good reply when they say that the Clinton people knew the rules and that if they didn’t play competently, the side that did shouldn’t be penalized. The problem is, the same argument could be deployed in favor of superdelegates’ supporting Clinton. The Obama people could have lobbied these superdelegates better or, back when they were selected, acted to choose different superdelegates more amenable to Obama.
It seems to me that Clinton’s current popular-vote lead (with Florida and Michigan) and her likely post-June 3 popular-vote lead (with Florida and Michigan) and possible post-June 3 popular-vote lead (with Florida but not Michigan) give her a talking point with superdelegates. The talking point is that she is the choice of the people. The Obama side can respond, plausibly, by saying that caucus wins produce only small popular-vote margins (or imputed popular-vote margins, as in Iowa, Nevada, Washington, and Maine) and that if those states had primaries, they would have produced bigger Obama margins. To which the Clinton people can reply that Obama has consistently done better in caucuses than in primaries (as in Texas, where he lost the primary and won the caucus) and that his percentages in caucus states if they had held primaries would have been smaller and that in some such cases he would have lost caucus states if they had held primaries. The Obama side can also say that Florida and Michigan shouldn’t be counted, because they were held too early and because Obama wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan. But real people did vote there, and in Michigan prominent Obama supporters urged people to vote for “uncommitted,” which got a respectable 40 percent of the vote, to Clinton’s 55 percent. And then you can get into arguments about the imputed vote in the four caucus states.
The important thing here is that all, or almost all, these arguments, on both sides, are plausible. Reasonable people can advance and believe them. And supporters of the two candidates will, reasonably, advance the reasonable arguments that serve their cause. There is no entirely value-neutral basis, no one moral yardstick, to determine which set of arguments is the more legitimate. Reasonable people will disagree, as they call on the superdelegates to make their decisions. My sense is that the superdelegates don’t want to make their own decisions…
“the superdelegates don’t want to make their own decisions” — that would appear to be something of an understatement, given the circumstances.