Clinton's Contradiction

Over the last few months, the Clinton camp has come to represent the height of hypocrisy. Typically, this involves Clinton or members of the campaign asserting one thing one day and than claiming the polar opposite several weeks (or days) later in the name of justice and with the motivation of political convenience.

The most glaring example is the Clinton camp shifting the definition of what constitutes a win, or as it has come to be known, the repeated 'moving of the goal posts.' However, when an already desperate campaign enters desperate times, it resorts to exceedingly desperate measures.

A cartel of Clintonistas recently wrote an assailing letter to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi, the highest ranking Democrat in the land, has not endorsed Obama. However, several weeks ago, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Pelosi made it very clear that the candidate that wins the most pledged delegates will be the nominee. Such a scenario does not bode well for the Clinton camp which has already conceded the pledged delegate count to Sen. Obama (by Bill's own account).

The coalition of Clinton first asserts that such 'declarative statements disenfranchise voters in the remaining states:

We respect those voters and believe that they, like the voters in the states that have already participated, have a right to be heard. None of us should make declarative statements that diminish the importance of their voices and their votes.

However, they go on to say, it doesn't really matter how the remaining states vote because the superdelegates have the right to overturn the populace:

Super-delegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party’s strongest nominee. Both campaigns agree that at the end of the primary contests neither will have enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination. In that situation, super-delegates must look to not one criterion but to the full panoply of factors that will help them assess who will be the party’s strongest nominee in the general election.

Hmmmm... (Read the letter on Talking Points Memo)

The Clinton camp staffers (including Clinton herself) are making a very similar contradiction. The Florida re-vote has been off the table for two weeks now. Yesterday, a Michigan court ruled that the state could not legally release the necessary voter information for holding a re-vote to the Democratic party. The coffin has been nailed shut, yet Wolfson and Singer continue to accuse Obama of disenfranchising voters in both states; a ridiculous assertion.

Interestingly enough, while Wolfson and Singer play the role of Guardians of Democracy, Clinton pushes the idea that pledged delegates are not obligated to represent the actual vote count of the states. Even if it were within the power of the Obama camp (it's not) to push through re-votes in Michigan and Florida, Clinton is asserting that it doesn't matter what the voters say. She hopes that with a little power politics she can simply single out the individual pledged delegates headed to convention and convince them to completely disregard the voters from their respective home states.

Now who's disenfranchising the voters?