Clinton’s Claim To Popular Vote Lead Claim: Campaign Rep Suggests Party Is Supreme Court In 2000

If it becomes a formal talking point, you have to wonder how this tidbit reported by Balloon Juice’s always blunt John Cole will play with many superdelegates, DNC party chair Howard Dean and the mainstream media that has been covering the Democratic party race:

Lisa Caputo, one of the Clinton hacks on MSNBC tonight, just claimed (fraudulently) that Hillary had the popular vote but was behind in the delegate math, and that this felt like “Al Gore in 2000 when it had to go to the Supreme Court.”

Caputo was one of Hillary Clinton’s best spokespeople at the White House and is considered close to her. Her Wikipedia bio notes:“She now serves as a campaign supporter for Hillary Clinton and speaks out to television stations on her behalf. She is frequently seen on CNN as a representative of the campaign.”

Several things about this:

(1) The Clinton camp can make the argument about the popular vote in a clinical, hard-nosed way, outlining their case and in time it could be an argument some superdelegates could consider.(See Pete Abel’s excellent post below).

(1) Hillary Clinton this week started making this argument about the popular vote repeatedly and strongly and it was noted by the New York Times. Just as George Bush’s supporters on talk radio, weblogs and in the media would immediately pick up his battle cry when he makes a new assertion, Clinton’s most partisan supporters immediately picked up the talking points, even before yesterday’s primaries. On the right, the National Review’s Byron York now agrees with her.

But several reporters say this is questionable. For instance, ABC’s Jake Trapper:

It’s one of Sen. Hillary Clinton’s last arguments — she’s ahead in the popular vote, she should be the nominee, even though she has won fewer delegates.

“Right now more people have voted for me than have voted for my opponent,” Clinton told Kentuckians recently. “More people have voted for me than for anybody ever running for president before.”

One problem with these claims — they don’t appear to be true.

The problem is not Clinton mendacity. The problem is that popular vote tallies are woefully wrong.

Read the entire post.

2. The suggestion that the Democratic party apparatus is behaving like the Supreme Court squelching Al Gore’s argument is actually a mirror argument of what some progressive blogs have been suggesting about Clinton’s campaign. Some blogs over the pasts few months have suggested that if the party gave the nomination via superdelegates to Clinton over Obama after voters went to the polls, donated money and Obama won more pledged delegates THAT would be like the 2000 Supreme Court decision. The cartoon above reflects that viewpoint.

3. Use of this argument suggests that even though some rhetoric has cooled, the Democrats are far from starting to mend fences, since arguing that the party is having like Justic Scalia et. al. given the way the Supreme Court decision is perceived by many Democrats is a nice way of saying the party’s actions are illegitimate.

4. If bloggers suggest it, it’s one thing. But this has come from the aide of a candidate — which puts it on a higher level. This would be– once again — highly polarizing and not help the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House in November (if that is what the party’s and its partisans truly have as their goal on election day).

Cartoon by Wright, The Detroit News