RobertEmmet

By Robert Schlesinger

So it turns out that the Super Bowl was a tie.

Bear with me here. Look, it’s true that the Giants scored more points than the New England Patriots if one chooses to follow the traditional rules of football. But if you only count touchdowns, the game ended in a tie.

Hey — I didn’t invent this kind of logic. Bill Clinton did.

Here’s the former president, speaking by telephone Thursday to his wife’s Texas supporter, as reported by ABC News (thanks to TPM for flagging it):

“Right now, among all the primary states, believe it or not, Hillary’s only 16 votes behind in pledged delegates,” said Bill Clinton, “and she’s gonna wind up with the lead in the popular vote in the primary states. She’s gonna wind up with the lead in the delegates [from primary states].”

“It’s the caucuses that have been killing us,” he added.

This is fascinating irrelevancy — as much as if a football coach argued that their team should be considered better because they scored more touchdowns, if not more points overall. (”Look, we scored two TDs to their none — forget their five field goals.”) Or a baseball manager who suggests that their team is the champ because unearned runs shouldn’t count. (The Yankees should be awarded the bug game from last year’s ALDS.)

Much has been made over the last few weeks of the various arguments coming out of the Clinton camp regarding how the Democratic nomination should be determined: big states are more important (true; if only there was some way to reflect that, perhaps by allotting them more delegates than the small states — oh wait, we already do that); Florida and Michigan should count (actually, Obama should concede on this point, for reasons I discuss over on HuffPo); pledged delegates are free to flip (I doubt this is a serious suggestion that they plan to try to flip them — rather it’s an attempt to suggest that the fact that the superdelegates are free agents does not make them sinister); superdelegates should vote their conscience and best judgment, not be bound by the voters’ will (memo to thuggish Clinton donors: Sometimes a superdelegate’s conscience and best judgment mean following the voters’ will).

Each of these utterances and others have been critically analyzed by the press and the bloviators, looking for signs of a master Clinton strategy to snatch the race from Obama. They give the whole thing too much credit and too much credence. Rather I suspect that the Clintons have entered the spaghetti phase of the campaign: They’re tossing everything against the wall and seeing what sticks.