Wednesday, April 23, 2008
(11:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Candidate Who Will Not Admit She's Dead
I've been looking over the numbers, and it appears that Clinton's net gain in delegates from Pennsylvania is going to be trivial. Obama is obviously going to win big in North Carolina, the last state with over 100 delegates left, easily erasing Clinton's gains. Indiana is still up in the air -- but that very fact indicates that Clinton is unlikely to win by enough of a margin to make a significant dent in Obama's delegate lead.The only other states that seem to me, impressionistically, to be a lock for Clinton would be Kentucky and West Virginia, and even if she won 100% of the vote, it still would only cover around half of Obama's delegate lead. If anything, even after Clinton's "big win" tonight -- i.e., the "big win" where she engaged in massive deficit spending, after Obama virtually handed her an issue to beat him up with, and ended up with less than half the lead she had at her high point -- Obama is likely to show up at the convention with an even bigger delegate lead than he has today.
In conversation on this topic, Brad pointed out that this is yet another example of the media's profit motive distorting coverage. They hugely overplay individual states, even though the Democratic Party has no winner-take-all states. They go along with Clinton's arbitrary decisions as to which states count -- "Of course Obama wins in states where he wins! What about states were we win, though?" -- and with her exaggerated claims about her influence over the status of Florida and Michigan. Why? To artificially extend the primary and keep people glued to their TVs! The race has essentially been over for weeks now, yet people continue to tune in to idiotic debates, including one where the moderators' prep work appears to have consisted in scanning a few right-wing blogs 10 minutes before the show started.
At this point, the Clinton campaign is the media's best friend -- no wonder they're going easier on her now! If this thing extends to mid-summer, that keeps everyone in business during a traditionally slow time for news. (Nice bonus: in this case, the economic explanation has the benefit of accounting for the behavior of individual reporters as well as their corporate overlords.)
