If Wishes Were Horses . . . .

Another argument the Clinton camp has been making recently is that if Democrats had the Republican winner-take-all system for allocating delegates, Clinton would already be the nominee. Long ago, someone told me that it's amazing how many arguments can be answered by asking "So what?" This is one of them.

The most common rejoinder is simply that Democrats don't have the Republican system. They have the system they were given, and both candidates operated accordingly. If the Republican system had been in operation, candidates would have allocated their resources differently and we can't say what the result would have been.

But an even more significant flaw is that the Clinton campaign raises this argument without putting forward any justification as to why the Republican system would be better (aside from giving her the nomination). A winner-take-all system tends to lock up the nomination earlier than the proportional Democratic system, and some people believe it's better for the party to have a nominee with more time to prepare for the general election. But Clinton has been the champion recently of making sure these states late in the process get to have their say; does she now think it would be fine to have more contests that don't matter?

Also, Clinton has been touting the overall popular vote as a metric to measure her against Obama (a metric which I think is irrelevant, since I don't think any rational candidate would devote resources to getting votes that did not lead to more pledged delegates). Yet a winner-take-all system would give all the delegates allocated to a district or state to the candidate who got 50% + 1 votes. If the pledged delegate result doesn't always represent the will of the electorate, the Republican system would be even worse.

Reasonable minds can differ as to whether the Democratic or Republican system is better for the party. But for the Clinton campaign to bring it up as a reason for superdelegates to vote for her when it would seem to contradict other positions that she not only held in the past but holds today seems to me another example of intellectual dishonesty (see previous post for more). What is even more disturbing is not that it comes from the campaign, but that so many supporters are willing to just parrot it.

As Michael Kinsley has said, if we don't hold our politicians accountable for these blatantly faulty arguments or for their inconsistent positions, we're just going to get more of it. That's democracy.

Clinton and the Problem of Intellectual Dishonesty

There's a Michael Kinsley piece from the New York Times book review section before the 2006 election where he said:

"The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse."

I have to say I've been extremely disappointed with the Clinton campaign because I think it exemplifies what Kinsley is talking about. She wanted superdelegates to wait before committing when Obama took the delegate lead and they became her sole path to the nomination, yet she had no problems with nearly a hundred committing to her before the primary voting had barely gotten underway. Her campaign seemed happy to support sanctions on Michigan and Florida until it became clear she might need their votes. After the Pennsylvania primary, she counted Michigan to give herself the "popular vote" lead even though that vote gave zero to Obama, a result which cannot possibly be considered to represent the will of eligible Michigan voters (never mind the threshold question as to why the popular vote should be relevant in what is essentially a delegate contest). Her fundraising appeals going into Pennsylvania stated that the campaign should be decided on their ideas and not the size of their campaign coffers, yet she outspent her Republican opponent for Senate in 2006 by over 7:1. She ridiculed Obama for saying that McCain would be an improvement over Bush, even though I can't believe she would vote for Bush over McCain if forced to make the choice. And, as noted in my previous post, she extrapolates primary results to the general election, even though those inferences are logically unwarranted--and I find it hard to believe she doesn't know it.

I think each of those examples are fairly brazen displays of intellectual dishonesty. And I find it hard to find similar examples from the Obama campaign. One can accuse him of not being sufficiently specific, but at least he hasn't put forward an argument I can find that has been deliberately deceptive or specious. And that, I find, is extremely refreshing.

(OK, maybe there's one: he accused Clinton of taking money out of the highway trust fund with her gas tax holiday proposal, when her plan would have oil companies pay the tax. But it's at least no worse a representation than Clinton's claim that the gas tax holiday would bring down gas prices. Any college freshman who has taken Microeconomics 101 would know that if supply can't be increased, the price is going to stay pretty much where it is for the given demand. And Clinton, who prides herself on being the policy wonk, must know it--especially after she failed to name a single economist who supported the idea when asked by George Stephanopoulis on last Sunday's "This Week.")

Another Specious Clinton Argument: Will She Ever Admit That Primary Results Don't Apply To The General Election?

Clinton, in a widely blogged comment, argues that she’s the stronger candidate against McCain than Obama because whites without college degrees voted for her in Indiana and North Carolina.

This argument is yet another in the specious series from the Clinton campaign that extrapolates primary results to the general election. The problem is that one can't extrapolate primary results to the general election because the general election presents a completely different choice with a different opponent (and often with a far larger eligible voting population and a far higher turnout).

Yes, Clinton is correct that white primary voters without a college degree tend to favor her over Obama to some extent. But that does not tell us whether they would also favor McCain over Obama (or whether they might prefer McCain over herself). Just because one prefers A to B does not mean one would prefer C to B (or A to C, for that matter).

It's a variant on the same argument she raises when she says she wins the big states and battleground states that Democrats will need in November. But if her argument is that she's better against McCain than Obama in those states, then the place to start would be polling data of her and Obama against McCain in those states, not the primary results of her against Obama.

Moreover, even if Obama were weaker than Clinton in attracting blue collar white voters against McCain (which may be true, even though Clinton’s primaries argument doesn’t show it), he must have some strengths to compensate since national polls have him doing about as well as she in head-to-head match-ups against McCain.

This attempt to link primaries to the general election has been refuted over and over again, yet the Clinton campaign keeps on using it. Maybe they think if they just repeat it enough times, it will be true.