Unfortunately, Richardson's respect for the popular vote is not seen in all Obama supporters. Consider Josh Marshall's blithe unconcern for the votes of the people, a new position BTW for TPM. Josh's feigned bafflement at the difficult task of counting the votes is thoroughly amusing, indeed, to coin a phrase, almost parody:
I don't know where it was. It think it may have been a reader blog at TPMCafe. Wherever it was it was a post that ran down something like ten different ways of counting the popular vote, all to the end of showing that Barack's popular vote lead wasn't nearly so great and may not exist at all. There was the count with and without Michigan and Florida, with one but not the other, including caucuses and not including caucuses. There were other options that seemed to go even further down the rabbit hole.
The rabbit hole? Having done these exercises, let me assure you that they are quite straightforward and simple. They entail getting a vote count from all the states. The controversy surrounds Florida and Michigan. OF course Josh WANTS this all to be some arcane nonsense, but he must know better. There seems to be a purpose to his feigned bafflement:
But it did lead me to have a kind of epiphany about just where the Clinton side is at this point -- gaming out different retroactive rule changes to see who would have won the popular vote if the nomination process were operating under a different set of rules.
Here is Josh again making stuff up. The question is not who will win the popular vote under a different set of rules. That would be the Obama campaign's exercise (projecting out caucus votes to primary sized turnouts) and I bet you right now Josh Marshall will be one of those playing that game in a month or so. Mark my words.
After some more incomprehensible blather from Josh, he lets loose with this jabberwocky gem:
But fundamentally, who cares? The system is based on pledged delegates and super-delegates. Period. There's a set of rules everyone agreed on. The wisdom of those rules is irrelevant at this point. The Clinton campaign is entitled to do whatever it wants to get superdelegates to come over to her side to even out the pledged delegate deficit. My take is that whatever the arguments, the superdelegates aren't going to go against a clear pledged delegate leader. And I think they'd be extremely ill-advised to do so. But the superdelegates do have this power under the rules. But these constant efforts to say the rules aren't fair are just silly, and truth be told I think they're more undermining of the Clinton campaign than they realize.
(Emphasis supplied.) Um, what I have seen is nothing but Obama supporters spending all their time whining about the Clinton's efforts to convince the superdelegates to support Hillary Clinton. One of the arguments the Clinton camp is legitimately making is about the popular vote. And Obama supporters are whining about it.
Indeed, prefacing his complaint about Clinton whining Josh Marshall writes a long whine about those efforts. Josh basically just whined about how unfair the Clintons are being and then wraps up his piece accusing the Clinton forces of whining about "unfairness."
The irony is stark and the "undermining" of TPM as a reliable source of information and opinions about this campaign continues apace. A remarkable post from Josh Marshall.
