Woolsey’s “Magic” Number!

Some of you may be aware of my ongoing efforts to sway my congressional representative, Lynn Woolsey, from her original endorsement of Hillary Clinton.

At this point, she has said that she continues to support Clinton, but will not cast her superdelegate vote to overturn “the will of the American public.”

I initially took this to mean she would vote with the pledged delegate winner, since that is the official scoring method for assessing the State primaries and caucuses. However, the latest statement I found from her office sounds a bit more slippery:

Representative Lynn Woolsey's press secretary says Woolsey still supports Clinton, but will vote for whoever wins the popular vote, not counting Michigan where Obama wasn't on the ballot.

My sense is that Woolsey is desperately trying to extend the clock so she doesn’t have to publicly cross Clinton and risk being added to the dreaded enemies list!

She’s now seems to be accepting Clinton’s argument that the popular vote means more than the delegates (which is like trying to claim a football victory based on total yards after losing by a touchdown!)

Woolsey also seems to be trying to thread the needle by counting Florida votes, but avoiding the blatantly silly Clinton position of counting all of her Michigan votes, while disenfranchising those who would have preferred to vote for Obama!

What also remains unclear is whether Woolsey is willing to ignore the caucus results in States without popular vote totals as an additional way to keep the jury out even longer on the popular vote results!

At this point, going into tomorrow’s primaries in Kentucky and Oregon, I’m willing to give Woolsey the benefit of the doubt and assume she’s still accepting the pledged delegate race (albeit with Florida results, but not Michigan) as a valid expression of the public’s will. Of course, considering John Edwards endorsement and giving his Florida delegates to Obama (2 of 13 have already officially moved), the magic number now looks like this:



Obama will clinch the pledged delegate race tomorrow - with or without Florida - so Woolsey will have to twist her logic even more if she wants to justify continuing to keep her options open (and her bed horse-head free!)