DNC to PUMAs: STFU

Former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler sent an e-mail telling the PUMAs that "she lost. Barack Obama won. It's over." The nub of the counter-argument was summed up by one PUMA blogger:

How can you possibly say that Barack Obama won and Hillary Clinton lost when neither achieved the required amount of pledged delegates to receive the nomination. It’s still undecided and won’t be until the vote is taken in Denver.. . . [T]he DNC pushed the superdelegates to endorse him. He hasn’t won anything.

This goes back to the pledged delegate count, where Obama is still more than 300 votes short of a nominating majority in Denver. Hillary supporter Larry Johnson:

Here are the facts. Hillary won more delegates in elections than did Barack. Barack won more delegates in caucuses–events that are not Democratic because only a small fraction of eligible voters can participate in them. Neither Hillary nor Barack won enough delegates to secure the nomination. Both had to look to the Super Delegates to put them over the top. . . .
Our beef is that when it comes to a general election, Hillary, who actually won more votes in real elections than Barack, is a much better candidate and has a much better chance of beating McCain.

As I observed at AmSpecBlog:

The point about the delegate count . . . is the PUMAs' strongest argument for having Hillary's name in a first ballot roll-call vote in Denver.
Because of the super-delegates, Obama would win that vote, but the DNC and Obama HQ apparently feel that such a vote would highlight the division in the party. They want their guy nominated by unanimous acclamation, and seem to view opposition as disloyalty.

It is their obsession with public perception -- the same image-making stuff that went into Obama's current foreign excursion -- that causes Team Obama to oppose an open roll-call vote at Denver.