Last night on MSNBC's After Hours, Ron Reagan did something I haven't seen many "true" journalists do. Listening to one of Hillary Clinton's conduits argue that superdelegates should overturn the pledged delegate count because Hillary would win the popular vote, Reagan asked her a simple follow up.

Where I have seen most journalists make a wise crack or go straight into arguing with the spinster, (assuming that everyone watching is as familiar with the many metrics being used to estimate popular votes) Reagan simply asked the woman how many votes Obama was receiving from Michigan in her calculation. The beauty of the question was that it was a simple way of getting the point across. Hillary's advocate smiled a defeated smile and admitted that "officially Obama did not receive any votes in Michigan." Then, like a professor getting a doctoral student to reason out a flawed premise of their thesis, he followed it up with a question forcing the advocate to explain that her candidate was the only name on the ballot. That easily, Reagan proved how rediculous the metric the Clinton campaign was using and did it without looking biased.

that is an elected official should pledge to the opposite candidate that the people of their state voted for? I don't, and it is happening.

Funny, wasn't it? It's like a losing football team asking the referees to overturn the score of the winning team just because. How would that work?

Hillary's argument reminds me of playing a video game (for the illustration's sake, John Madden Football), where it is you against the computer. At the beginning, you accept the rules of the game thinking you will clobber the computer. But then, as the computer starts racking up touchdowns while you keep turning the ball over, you decide it's time to go to game settings and change the rules to favor you.

Obama's camp accepted the rules of the primaries (no Florida, no Michigan, how the delegates were assigned) and came up with a strategy that maximized their campaign's ability to succeed under those rules. Hillary just assumed she would win on name recognition and end it by Super Tuesday and when that failed, she started lobbying to change the game midcourse. It was a poor campaign strategy and a poor reflection on her leadership ability that she has been relegated to arguing that she should me the nominee because she would have won if the rules were different (such as pointing out that she would have won by the GOP rules). It's like going to your professor to argue that your paper on The Great Depression was worthy of an A when the assignment was to write about Advanced Physics.

I don't know. Personally, I would leave it up to the voters and leave out superdelegates altogether unless something came up...a major scandal arising late in the primary season, for instance...that would make it necessary to overrule the vote.

I've heard that arugment before--if only we used the Republican rules, she would have won. How crazy is that spin? We aren't using the Republican rules. Hillary agreed to the Dem rules and one of her advisors, Harold Ickes, was on the committee that set the rules. Why didn't they object to the rules last year?

I've referred seveeral times to Barbara Bush's book, "Favorite Son" in which she said George W. did this every time he was losing the sandlot baseball game until all his friends drifted away and Goerge was left to take his bat and ball and go home. So is Hillary copying George Bush?

As for the super delegates voting for Obama even though their state went to Hillary, shouldn't the same apply to supers Hillary has from states Obama won? Hasn't Hillary's argument all along been that the supers should go with the candidate they see as the most qualified, that can win the general? You can't have it both ways.

I think that most would agree that the current system that the Democrats use to nominate their candidate is fundamentally flawed and is in need of an overhaul. However, it is bad form to request the rules of a contest be changed once it has already begun. Any argument of how unfair it is by the party that is losing rings hollow. If the roles had been reversed, I doubt that the Clinton camp would put their argument forth based on principle.

Good for him. I'd like to see more of that kind of interaction. However, there's an obvious counterpoint to be made here. In reality, the Clinton method very likely UNDERCOUNTS the net vote gain she would have gotten in Michigan had the vote been held without the scheme of disenfranchisement. Knowledge of that scheme suppressed voter turnout. When you compare Michigan to other highly-competitive large states, like Ohio and Pennyslvania, far fewer Democrats turned out to vote, per capita -- which is hardly surprising since they knew the party intended to toss their votes in the rubbish bin. If you adjust turnout upwards to what one could reasonably expect it to have been without the disenfranchisement plan, and you divide those votes between the candidates in proportion to how they did in the pre-election polls, then Clinton picks up even more net votes than using the methodology of the "Clinton conduit" in your story. And that's without even accounting for the fact polls have tended to overstate Obama's performance, so it's likely Clinton would have done even better than the polls were suggesting.

