How Will It All End? - Salon

How will it all end?
Obama surge? Or Clinton comeback? Superdelegates anyone? With the delegate count agonizingly close -- and proportional representation likely to keep it that way -- all bets are off.

By Walter Shapiro

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Feb. 11, 2008 | RICHMOND, Va. -- Normally, when you hear the lamentation, "Oh, God, how will it all end?" you are safe to assume that the speaker is referring to the Day of Judgment or a similar religious topic. But these days most of the wailing about the End Times is being done by Democrats unable to decipher how Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama can corral a majority of delegates at the Denver Convention. Where once the Democratic primary race was seen as a rush to judgment now it is regarded as a restaging of "No Exit."

Nothing better conveys the white-knuckle flavor of the Democratic race than the apparent maneuvering behind the scenes. According to Time magazine's Mark Halperin , Hillary Clinton met secretly with up-for-grabs former candidate John Edwards in Chapel Hill last Thursday and Obama is slated to fly there Monday. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign announced that it had a new campaign manager, Maggie Williams , who had been Hillary's White House chief of staff. Williams joined the campaign as an unpaid, but high-ranking, consultant after Clinton's brutal third-place finish in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses and had initially planned to stay for just 45 days.

This is certainly looking like Sweeps Week for Obama. He pulled off a surprise victory in Sunday's Maine caucuses, despite Clinton's efforts to turn out blue-collar women in this economically troubled state. Obama also easily prevailed Saturday in the Louisiana primary along with caucuses in Nebraska and Washington, winning 39 delegates more than his rival, according to CNN. And he is heavily favored to repeat the hat trick Tuesday in the Potomac Primary (Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia). There is nothing in politics like a 7-and-0 week.

But this mini-surge has not brought clarity to the overall delegate counts by major media organizations, nor is likely to. When it comes to landslide leads in the quest to win the 2025 delegates needed to win the nomination, there is the CBS News tabulation which currently has Obama besting Clinton by exactly three delegates, 1134-to-1131. The Associated Press has them flipped with Clinton leading 1135 to 1106, while the New York Times , using a very conservative methodology and not counting some caucus results, has Hillary ahead of Barack 912 to 745.

In truth, here is what we know about the Democratic endgame -- and it is not much. After Tuesday's vote, the next major milepost will be the March 4 mega-primaries in Texas and Ohio. But based on current trends, neither candidate will win the nomination solely from the delegates they acquire in the primaries and caucuses alone. These statewide delegate contests will be influential but they will not produce the balloon drop for the victorious candidate in Denver. Clinton and Obama simply are too closely matched and party rules mandating proportional representation will prevent either candidate from picking up the more than 900 delegates needed for a convention majority in the 18 states remaining on the calendar. "These two candidates will slug it out, state-by-state, delegate-by-delegate," predicted pollster Mark Mellman, who is neutral in the race. "It goes all the way through the process."

What that means is that the 796 unelected superdelegates (mostly members of the Democratic National Committee, governors, senators and House members) will be the ones who put either Obama or Clinton over the top. According to CNN, only 359 super delegates have so far endorsed a candidate, favoring Clinton 224 to 135 (these commitments are not binding). That calculation leaves 457 of these party insiders on the fence -- and they are being wooed with an ardor that makes every day seem like Valentine's Day. Even though the Democratic Party itself created these superdelegates after the 1980 campaign, they have always had a whiff about them of old-time machine politics and the kind of rigged conventions that nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 over the protests of the antiwar movement.

The Democrats, in short, gave all this power to the superdelegates and now are in full panic that they will actually use it to select between Clinton and Obama. This undemocratic outcome (all power to the super delegates) in this most small-D democratic of political parties has produced widespread gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.

Donna Brazile, an at-large member of the DNC and thereby a superdelegate, told CNN, "If 795 of my colleagues decide this election, I will quit the Democratic Party. I feel very strongly about this." Members of Congress, who will ultimately be forced to endorse because they are superdelegates, have been nervously calling their campaign consultants wondering whether the politically safe thing to do is to abide by the results in their district. In an Op-Ed article in Sunday's New York Times , political consultant Tad Devine, an expert on party rules, worried that superdelegates taking sides would create "the perception that the votes of ordinary people don't count as much as those of the political insiders, who get to pick the nominee in some mythical backroom." Small wonder that former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who is running for the Senate this year and has not endorsed a presidential candidate, sounded positively gleeful when he said in response to a press question about the presidential race Saturday night, "I am not a superdelegate."

While this entire campaign year has been cruel to anyone with the temerity to make confident predictions, there is a sense that the superdelegates will flock to the frontrunner if either candidate moves ahead by more than a nose. Steve Murphy -- who ran Dick Gephardt's 2004 campaign and was a media consultant to Bill Richardson this time around -- doubts that either candidate will come out of primaries and caucuses with a lead of more than 200 elected delegates when the primaries and caucuses end June 3 in Montana and South Dakota. (Book your hotel rooms in Helena and Sioux Falls now). "If there is a discernable lead," Murphy said, "I think the superdelegates go with the candidate who is ahead."

Here are some ways that the endgame could play out on the political chessboard, though it may take several moves and several months to achieve checkmate:

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More (grab site pass): http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/11/dem_campaign/

Making me damned dizzy.

:crazy:

the Edwards camp was compassionate..intelligent snd kind..neither of these two camps represent who and what the Edwards are..and who we are as his supporters.

Please Seantor Edwards....don't do it.

and if you do and it is Obama and his nasty people..i will not follow your endorcement.

I don't want either of these candidates..but you know damn well who cheated in Iowa..you know what info there is that could expose one of the candidates and screw the dem party for a very long time..just stay out of it..

take your delegates to the convention if need be.

but do not swim in the dirty water!

fly

:shrug:

"It is easy to concoct other more fanciful scenarios, like Al Gore on the third ballot in Denver. My personal favorite (outlandish though it may be) is that the entire race could come down to the decision of one super delegate, pledged to Clinton but wavering. "I promised Hillary, I certainly owe her and she would be a great president," the super-dooper delegate would say in an intense argument with himself. "But that Obama is a comer. I've got to think about my own future, my own political reputation."

And with that, Superdelegate Bill Clinton chose the 2008 nominee."

:rofl:

on either side of this fight.
Don't forget, the Hillary has history of winning the democratic base. I don't think Obama & the DNC can risk pissing off close to half of the people who voted in the democratic primary so far.