Howard Dean’s Superdelegate Problem
By Tobin Harshaw
April 2, 2008, 4:04 pm
opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
USA Today is reporting that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean is rejecting the idea of a “superdelegate summit” before the convention this summer, which was proposed most prominently by Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen in a Times Op-Ed article last month:
Dean said a plan pushed by Democratic Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen for a two-day gathering of super delegates in June won’t work. “We can’t have a convention of super delegates because it would look like 330 delegates are overriding the wishes of 30 million voters,” Dean said in an interview with USA TODAY. He said Bredesen deserved credit for advancing the plan.
The most heated reactions to the decision seem to be coming, oddly, from the right: “The ever-feckless Dr. Dean wants the superdelegates to announce their preferences by July — but he doesn’t want a gathering of superdelegates?” asks John Tabin at American Spectator. “If finishing the fight is a priority, then a superdelegate straw poll should be a no-brainer. The only thing I can think is that Dean is being pushed around by those with an incentive to drag this out — the Clinton campaign, of course, but also superdelegates who want more time to exact political promises.”
Jim Geraghty at the Campaign Spot, however, thinks the Democrats would be wise to hold off:
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. |
