Clinton advocate comes out in favor of smoke filled rooms

Lanny Davis (former special counsel and spokesman for Bill and strong supporter of Hillary's) repeats the assertion that states Obama wins simply don't count.

DAVIS: She has a majority of the United States senators who have endorsed her. She won in California and in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy and John Kerry's backyard. And the states that you add up that Barack Obama won and give him credit, Idaho, Utah and North Dakota are not exactly states that are ever going to vote Democratic as opposed to California and we have the two senators in Washington.

You really need to kill this meme now, Hillary, before a smart Obama strategist starts running an ad with titles like this:

Hillary Clinton thinks some states are insignificant. Is yours one of them?

Worse yet, Davis, writing for The Hill, now literally argues that smoke-filled rooms are better at choosing candidates than Democratic voters are.

That data showed that in primary elections, the turnout among Democrats was often well below 50 percent. And in caucus states, where voters had to show up at a particular time and place and wait up to several hours before voting, the turn out was often as small as 10%-20% or often much less.

We were also reminded that before these reforms, the "smoke-filled rooms" of Democratic Party leaders had led to the nomination and election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy. Not bad.

It's no surprise that this man, who once sat on DNC Executive Committee, authored the WSJ editorial entitled Liberal McCarthyism (attacking Democrats for voting against his favorite in a primary).

The Democratic base already believes that the 2000 election was stolen and would be furious if they believed their own party cheated to deny them their pick for the nomination.

If her people keep making these arguments, Senator Clinton risks being labeled as the candidate who says to hell with the voters, I'll win anyway possible. (The fact that Obama is currently winning the popular vote as well doesn't help her case.)


Update: Here we go again. These people really aren't helping you Hillary.

A top strategist to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) on Saturday countered the recent claims of some prominent Democrats that party elders would be wrong to override the will of their constituents in their choice for the Democratic presidential nominee.

In a phone call with reporters, Harold M. Ickes, argued that the 796 so-called superdelegates who could decide the party’s White House nominee were as much or “potentially more in touch” with the issues important to voters than the delegates amassed by the candidates through state primaries and caucuses.

In other words, party insiders understand the desires of voters better than the voters themselves. (Really, why do we bother to vote at all?)