In Florida, too, turnout was suppressed by the scheme of disenfranchisement. Do the math to adjust that turnout upwards by a reasonable amount (to bring it into line with other highly-competitive large states) and Clinton would likely have picked up a whole lot more net votes there, too. The last time I crunched all those numbers, she was the clear popular choice, by several hundred thousand votes.

It's certainly happening. Even in states that went to Clinton by a huge popular landslide, like West Virigina, the establishment, like Byrd, would rather ordain Obama. But I'm OK with that. It's up to the superdelegates to choose whomever they think would make the best candidate and/or best president. That's how the system was set up. Maybe we'd be better off without any superdelegates. I don't know. But for now their duty is to exercise their individual judgment, not to rubber stamp the "popular choice" (whether that's measured by state, nationally, or through pledged delegate counts). The people I do have to chuckle at, though, are the hypocrites who think somehow the superdelegates should feel bound to rubber-stamp whoever has the pledged delegate lead, while they say those superdelegates should feel free to overturn the popular choice of their own home states. Either the superdelegates should be operating individual discretion or not. I'd say the system was clearly set up with the expectation that they would.

Actually, it's a bit like one team having two of its home games forfeited because the league didn't like how the franchise scheduled those games. Now the players are going to be shut out of the playoffs, in favor of a weaker team, thanks to a decision they had no part in. They keep offering to replay those games according to the league's prefered schedule, but the other team is frightened and would prefer to slip into the playoffs on a technicality, rather than getting there by beating the best the conference has to offer.

In the end, this isn't about Clinton and Obama. It's about the right of the people to have their votes counted. The voters of Florida and Michigan are being punished for actions taken by others, which makes no sense. If you want to punish someone, then find out which Florida and Michigan party leaders backed the early primaries, and punish them. Bar them from holding party office for some period, and bar them from receiving party help in their elections, etc. That would be a punishment tailored for the crime. Instead, the party is punishing folks who had no role in the crime, which is just downright bizarre.

Your argument reminds me a bit of the Republican spin about the Florida election in 2000. The Republicans pointed out that a lot of the problems with that election were due to mistakes made by Democrats (e.g., the infamous "butterfly ballot," designed by a Democrat, or the inferior voting machines in Democrat-controlled districts). They seemed to think it was OK to disenfranchise voters so long as the other party's leaders made the mistakes leading to that disenfranchisement. We lefties rightly pointed out how ridiculous it was to pretend that the public's right to the vote could be properly surrendered by the dumb acts of some election functionaries. We rightly argued that we were morally bound to do our best to account for every vote. But Obama supporters have conveniently stowed those principles away, this year.

Spin will only work for so long and it's not holding anymore. The fact is that Hillary signed onto the rules last year. She knew what they were. Harold Ickes knew what the rules were. So did Mark Penn and the rest of her advisors. In Nov., Hillary said MI and FL didn't count. She made no complaints about the rules until she lost in SC. No matter what or how you choose to spin, you can't change the facts.

Is it your position that Clinton has a moral and legal right to forfeith the voting rights of people in Florida and Michigan? If so, that's a truly sad statement about your own character. But assuming that you think those rights belong to Florida and Michigan voters, not to Hillary Clinton, then why keep coming back to a red herring?

she would have won by an even huger landslide ?

Even though other folks might have campaigned there,she would have won by a larger landslide than she won by with no competition.

Interesting.

Reagan did nail the Clinton lady last night and left her stammering.

I don't know how one can, with a straight face, argue that Florida and Michigan votes have any merit whatsoever. No candidates campaigned in either state, and Michigan only offered Hillary, Dodd, and Kucinich, at all. So, Hillary voters still did come out to vote (based on name recognition), and if anything, the uncommitted vote was low because many Democrats whose candidate wasn't on the ballot crossed over to vote for Mitt Romney who they felt was easier to beat than McCain.

I agree the overall vote count from Michigan would have been much higher if it had any credibility to begin with, but I also think Hillary would not have beaten Obama by near the number of votes she tries to claim in her count (if she won at all). A state with Detroit in it would certainly have turned out to vote for Obama.

Florida likely would have been won by Hillary, but not by nearly the margin she got from the lack of campaigning which benefits the more recognizable candidate.