Obama will be an Illegitimate Candidate for President

Original Link: http://wwsword.blogspot.com/2008/06/obama-will-by-illegitimate-candidate.html

Lanny Davis is trying to understand why they took four delegates from Clinton. It's more than four delegates, Lanny. The DNC took all uncommitted delegates - a valid presidential preference - and gave them to Obama! Uncommitted was the only presidential preference that saw a full blown campaign in Michigan. Despite the fact that there were four candidates on the ballot, Democrats campaigned to instruct voters to vote uncommitted, to steer away votes from Clinton, Dodd, Kucinich, and Gravel. Clinton ran no campaign in the state and still carried it by a large margin. Obama voluntarily left his name off the ballot.

What the DNC has done is entirely irrational. It's sheer lunacy, to be precise. In science we have a thing called unexplained variance. The rational scientists doesn't attribute it to anything, because she doesn't know to what it is attributable. Survey questions left blank are missing data. All this is basic to the rational way of doing things. Imagining differences are attributable to biology, for example, because of unexplained variance or guessing what survey respondents were thinking with their non-answers is irrational. Indeed, it's fraud. You don't know what voters who voted uncommitted wanted. You don't know what names appear on secret ballots. The DNC made a decision based purely on the political goal of nominating Obama not on the rational goal of determinable apportionment.

This DNC action is way beyond the pale. These elites kept talking about rules, yet they arbitrarily gave Obama votes he did not win, including votes Clinton did win! They even talked about the voters who did not vote, imagining that some voters would have gone to the polls and, presumably to vote for Obama, if they didn't because that their vote didn't count. But the US ranks at the bottom of democracies in terms of voter participation. If we used nonvoting as a reason for changing the actual vote after it was cast to reflect what we want it to reflect and not what it actually reflect, then we could change every election. Not everybody votes! Get it? You don't change votes based on who didn't vote. This is not Alice in Wonderland.

Let's review:

A large minority voted uncommitted. This means that they expressed a preference for uncommitted. Sure, Obama wasn't on the ballot so people couldn't vote for him. But neither was my name on the ballot. Do I get some delegates? Obama took his name off the ballot. Dumb strategy on his part. Since there is absolutely no way of knowing whether those who voted uncommitted would have voted for Obama - or Edwards or Biden or Richardson - you cannot give those votes to Obama. There is no other way of describing this action than it's stark-raving mad.

A small minority of voters wrote candidates names on the ballot. We do not know whose names appear on those ballots because they are secret ballots. Most of them could be for Edwards or Biden or Richardson. We don't know. We have no way of knowing. Obama could have stated that he wanted write-in votes for him to count. He didn't. Dumb strategy on his part. Why is his stupidity to be rewarded by imagining that his name appears on pieces of paper that no one will ever see? It is lunacy to attribute any of these votes to Obama.

People didn't vote. We know this because there is a gap between the number of registered voters and the number of voters who voted. But we don't know how many of these voters would have voted under different circumstances. Indeed, it may very well be the case that more people voted in the Michigan primary because they said it wouldn't count. If you can't think up a plausible explanation for why this might be true then you are severely lacking in creativity. There has to be some reason that four times more people turned out for the primary than did in 2004! Clearly the vote wasn't being suppressed.

Why weren't these arguments aggressively pursued at the rules body of the DNC on Saturday? Makes you wonder, no? It's so obvious, it's so clear cut, that you would think that rational people would have come to this conclusion without any argument at all. But you saw the vote. You heard the arguments. They wanted to award Obama votes he did not win because they want Obama to be the nominee.

The Democratic Primary is a fraud. The Obama candidacy is illegitimate.