Wednesday, March 05, 2008

Obama campaign tries to say Clinton failed...

Interesting attempt at spin that I received via email from the Obama campaign:

Lisa --

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday's elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.

That's a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.

For comparison, that's less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It's also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it's considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.

They failed.

The Obama campaign, the one that is promoting that they are the ones that are uniting people and offering hope want you to donate more money to them so they can fight Clinton since they seem to feel that she should drop out of the race after being the only candidate that can actually win large states. They don't seem to support the concept of the Democratic process which is everyone should have the right to vote and be involved in the primary process or do they? To quote the email's own words:
This nomination process is an opportunity to decide what our party needs to stand for in this election.

Exactly...so let's do something novel, actually let the voters decide rather than to try to place pressure on people to drop out.

I also have to dispute their math - yesterday here's where it stood before the elections:

Obama has 1,378 total - Hillary has total 1,259

Today?

Obama has 1,520 total - Hillary has 1,424

Obama gained 142 - Hillary gained 165 - That's a net gain of 23 delegates...not four.

2 comments:

tdadpete said...

Lisa,

Your math is probably accurate, but the Obama campaign is projecting delegates they expect to receive from the TX caucuses. If their projections are correct, Obama will actually "win' TX in delegates. We'll see.

mark skeldon said...

Lisa,

I signed up to recieve email from both campaigns before the primaries started to get a feel for how they were running their campaigns. After all of the states that Obama won, the Clinton's sent out an email trying to spin why the win was not that important. It's part of the game that is played of trying to frame the campaign in the light most favorable to the candidate.

Any realistic Obama supporter would tell you that Tuesday night was a disappointing night, but do you really expect the campaign to say that - of course not. Just the same as Clinton did not admit how badly things were going earlier.

The point they're making is that she probably won't catch him in delegates (I happen to agree with that point). That's the arguement they are going to have to make. Clinton will argue that the bigger states she has one are more important. That's the way it's shaping up, unless there is a comprimise before then. We'll see how it plays out.

On a different note I'm really surprized and somewhat disappointed that Obama has not been more aggressive since Tuesday in addressing some issues raised before Tuesday. National security, experience, and press coverage were all issues that I thought he let her frame before Tuesday's primary. I know you don't agree, but I don't think she has a clear edge in any of those areas, and I was hoping he would be more aggressive in debunking some of her propaganda.

I'm hoping for an aggressive campaign starting this weekend, that begins with her red phone ad.
I was disappointed that she used the Bush type fear politics. The message to me was if you vote for Obama you won't be safe. I don't think it was dirty, but I don't like the fear message especially after this admistration has used it so often. I'd like to see Obama get a little pissed off about it (sorry no other way to put it).

Either way I agree with Clinton that a ticket which included them both would be the best thing for the party and sooner rather than later, but I'm not confident that it will happen, because I think they both want to be on the top of the ticket.