One possibility is to ignore these differences and weight everything by Democratic members, which is sort of what you are proposing, but surely the vote percentages that you are weighting would be very different if only Dems could vote. The other choice would be to weight by the groups that were allowed to vote. If it was an open primary/caucus, you weight by everyone; if it was a closed primary/caucus, you weight just by Dems — but then again, you've just counted voters in open races as potentially twice as important as voters in closed races. And then what do you do with crazy Texas who had both a caucus and a primary? Average the results of the two, after you average the caucus measure?

Surely people could come up with some system to measure the “popular vote” but again the measure would at least be as controversial as the delegate system, so why not use the delegate system in the first place? That's what the candidates all agreed to.

After this election is done, I would be very open to changing the Democratic primary system — get rid of super delegates, perhaps get rid of caucuses — but you can't do it in the middle of the race. The result would be even worse than now. The DNC rules committee would effectively choose the nominee by themselves.

Obama gets 70% of Hawaii's registered Democrats added to the so called “popular vote” and Hillary gets 30%.

This FL & MI mess is a great opportunity to tackle all three of the above problems. If we re-vote by mail in MI & FL in June or July, we automatically bring both states back into compliance with DNC rules on timing of elections. This prevents any future Republican attempts to disrupt the Dem nomination process by moving up the primary dates. A precedent would be established requiring states not in compliance to utilize a future mail-in process. It also helps prevent election fraud because paper ballots are physically available for recounts or audits. Finally, it would create a route for Hillary to establish that she really is more electable without Obama’s side claiming she manipulated the party pledged or Superdelegates.

The DNC should coordinate the mail-in for FL and MI based on Oregon’s successful 100% mail-in model. We have enough money to pay for these two states if we utilize equipment we already have, especially since it’s much cheaper to do a mail-in than try to repeat the vote through the two states’ election process.

This is the DNC’s chance to enfranchising voters in MI and FL while mitigating the problems caused by those states’ Republican-led legislatures.

* * *

Much as the more — febrile — Obama fans may dislike it, the race isn't over, and the convention is the logical place to see this race resolved; it should be resolved then and there. The convention is Clinton's “follow-through terminus” as well as where Michigan and Florida will have their outlaw-election-and-delegates issue finally resolved.

Of course, a straight average gives as much weight to the Virgin Islands as it does to California, so you now have to weight the percentages, but by what? The number of Democratic voters in the state? The number of voters? The state's population? None of these are good because some states allow only Democrats, some allow anyone. No way to make it consistent. The best thing I can come up with is to weight by the number of delegates available in the state but that's getting really close to the already existing system of choosing delegates.

We are left with two possibilities. 1) Devalue caucus voters who, through no fault of their own, are not sampled fairly with respect to popular vote or 2) make up some criteria that's easily as controversial as anything we already have in FL or MI.

I'm joining them in that I have to accept, based on the truth laid bare, that some of what the right said of the Clintons in the 90s was a lot more accurate than I was anywhere near willing to accept. Not the silly “troopergate” crap, or the Vince Foster “murder,” but the power-at-any-cost meme that was the driving force behind so many of the silly made up “scandals,” as well as the legitimate ones.

I'd like to excuse the Clintons by blaming those attacks for “teaching” them how politics is played. But that would just be making more excuses for them, a continuation of letting them off the hook for their own bad acts. There are no excuses left, and I refuse to be an enabler for them any longer by defending them the way I once did.

Wrong.

Because a 9,000 vote difference is by no means a legitimate measure of the difference in levels of support among Democrats in the state. Caucuses are for choosing delegates, not sampling the popular vote. The 70/30 percentage split is likely much more accurate, so, if there had been a primary, which there wasn't, instead of a caucus, perhaps 100,000 would have voted instead of 35,000. This would bring the tallies to 70,000 votes for Obama and 30,000 votes for Clinton, a 40,000 vote margin.

Of course, if there had been a primary, the percentages might have been different. Maybe Obama at 65% or 60% or 72%. We don't know. And that's the point. This popular vote theory only works by devaluing the votes of party members in states with caucuses. Since Clinton is extremely concerned about counting all votes, she surely would not let this happen.

It's as simple as that.

Obama and his supporters need to do what they can to force her out as soon as possible.