'Declaring Victory: Remember, Florida And Michigan Will Count In November'

Post is here.

Politico is reporting that Barack Obama will declare victory on May 20:

Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. . . .The Obama campaign agrees with the Democratic National Committee, which pegs a winning majority at 2,025 pledged delegates and superdelegates—a figure that excludes the penalized Florida and Michigan delegations.

So let me get this straight -- the first act of the self declared Democratic nominee Barack Obama will be to state that Michigan and Florida will not count? This is insane. Two key states in November will be dissed in the first act of the newly crowned Democratic nominee. At the least, Obama should wait until he has 2209 delegates counting the existing Florida and Michigan delegations. One assumes that will likely happen by the end of the primaries barring some unforeseen event. I can not understand the logic of this approach. . . .

By the way, the Obama campaign is badly mishandling this situation in other ways. In the Obama post NC/IN memo makes two very strange arguments. The first:

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

The "wild scenario" is counting Michigan and Florida. This is simply madness from the Obama campaign at this juncture. Obama is going to be the nominee. It is time for him to think about November. The second problem from the Obama memo is its disgraceful disrespect of voters:

[T]he popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. . . . Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.

This is political lunacy. The Obama campaign needs to get its act together on these issues at this crucial time. . . .