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.