This is probably the actual reason that Hillary wants to stay in the race — and it is fascinating (if not downright shocking) that these three years of contested campaigns are not mentioned as examples of a nomination contest extending into — and past — June. This is because to cite these years means essentially saying that she shouldn’t be asked to leave because she might want to contest the convention. She doesn’t want to do this. That could be because she doesn’t want to contest the convention — in which case, hooray for her — or there could be a more sinister reason, as I suggest way down below. But let’s remember: the precedent of these three years is her best justification for staying in the race.

Let’s remind ourselves about what happened during each of these years.

1972: The 1972 convention is the second-biggest nightmare, after 1968, in recent Democratic Party history. While 1980 is the one that many of us think about having the endgame we fear — more on that below — 1972 is the one that has most in common with our worst-case scenarios. To cite Wikipedia’s article:

McGovern had amassed the most delegates to the convention by using a grass roots campaign that was powered by opposition to the Vietnam War. Many traditional Democratic leaders and politicians felt that McGovern’s delegate count did not reflect the wishes of most Democratic voters. Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter helped to spearhead a “Stop McGovern” campaign. The stop-McGovern forces tried unsuccessfully to alter the delegate composition of the California delegation. California had a “winner-take-all” primary format, which was contrary to the delegate selection rules. So even though McGovern only won the California primary by a 5% electoral margin, he won all 273 of their delegates to the convention. The anti-McGovern group argued for a more proportional distribution of the delegates, while the McGovern forces stressed that the rules for the delegate selection had been set and the Stop McGovern alliance was trying to change the rules after the game.

www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/25/44929/5071/365/522391

everytime these bunch open mouth in the next few weeks. I am shoving the word ‘assassination’.

Incidentally, Hillary just lost the moderate baby boomer in the party with that RFK remark. And now AA voters are beyond slightly cold on her. She has core 3 groups left: lobbyists/DC circle, white woman over 40, and Appalachian.

None of them care about hillz blogging crew. ahahahahaaa…..

NY Expat wrote:

So, if this was unintentional, what about when she mentioned it 2 1/2 months ago, per Time magazine? My question would be, if it’s really a dogwhistle, why would she only mention it about once every three months? I mean, if we’ve learned anything from the Republicans, isn’t that you should hammer your point again and again, and then again some more? Again, this just doesn’t add up to me, and I’m having a really hard time seeing how it adds up for anyone else.

Why is it a dogwhistle?

Because in order to be a dogwhistle, it must be extremely subtle and hard to immediately detect on the surface.

If she were hammering the point home like the Republicans, it would no longer be a dogwhistle, because everyone would notice it.

I’ll tell you what’s depressing, though– it takes a clumsy-ass Democrat to completely screw up the low-grade demagoguery that the GOP has turned into an art form over the past thirty years or so.

Keith Olberman tore into Clinton last night. I don’t think I have ever seen him this angry.

The first is that the strategy of the Clinton camp, of continuing to campaign even after victory at the polls became numerically impossible–in hopes that Obama might stumble and alienate sufficient numbers of superdelegates–was not crazy. I don’t approve of it, but that it could work or could have worked seems clear. It could easily have been Obama who stumbled yesterday. Ironically, it was Clinton.

The second thing the incident tells us is how traumatized the nation still is by those horrible killings 40 years ago, and how much unfinished business of healing those wounds there is. Hillary didn’t mean to pick at the scab. But she did. And we bled a little, all over again.

www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/5/24/65451/0542/860/521896

SICK. Disgusting. And yet revealing. Hillary Clinton is staying in the race in the event some nut kills Barack Obama.

It could happen, but what definitely has happened is that Clinton has killed her own chances of being vice president. She doesn’t deserve to be elected dog catcher anywhere now.

Her shocking comment to a South Dakota newspaper might qualify as the dumbest thing ever said in American politics.

If you can say “kabuki outrage” than at least you have to admit you can identify outrage of differing origin. If you say heuristic “outrage” then I can say yer the mop brigade, the damage control crew.

I’m really not clear what you’re saying here, or if the second use of quotations on just one word is intentional. Feel free to clarify.

