The only number that matters is 2025 (the pledged delegate "lead" premise is utterly bogus) [View All]

[ruggerson]

1) The only number that matters is getting to 2025.

2) A candidate gets there with ANY combo of pledged delegates and superdelegates that they can cobble together.

3) If one candidate leads in so called "pledged delegates" but has not reached 2025, guess what? They aren't the nominee or the presumptive nominee until they have put together the actual majority.

4) The Obama camp/media spin that the superdelegates must line up the way the pledged delegates do is entirely made up out of whole cloth. It is a premise they invented. It is FICTION. There is nothing in the rules that the superdelegates have to vote for whomever is in the "lead" with pledged delegates. Any more than they have to vote for whomever is in the "lead" with the overall popular vote. The only thing the superdelegates have to do is vote for the candidate they prefer - just like you and I.

5) To pretend that there is some rule, moral or otherwise, that the superdelegates must follow is just as wrong as the Clinton camp wanting to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations. You don't change the rules to suit the whims and desires of one particular campaign. And that includes coming up with an edict that whomever "leads" wins. Wrong. Whomever puts together 2025 wins.

6) If Obama should come into the convention without a pledged delegate "lead" or a popular vote "lead" and gets the nomination anyway, then that's because more superdelegates thought he would be the better candidate than Clinton. And vice versa.

7) If you don't like this concept, then rewrite the rules for 2012 and mandate that in the case no candidate has the magic number coming into the convention, the superdelegates must vote for the candidate who has the "most" delegates. Or write a rule that they must vote for the overall popular vote leader. But as of today, 2008, no such rule exists. The superdelegates are bound by only one thing: their preferences, just like you and I. A pledged delegate lead or a popular vote lead shouldn't mean anything to them whatsoever, unless, individually, they decide it's a criteria.

Don't try to change the rules midstream to try to fix things for one candidate over the other. That isn't democracy. Let the process play out as agreed to and understood by all before the game began.