Amazing ignorance

In today’s world, we assume that people, including politicians, are woefully lacking in their general knowledge of the world, including history, geography, literature, science, and so on. But we also assume that people who work at a high level in some technical field are highly knowledgeable and competent in that field. Well, here’s something genuinely shocking, from Time magazine via the Corner. As of last year, when Mark Penn was already working as Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategist, he was not aware that all the Democratic primaries award delegates to candidates based on their proportion of the vote, rather than on a winner-take-all basis. He thought California was winner-take-all.

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John Hagan writes:

This information on Mark Penn not understanding the nominating process backs up the suspicion I shared with you last month that the Clinton team has made one of the biggest blunders in American political history by allowing the Obama team to stack every small caucus state in the country with their people, and essentially take the nomination away from Clinton on the cheap.

You would think that any competent political operative would have understood this concept, and made sure that the Obama people could not game the system, and stack the caucuses. It was not an act of political genius by the Obama team, just good common sense. It seems that hubris and stupidity rule the Clinton campaign. Without the caucus strategy in place, Obama would have lost this election months ago.

LA replies:

Well, remember the arrogant statements coming from both Hillary and Mark Penn up until Iowa. Penn made statements that were shown by the Iowa results to be delusional. Yet Hillary kept him on.

I didn’t realize that that many states were caucus states for the Democrats. How many are there?

John Hagan replies:

I don’t know off-hand just how many caucus states were in play this year, but it seemed like an awful lot. Lol, I guess there was just enough of them for Obama to take this election unless the super delegates wake up.

Jon S. writes:

There were 14, of which Obama won 13.

Iowa
Nevada
Alaska
Colorado
Idaho
Kansas
Minnesota
North Dakota
Nebraska
Washington
Maine
Hawaii
Texas (primary plus caucus)
Wyoming

These total 318 delegates. I’d guestimate that Obama won about 220 of them, which gave him the amount he currently leads by.

LA replies:

Thanks for this.

Can you explain how Texas could have a primary AND caucuses?

LA writes (May 9):

It wasn’t hard to find something on the combined Texas primary and caucus, thanks to Google and Wikipedia. I googled “”Texas primary caucus”” and the top result was a Wikipedia article, “Texas Democratic primary and caucuses, 2008,” with everything you wanted to know about Texas delegate selection procedures but were afraid to ask. And there’s a good reason for being afraid to ask. The procedures are extremely complicated.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 08, 2008 07:33 PM | Send