News of the Weird

I'm like, scratching my head. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, correct? The nomination will be awarded officially by delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the delegate selection process is over, and the majority of the delegate votes at the convention belong to people who will vote for Obama. Ergo, QED, therefore, ipso facto, a fortiori and you can take it to the bank, Senator Obama will be the nominee.

So Hillary Clinton takes the occasion to announce:

She is the candidate who will be the best president;
She is asking people to continue to donate to her campaign;
She will decide on the future of her campaign in the coming days, based on what the people who voted for her want her to do;
That the voters of South Dakota have had the last word in the primaries, even though the polls in Montana were still open at that very moment;
That more people voted for her than had ever voted for a candidate in a primary -- even though more people voted for Obama than for Hillary Clinton.

What on earth is the motive for this speech? What does it all mean? Andrew Sullivan, who used to be wrong about everything but has woken up and smelled the coffee, says "The way she is now doing this - by an implicit threat, backed by McCain, to claim that Obama is an illegitimate nominee if she does not get her way - is designed to humiliate the nominee sufficiently to wound him enough to lose the election. . . . She will not go away. The Clintons will never go away. And they will do all they can to cripple any Democrat who tries to replace them. In the tent or out of it, it is always about them. And they are no longer rivals to Obama; they are threats."

Noam Scheiber says, "What good could possibly come of this? With Hillary proclaiming herself the legitimate winner, they're clearly going to say "keep going." If she actually does keep going, that's a disaster for the Democratic Party. And if she doesn't, you've just drawn a ton of attention to the fact that a large chunk of the party doesn't accept Obama as the legimiate nominee. No, worse: you've encouraged them to think that, then drawn attention to it."

Steven D says, "So she's still in it to win it! Or maybe she did win it? Who needs delegates anyway. She's strong, she's tough, and she only cares about you. You and your health care. That's why she ran for President. It was all about you. And Terry McCauliffe apparently. . . . And she she did promise to unite the party. I know because that was one sentence in her speech. Which I thought was really cool. She's a uniter not a divider. Who knew? Oh, and yeah, it was a great honor to beat Obama. She said that too (if you read between the lines in my opinion). So good for her."

Wacko. Nutty as Planter's Party Mix. And no, Senator Clinton, if you succeed in sabotaging the Obama campaign this fall, you will not be the nominee in 2012. It's time to think of Plan C.