Wednesday, April 02, 2008

HORSERACE

Why a July 1 Superdelegate Deadline Won't Work

Presume, for the sake of this posting, that in the following weeks we don't see Obama score some unexpected victory in unfriendly territory — winning a primary in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia or Kentucky.

Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer want Democratic superdelegates to make their choice clear by July 1. (All three are currently undecided superdelegates themselves.)

But DNC Chair Howard Dean doesn't like the idea of a formal gathering of superdelegates, a pre-convention convention of sorts.

Here's the thing: until the convention delegates vote to officially nominate someone to be the party's nominee, there's nothing that prevents them from changing their mind (as Rep. John Lewis did) or from being... removed from the process by events (like Eliot Spitzer). It's not like the delegates and superdelegates can take a binding vote before the convention; at the very least, there's nothing in the party's charter and bylaws that provides for it. (Then again, New Jersey law prevented last minute candidate switches and the party ignored that in 2002.)

Sure, someone can count up the delegates and super-delegates and calculate that Obama has reached the threshold of 2,024, and that would probably spur quite a few Democrats to urge Hillary to leave the race. But they can't make her, and it's hard to see her giving up early (particularly having pledged to fight "all the way to the convention.").

Every couple of days, in the conservative blogosphere finds new information about Obama coming to light. There's his widely televised claim to not take money from oil companies, even though no candidate takes money from companies themselves, and how he, like most other candidates, does take money from oil company employees and shareholders. There's his attendance at the Million Man March, his old slogan, "it's a power thing," his insistence that his mortgage plan isn't a bailout even though taxpayers pay for any defaults on refinanced mortgages, his constant shifting of his story on Jeremiah Wright, polls showing him losing white Democratic voters by 25 points... who knows if something could come out between early July and late August that would make Obama look like a more risky bet for the superdelegates?

Hillary has no incentive to bow out early, and every incentive to stay in until Obama is officially the nominee — something that won't happen until the convention.

04/02 11:50 AMShare