Clinton and the Rule of Law

For the past couple of weeks, I was amongst those Obama supporters who was trying to mend with Clinton supporters. I strongly believed that Clinton would, after WV, begin to prepare for a graceful and honorable exit which would be carried over the remaining contests. After all, Obama has almost secured the nomination as he leads Clinton by every single available metric.

With her speech in WV, Clinton clarified her position in regard to the rules of the Party. Before and after the primary, Clinton and her surrogates, went all the way in what should be rightfully called a disregard of the internal rule of law of the party. Basically claiming that the rules must be changed, that the millions of voters who have already voted don’t count, and that the elected pledged delegates don’t count either.

What seems to only count for Clinton is the popular vote of some but not all contests (after all many caucus states don’t divulge their numbers) and the superdelegates. This is because those are the two only metrics that she can hope to change in her favor.

While it is true that Clinton and her surrogates have stopped the direct attacks on Obama, they have not stopped (and actually increased) their attacks on the Party’s rules and regulations as well as the will of the majority of its voters thus far.

The Clintons and their surrogates keep moving the goalpost as they see fit and they must have a lot of clout within the upper echelons of the party since no one (where are you Howard Dean?) is telling them they should stop their extralegal attacks on the Party’s rules and regulations.

On Meet the Press last Sunday, talking about the FL and MI delegations, Terry McAuliffe said that "the rule is 50 percent" and that he would be content with 50% of the delegations from those states seated. Now, two days later, they want 100% of the delegates seated as is, even though Clinton herself said back in December, that these primaries "will count for nothing".

Their rationale is that we need 50 states in November but they don’t seem to care about the fact that they might end up with 25 states if they keep pushing their unorthodox efforts and drive away a large chunk of Obama supporters in the process.

Since there is no logical explanation for Clinton’s refusal to play by the rules, the only possible explanation is that what we are witnessing is a pure and simple coup attempt by the Clintons and their surrogates. Now that they cannot win by the rules that they themselves have helped to lay out and that they have accepted at the beginning of the process, they feel it’s ok for them to demand that the rules be changed as they see fit in order to make the math work in their favor.

They now claim that they could win the popular vote but what they are not saying is that they are only referring to those states that hold primaries. Clinton knows very well that some caucus states don't release their popular votes results so, while with one hand she acts as the champion of democratic voters by demanding that FL and MI be seated, on the other hand she is openly trying to disenfranchise the voters of those states where caucuses are held.

Clinton has already passed the point of no return by openly declaring that the number of delegates needed to win the nomination (2,025) is null and void and that the new number should be 2,209. By doing so, she has done great damage to the integrity of the primary process. Clinton and her surrogates have clearly espoused the belief that the end justifies the means and they will not stop their attempts to win the nomination at all costs.

And so we find ourselves in this Orwellian land of double speak where Clinton pretends to be the champion of democracy and the popular vote while she’s openly and directly undermining the democratic process since her only path to the nomination is for the superdelegates to overturn the the will of the pledged delegates.

Clinton has taken a very dangerous route because if she believes that the Obama supporters will sit idly by and let her destroy the integrity of the electoral process of the Democratic party she’s highly mistaken. This was supposed to be the year of the Democrats, the year when the people throw out the Republicans because of all their failed policies. Instead, because of the thirst for power of one person, we are more and more likely to witness a civil war within the Party that will cripple it for years to come.

Way to go Mrs. and Mr. Clinton.