1115.org

Lanny Davis may not be a household name, but he is one of the more high-profile enablers and apologists of the Hillary Clinton campaign. A former former Special Counsel to President Bill Clinton, Davis is a prominent Hillary fundraiser, and quite a fixture in media circles, both print and TV. He is widely described as a Clinton campaign surrogate.

Today he spelled out at great length what he’s calling the “fairest solution” for seating Michigan delegates:

In Michigan, Clinton received 55 percent of the vote. According to Thegreenpapers.com, she thus should receive 73 pledged delegates based on that percentage. What about the 50 remaining uncommitted delegates, and 7 collectively cast for Sen. Chris Dodd and Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, who were also on the ballot?

Some of those 50 delegates might have been for Clinton as a second choice to candidates other than Obama, so it would be totally unfair to award all 50 delegates to Obama.

[...]

The Rules Committee has several options. The fairest would be to allocate those 57 pledged delegates, to Clinton and Obama by the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary. Or perhaps one Solomonic compromise, more generous to Obama than to Clinton, would be to divide the remaining delegates approximately 50-50 between the two of them, 28-27 (giving Clinton the extra delegate since she led in all the latest statewide polls prior to Jan. 15).

Lanny “Mental Giant” Davis has been excoriated all day for both shoddy math and faulty logic. Now there’s no denying that his math was shoddy, and his grasp of the facts was way beyond shaky:

– The total number of Michigan delegates is 128, not the 73 + 57 = 130 that Davis somehow starts with.

— Dodd and Kucinich didn’t actually win any delegates, since they didn’t pass the 15% threshold in a district. (Hillary doesn’t seem to have realized it yet, but these voters have been totally disenfranchised. Their votes don’t bloody well count! And nobody’s fighting on their behalf. Nobody!)

— The two extra delegates Davis spawned when he started out with 130, he vaporized at the end when he divided up 57 delegates by giving 28 to Clinton and 27 to Obama. Self-correcting errors! The man is awesome.

But you can’t really fault the man’s logic. In fact, his formula for dividing up the delegates not only makes perfect sense in principle, it is also — just as he claimed — perfectly Solomonic.

All it takes to see the perfect logic of Davis’ argument is three simple steps:
1) Take leave of your senses. (Everything the Clinton campaign or its army of apologists and enablers does these days makes sense only if you take leave of your senses.)
2) Squint just so. (Even after you’ve taken leave of your senses, everything the Clinton campaign or its army of apologists and enablers does these days makes sense only if you squint just so.)
3) Assume that Obama would not have been the first choice of any Michigan voters.

Remember that this assumption is fully consistent with the results of the actual voting in the Michigan primary. (And if you insist on being picky-whiny — “I know my aunt would have voted for Obama!” — we can relax that assumption substantially. All we really need to assume is that Obama would not have been the first choice of more than 15% of the voters in any Michigan district.)

So then (after correcting Davis’s minor arithmetical errors and factual gaffes), it makes perfect sense to give Hillary 73 first-choice delegates — since she was clearly the first choice of 55% of the voters (or at least the ones who voted anyway after everyone was told the votes would not count, and all the candidates solemnly agreed to this, including one Hillary “Champion of the Disenfranchised” Clinton — and zero first-choice delegates to Obama, since there is no proof whatsoever what he would have been anyone’s first choice. And then it is only fair that the remaining 55 delegates (for Lanny, and other ardent Clintonites whose grasp of basic arithmetic has been somehow eroded by the fervor of their devotion to Their Dear Leader, that’s what 128 minus 73 comes out to in the real world, no matter what it is in Hillaryland) are awarded in “the same ratio of their standing to one another in the average of the most recent Michigan statewide polls prior to the Jan. 15 primary.”

Can’t fault that logic, can you now? And what could be fairer than graciously not insisting on even applying that “same ratio of their standing to one another”? To just give Obama 27 out of those 55 delegates.

And that, boys and girls, suckers of all ages, is how taking Michigan’s 128 delegates, and giving 27 to Obama and 101 to Hillary, is the fairest possible division of the delegates.

If the Obama camp turns down this handsome, generous offer, they’re just being deliberately obstructionist.