WHAT A DIFFERENT A DECADE AND A HALF AND A (D) AFTER THE NAME MAKES, Betsy Newmark writes:
James Taranto points out that Hillary’s supporters are definitely more willing to paint her squeaker of a win in Iowa based on winning coin tosses as a victory than they were to characterize George W. Bush’s squeaker of a win in Florida in 2000.
Among known tosses, then, Mrs. Clinton has a net gain of five delegate equivalents, more than double her lead of 1.8. Maybe there are unreported Sanders tosses that even things out, but at any rate the designation of one or the other candidate as the “winner” comes down to pure randomness.
Which won’t stop Mrs. Clinton’s supporters from insisting their woman won. Last night Peggy Noonan tweeted: “I’m sorry but a 50-50 race on Democratic side is not, if she wins, a Hillary win. This is a draw. The fight continues. No HRC validation.” Which prompted this response from Democratic strategist Donna Brazile: “Let’s not set new rules in the middle of the game. A win is a win. They will fight this out next week and beyond.”
Donna Brazile was not saying “a win is a win” in Florida in 2000, when George W. Bush really did have more votes than her man.
As Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, “The accord that emerged in the post-attack period had no chance of standing up to the most powerful force in American life now: party politics. For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives occurred a year earlier—the Florida presidential recount.”
But hey, for somebody who desperately needs to kick off her campaign win to both avoid painful memories of 2008 and to keep her bid for coronation alive, all those memories — all that rage over November of 2000 — must be discarded. It’s yet another reason why, as Jonah Goldberg writes, “Hillary Clinton’s asterisk-heavy victory in Iowa might have been the narrowest of wins for her, but it was arguably the worst of all possible outcomes for the Democratic Party.”