Ironically, I agree with all three of your points, just not the conclusion afterwards. Also ironically, if you had bothered to click on the link, you’d have read that I’m an Obama supporter. But by all means, keep believing what you want to believe, which reenforces my point.

2 1/2 months ago she didn’t look so desperate, and people probably gave her the benefit of the doubt because maybe she could pull it off and talk about going until June was just premature.

Now, she has no probable route to the nomination, she’s deeply in debt, and her rhetoric has been getting worse and worse.

It’s context. If your coworker jokes about cleaning out the cash box, you’ll see it differently (and take it more seriously) if he’s facing foreclosure or bankruptcy.

That she also mentioned RFK’s assassination does not mean that she was using that assassination as a justification to stay in the race. Why did she mention it at all? I don’t know …

Yeah…she just want to be a wikipedia editor.

If you can say “kabuki outrage” than at least you have to admit you can identify outrage of differing origin. If you say heuristic “outrage” then I can say yer the mop brigade, the damage control crew.

But hey, he said, she said. This is meta talk about the origin and notion of outrage.

The basic question remains:

1. Hillary has no chance of winning under regulation. The math is not there.
2. She is spinning, delegitimizing the process and plan to blow up the party seeking divisive rule change.
3. Increasingly even that is now nearly impossible.

so the question is WHY is she blowing up the party on nearly impossible math?

She gives answer:

Hey, if Obama is assassinated in June, I get the seat.

cog psych and heuristic outrage that. (Am I the only one who think Clinton spinner are so deep inside their spin, they don’t even know what the fuck they are talking about anymore.)

Even though I usually respect the opinions of many of the people who have commented above, I don’t see at all how anyone can truly believe that Clinton is rooting, hoping for, or in any way trying to hasten an assassination of Obama. Contra a poster above, I thought she did seem very weary during the interview, and it is understandable that she’d mention 1968 above other recent campaigns because it was a closely contested primary (caveats about the greater power of superdelegates at the time notwithstanding).

That she also mentioned RFK’s assassination does not mean that she was using that assassination as a justification to stay in the race. Why did she mention it at all? I don’t know, but the rationales provided here and elsewhere, that she did it to intentionally bring up the possibility of it happening again, seem very, very farfetched to me. This is Hillary Clinton we’re talking about here, not Jesse Helms.

So, if this was unintentional, what about when she mentioned it 2 1/2 months ago, per Time magazine? My question would be, if it’s really a dogwhistle, why would she only mention it about once every three months? I mean, if we’ve learned anything from the Republicans, isn’t that you should hammer your point again and again, and then again some more? Again, this just doesn’t add up to me, and I’m having a really hard time seeing how it adds up for anyone else.

In the end, however, if there’s something I think we’ve all come to realize with respect to beliefs in other’s motives or in what kind of people they are, it comes down to what we want to believe about them. A lot of Amanda’s Cog Psych pieces talk about this dynamic: If you start to think poorly of someone, everything they do starts to be seen through that lens, which only accumulates more evidence that they’re a lousy person. In that context, given Clinton’s past comments about “white working class Americans”, and how she’d walk out of the church if Reverend Wright were her pastor, it’s clear that the pump has been primed for people to see her comments in the worst possible light, but only in the way that people use heuristics as a replacement for rational thought. I thought we in the “reality-based” community were trying to correct for that instinct, not embrace it.

It kind of makes me question the notion of “kabuki outrage”. Maybe it really isn’t kabuki at all, and when people get upset at, say, Sen. Durbin saying that the methods that we’ve been using on prisoners is reminiscent of the KGB and Nazi Germany, because they interpret him as comparing our troops to Nazis, maybe that’s what they actually believe. Of course, to get someone to believe that a Democrat would say that about our troops, you have to get them to believe that a Democrat could say that about the troops.

I’d like to think that we want to work towards breaking this kind of cycle of heuristic outrage, because Democrats are far more likely to be on the short end of the stick, but the first step is to recognize it in action, and I think a lot of us are failing to do that in this instance.