Reply #37: That Darn Obama Is So Obsessed With… Doing What He’s Supposed To?

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That Darn Obama Is So Obsessed With… Doing What He’s Supposed To?

Apr 21 Oliver Willis

There’s a pretty silly blog entry by Noam Scheiber of The New Republic asking if Sen. Obama is too obsessed with winning delegates as opposed to racking up popular vote totals and the like. But it is the Clinton campaign who, depending on the day of the week and the hour of the day, has tried (badly) to come up with alternative metrics for winning the party’s nomination.

Since time immemorial it has been about delegates. Win the delegates, win the nomination. That was the Obama plan from the get-go and they’ve executed it superbly. Sen. Clinton, on the other hand, has sought to disqualify caucuses, the votes of non-swing states, the votes of red states, as well as the votes of smaller states in order to spin her losing campaign into a winning one. They’ve also been pushing the popular vote line as well as the electoral vote whopper. Look, perhaps if they get to change the party rules those things will be modified and straightened out.

But here, in the 21st century, in the year 2008, the only number that truly matters is how many delegates you’ve won.

As we used to say when I was younger (aka five minutes ago): Scoreboard.