Clinton Campaign Self-Parody Watch
By If I’m not mistaken Terrry McAuliffe just announced two new goalposts.
1. Hillary has gotten more votes and delegates since March 4th.
2. Hillary has gotten more votes in a nomination race than anyone in history. “Hillary Clinton has now received more votes than any candidate ever running for president in a primary.”
The central premise here is a Grade A, or a Jeff Jacoby, level of illogic:
Bush was reelected with the highest vote total in American history.
I trust the idiocy here is transparent.
But wait! At least what Jacoby said is literally true. Whereas, as Josh points out, unless you insult people’s intelligence by counting North Korea-style one-major-candidate unsanctioned not-even-straw polls and not counting several contests actually sanctioned by the party (under standards McAuliffe contemporaneously supported), the person who wins under the meaningless “most primary votes in history” metric is…Barack Obama.
Given that the Clinton campaign seems to think this crap will actually convince people, it’s pretty easy why they thought that blowing off a month’s worth of primaries and caucuses was an effective strategy.
…I can understand people thinking this kind of thing is trivial. But I don’t think that’s right. It should be remembered that Clinton’s campaign (see also) is using these ridiculous Calvinball metrics to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic nominee. If there was any significant chance that she could win, that might be acceptable. If she even had a credible argument that she was ahead in the popular vote — one anyone would have accepted before the nomination, without knowing who it would benefit — that would be a different issue. But to send flacks to rile up other Democrats against Obama under these circumstances is a disgrace.