Clinton Democrats

The 2008 Democratic Party nomination for the presidency was stolen from Hillary Clinton and given to Barack Obama by certain members of the party leadership.

Thanks to Bag News Notes,
which had a much different take
on this photo than I did.

Five states broke the primary timing rules, but only two—big states that Hillary was sure to win, Michigan and Florida—were penalized.  The holding back of those two states gave Obama the ability to claim he was ahead in the race, even when he wasn’t.  Unfortunately, a lot of people fell for that nonsense and started to consider him the frontrunner.  That had an impact on media coverage and likely influenced the vote in later primaries.  Paul Lukasiak documented this problem on several blogs, including InsightAnalytical, and found other evidence of what he calls “‘stop Hillary’ corruption” among certain members of the party leadership.

There was manipulation, if not outright fraud, in the caucuses.  A group is making a film about it, and Lynette Long offers a preview. Pacific John, writing at MyDD, gave us a taste of what went on in Texas, but it wasn’t the only state with serious problems reported.  Lambert reports on Texas caucus fraud and the general unfairness of caucuses at Corrente.  Dr. Long has started a new website, Caucus Fraud, to document as much as possible of what happened.

Peniel Cronin’s final report, “Primary versus Caucus: How millions of voters were systemically disenfranchised and election results were skewed”  has just been published at TalkLeft (pdf).  The most significant findings:

Alegre has more on the allocation of delegates, including this gem:

Though voters in all 13 caucus states cast only 2.9% of the total 35.9 million votes those caucus votes control 14.6% of the pledged delegates and 15.5% of the Super delegates sent to the DNC Convention…

39 Primaries with 34.8 million voters gave Clinton a lead in both votes and delegates. Caucuses with 1.1 million voters gave Obama 300,000 more votes and 206 more delegates.

Hillary won the state of Nevada 51%-45%
…but by the time the contest reached the state convention, she ended up with 3 fewer delegates!

Hillary won the popular vote, according to ABC News.  The information is no longer available on the ABC News website, but  both No Quarter and Taylor Marsh documented it at the time:

POPULAR VOTE (all primaries and caucuses)
Hillary Clinton: 17,785,009
Barack Obama: 17,479,990

Rather than being penalized for the tactical move of removing his name from the Michigan ballot, on May 31 Obama was rewarded instead, by the Rules & Bylaws Committee of the DNC.  He was given delegates who didn’t vote for him, and was even given four of HILLARY’s delegates.  There is no precedent for that kind of theft.  Lambert explains at Corrente how the committee broke its own sunshine rules to decide on the delegate donation.

Had the RBC not halved the votes from Florida and Michigan and given to Obama delegates who didn’t vote for him, Hillary would also be ahead in pledged delegates. From Riverdaughter at The Confluence:

[N]ow we know why the RBC did what [they] did. She had over 100 delegates from Florida and 73 from Michigan. If he got zero from Michigan and both states had been able to seat with full strength, she could have added over 86 delegates and he would have lost 59. Hmm, that brings her total to 1725 and Obama’s to 1707.

If that’s not a stolen nomination, I don’t know what is.

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