2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Woke up this morning, logged on and went straight to [View all]StevieM
(10,503 posts)That story was never about Hillary introducing this argument and other people then responding to it. It was an attack on Hillary from the first moment the smear was introduced.
Hillary wasn't answering a question about whether she could still win the race. She was answering a question about whether it was damaging to party unity to have a race still not wrapped up by June. She gave examples of other primaries that were still going on in June. She mentioned her husband's race. She mentioned the 1968 race, and she accented the word JUNE.
There wasn't even a conversation taking place about whether or not she could still win.
Hillary, for better or worse, had rejected the argument that the pledged delegate winner was the rightful nominee. She had rejected it for months, and the Obama supporters criticized her for rejecting it. The assertion you are making is premised on the notion that Hillary was in agreement with the PD count argument.
2008 was the first time that the PD winner was regarded as the de facto automatic winner and that pledged delegates were treated as the equivalent of electoral votes. A new precedent was set in that election. The last race that had been close enough to make it an issue was in 1984, which was just 12 years after the people started picking then nominees in 1972.
So it was to be expected that in 2008 there would still be contention over that point. Clinton and her supporters were pointing to other standards, like who won the states that, taken together, constituted a majority of the electoral college in the general election.