It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.
 | Don’t Be Herded: Why Nothing in the 2008 Race is Wrapped Up |
In the last day and a half I’ve been listening to pundit after pundit declare that Hillary Clinton is somehow “on the ropes” or that her campaign will have an “uphill climb now” and that John Edwards is a “dead man walking” who just doesn’t know it yet. The notion among the punditry seems to be that because Barack Obama got the largest percent of caucus support in the Iowa Caucuses on January 3 2008, he now has a considerable lead in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Pshaw. In literal terms, this is clearly untrue. Here’s the current delegate count:
Barack Obama: 16 delegates
Hillary Clinton: 15 delegates
John Edwards: 14 delegates
Hillary Clinton is in second place in the nomination race, not third, because while she had a slightly lower amount of percentage support of caucusgoers in Iowa, her support was distributed across precincts more evenly than John Edwards’ support.
How can any of these three be said to be blowout winners of the Iowa caucuses when the number of delegates they’ve secured is so close?
And, oh, did I mention that to win the Democratic nomination, a candidate needs to secure a majority of the 4,049 total delegates? That’s 2,025 delegates needed to secure the Democratic presidential nomination. How’s the presidential race look in those terms?
The differences of 16 versus 15 versus 14 delegates for Obama, Clinton and Edwards shrink to essentially nothing on the effective scale of the Democratic nomination. What’s more, the difference between 16 delegates for Barack Obama versus 0 delegates for Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson or Mike Gravel also becomes quantitatively insignificant.
There’s only one condition under which the pundits have it right, and that’s the condition in which Democratic primary voters are conformist sheep who look for their cues to follow whomever the “leader” is declared to be, no matter how bare the standard for that declaration.
So are you a sheep? If you are, just go right on ahead and let the shepherd beat you back into the flock with his crook.
If you’re not a sheep, then by all means keep on supporting the presidential candidate who you think is best suited for the job. If enough people will stop bleating and start thinking, then the race will be as wide open sociologically as it is numerically.
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