Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Reality Has A Well Known Obama Bias.
by Cenk Uygur at Huffpo
You have to give Hillary Clinton's team credit for one thing: they have masterfully played the perception game. It might have been all smoke and mirrors, but they have done their job of keeping people confused and distracted them from what really matters.
The reality is that: 1. She has no chance of beating Barack Obama. 2. She has had no chance of beating Barack Obama for a long time now. 3. Most importantly, she has deluded people into thinking her chances of winning the nomination were improving as they were getting dramatically worse.
I can prove it with one simple set of numbers. Before the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4th, Senator Clinton was trailing Barack Obama by 102 delegates overall. She had 1,267 and he had 1,369. Today Senator Obama has 1836 delegates to her 1,681. In total she trails Senator Obama by 155 delegates now. So, that means she has lost 53 delegates in that time.
Meanwhile the perception has been that she won Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania and has huge momentum in this race. Her argument to the superdelegates and to the media has been that she is better suited to win the general election because Senator Obama has been stumbling and is vulnerable in the general election -- as all of her wins since March 4th show.
But as you can see from the numbers above that spin is completely unsupported by the numbers. The only reason we are continuing to have a conversation about Senator Clinton's chances is because perception has trumped reality.
She has lost over 50 delegates in the time that she has been claiming to have all this momentum. That's Joe Lieberman-like math. Next thing you know she's going to tell us she has Joementum. After all she's been telling us that her second place status is actually better than first place for a long time now. And people are still humoring that absurd idea.
I hate to put it so harshly (though I don't hate it that much), but it's time to stop humoring Hillary Clinton. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert, in this case, reality has well-known Obama bias. This race is way past over.
