Obama Tells Superdelegates Popular Vote Is Not Legit

Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, sent a letter out to superdelegates today urging them to make their choice, because the “time is now.” According to the letter, “With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.” Clinton has been talking about having more of the popular vote when you count Michigan and Florida up until last night, but the Obama camp feels that using the popular vote is a flawed system. Plouffe wrote, “the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.” He shows further disdain for the popular vote by saying, “essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.” The popular vote ploy was just an example of one of Clinton’s “creative scenarios,” and the Barack camp is tired of all her shenanigans. “The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality,” Plouffe wrote. The Obama campaign wants all this to stop because they believe they have already won. “We believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates,” the letter states. Now all that Clinton can do is get the superdelegates to overturn the will of the people. The Obama camp feels that would be unfair because “pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded.” The people for the most part have spoken, and now the Obama camp wants to hear from the superdelegates to get this over with. Clinton would like to see this thing go all the way into August with a brokered convention, and meanwhile hope Obama will stumble again. It is her last shot.
Alan Cosgrove