You know, normally I wouldn’t hit a woman when she’s down. But for Hillary Clinton I think I’ll make an exception.

Like Obama and McCain, Hillary Clinton was in South Florida last week, pretending her campaign had any business there at all. She went with her tired, last-ditch spiel that the Democratic Party should sit Michigan’s and Florida’s delegates at the August convention, because, in the name of democracy, “every vote should count.” Here was what she told folks at the Century Village Retirement Community in Boca Raton:

We believe the popular vote is the truest expression of your will. We believe it today, just as we believed it back in 2000 when right here in Florida, you learned the hard way what happens when your votes aren’t counted and the candidate with fewer votes is declared the winner. The lesson of 2000 here in Florida is crystal clear. If any votes aren’t counted, the will of the people is not realized and our democracy is diminished. That is what I have always believed.

The lesson of 2000?

First, let’s get a couple things straight about the primary. The Democratic Party is a private corporation (yes, it’s incorporated) that can use whatever process it wants to select a nominee, whether that be a complex national state-by-state delegate system or having all of its members compete in a drunken game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Thus to compare the DNC not seating Florida’s delegates at their private convention to the US government not counting Floridians’ votes in the 2000 presidential election is a blatant misrepresentation of the situation. No matter what Hillary tells them, the voters in Florida and Michigan do not have a democratic right to vote in the Democratic primary.

Moreover, Hillary Clinton treads a blurry line, suggesting she may still be entitled to the Democratic Party’s nomination while showing zero respect for the Party’s way of doing things. Florida and Michigan were stripped of their delegates for violating long-established rules; the ones that got past Democratic presidents, such as Bill Clinton, nominated for the general. Last year the DNC made clear it would strip any state trying to move up its primary of its delegates, and yet Michigan and Florida defied the threat, and stated that regardless of whether their delegates were counted the media coverage of their primaries would still give them plenty of importance. Clinton, like her opponents, said she respected the DNC’s decision to make good on its threat, agreeing not to campaign in the offending states.

As Ezra Klein excellently points out, even if they felt DNC Chairman Howard Dean got a little ahead of himself by stripping two valuable states of their delegates, either Clinton or Obama could have done something about it at the time:

A declaration by either [candidate] that they disagreed with the DNC’s decision and would instruct their delegates to alter the rules at the convention and seat Florida and Michigan would have forced all the other candidates to do the same, and the DNC’s prohibition would have collapsed….

That didn’t happen. Clinton’s campaign manager backing the DNC, said, “We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process, and we believe the DNC’s rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role.” So Florida and Michigan didn’t get their primaries. They didn’t get campaigns. They didn’t have serious Get Out The Vote efforts. And now, they’re being cynically used, the language of democracy revisited and dusted off in service of a power play for additional delegates.

None of this captures the full egregiousness of Clinton’s current position on the delegates. Even though the Obama campaign stated last week that it was willing to go “more than halfway” in compromising with Hillary Clinton and seating some of her delegates, the Clinton campaign is still taking the extraordinary stance that all the delegates she “won” in those states should count for her. Again from Boca Raton:

I receive dozens and dozens of letters and emails and phone calls, every couple of hours it seems like, all making the same urgent request: please count my vote….I believe the Democratic Party must count these votes. They should count them exactly as they were cast. Democracy demands no less.

What brand of “democracy” does she practice? Hillary Clinton won in Florida because she cheated — because she campaigned in a state everyone agreed was off limits. Moreover she states with a straight face that she won in Michigan, but in what kind of democracy is an election “won” by a candidate whose name appears alone on the ballot?

Not only did Hillary Clinton invoke everything from suffrage to the 2000 presidential election to stoke her Floridian supporters into protesting their “disenfranchisement,” last week she even had the nerve to invoke Zimbabwe:

[In some countries] people go through the motions of an election only to have it discarded and disregarded. We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe — tragically an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people. So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote.

Here is what’s “tragic:” that Hillary Clinton thinks the outcome of this primary somehow resembles the miscarriage of democracy in Zimbabwe. Somebody needs to tell her that she is not Morgan Tsvangirai. If anything, she is the Mugabe in this situation. Like him she thinks it’s okay to claim victory in an election where hers was the only name on the ballot. And like Mugabe in Zimbabwe, she is the one holding up the process here — rambling about democracy when she is just trying to hold on to power.

What happened in the Florida primary has nothing to do with Zimbabwe or democracy. It is the reality of the Party to which she has pledged allegiance, and whether she likes it or not that Party does not want Hillary Clinton to be its nominee for president.

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