Clinton Continues Dishonest Campaign–This Time Misrepresenting ABC News

Being far behind Obama by any meaningful measure, the Clinton campaign continues to twist reports to try to claim a lead. They are again stressing popular vote, despite actually being behind. Jake Tapper writes that in making this claim Clinton Camp Misrepresents ABC News Report.

Besides being incorrect, the race is based upon delegates, not popular vote, and shifting to popular vote allows Clinton to continue to play the game of picking and choosing which states to count. As I noted recently, if the race was based upon the popular vote and not delegates, Obama would have conducted his campaign differently to increase his popular vote. However Obama campaigned based upon the party rules and concentrated on obtaining delegates.

Besides changing the rules, concentrating on the popular vote creates problems with regards to which states to count. Clinton includes Michigan where Obama was not on the ballot and write-in votes for Obama were not even counted. Clinton’s selective count does not even include the count for uncommitted in Michigan, which clearly represented anti-Clinton votes. The popular vote down plays caucus states where turn out is lower. These happen to be states where Obama had greater support.

If allowed to pick and choose which votes to count, then Clinton wins. By any meaningful criteria, Clinton remains far behind Obama. Someone who conducts a campaign like this is likely to govern like this. After what we have gone through with the Bush administration, we do not need a president who repeatedly does not tell the truth.

Clinton Campaign Praises “Fair and Balanced Fox” Again

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ2nVor0bSI]

A few weeks ago I noted how Clinton has been joining forces with the “vast right wing conspiracy” (possibly because they now hold similar views on most issues beyond economics and abortion). One example was given in this post where Clinton surrogate Ed Rendell said, “FOX has done the fairest job, and remained the most objective of all the cable networks.” Clinton campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe repeated this claim last night saying, “Fair and balanced Fox. You beat them all.” (Video above.)

Hat tip to Jon Henke at Q and O, who comments:

One comment might be enthusiasm. Repetition, however, suggests this is a Clinton campaign talking point…and a rejection of the Leftroots attitude towards Fox News.


Update:
Fox is now using McCauliffe’s comments in a network promo.

An Uneventful Day

After six weeks of hype nothing much happened on Tuesday. As most predicted, Clinton won but Obama reduced her lead from earlier polls. While Clinton won in Pennsylvania, the result makes Obama’s nomination a little more certain, and the race will continue with Clinton still remaining in the race.

Clinton will pick up a slightly higher number of delegates than Obama but it won’t have any effect on the race as only a total blow out would have helped. Pennsylvania’s demographics were among the best for Clinton of all the states remaining. If she couldn’t win big in Pennsylvania she won’t be able to do so anywhere else. To eliminate Obama’s lead among pledged delegates she now needs to pick up near 80% of the vote in all the remaining states, which is virtually impossible. Clinton’s only hope is that the superdelegates vote for her over Obama, but far more have superdelegates have committed to Obama than Clinton in the past couple of months.

The spin provided a few moments of amusement. While the Obama camp explained how a Clinton victory wouldn’t change the dynamics of the race, the Clinton camp claimed that even a one point victory would still be a victory. While true, this sure contradicts all the times they claimed that Obama’s victories didn’t count, even when he won by far larger margins than Clinton won in Pennsylvania. Clinton surrogates both argued that it is the popular vote and not delegates which matter, but also declined to agree that Clinton loses if she fails to take the lead in the popular vote. Everyone knows they will come up with yet another argument if unable to take the lead in the popular vote. Hillary believes she is entitled to the nomination and nothing else matters.