POLITICS
A Split Decision
By Stump Connolly
My calculator hasn’t had this kind of workout since my first SAT in high school. And given the choices, I’d say the best guess on who won Tuesday’s Democratic primary is none of the above.
The Republicans, who still cling to the antiquated notion that when you win a state you win it all, seem to have decided that John McCain deserves their nomination, and Mike Huckabee deserves another look.
But the Democrats like a messy democracy. Now they’ve got one. Fourteen million Democrats went to the polls Tuesday and the difference in the vote totals for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton nationwide was 53,000 votes.
On the morning after, Clinton has 887 pledged delegates; Obama has 902; and there are 21 more states to hit along the primary trail. The problem is those states hold only 1,469 delegates –– and 2,025 is the magic number each needs to win the nomination outright.
To get to the magic number in the remaining primaries and caucuses, one or the other will have to win 76% of all the votes to come, a mathematical impossibility under the current system of proportional voting.
The Superdelegates
So the balance of power now shifts to the 796 superdelegates who will make up 20 percent of the Democratic convention in Denver. About 350 are senators, congressmen, governors and other “esteemed party officials” -- like Mayor Daley and former President Bill Clinton – who get a seat at the convention with no constraints on how they must vote.
The other 450 (a delegation larger than California) are little known members of the Democratic National Committee who, in a brokered convention, can be considered the brokers.
The superdelegates are an outgrowth of a particularly ugly Democratic convention in 1972 when a young Afro-haired minister named Jesse Jackson led an Illinois delegation of McGovern supporters that unseated the regular Democratic slate headed by Mayor Richard J. Daley – and the ensuing floor fight pushed McGovern’s acceptance speech back to 3 AM in the morning.
After McGovern was trounced by Richard Nixon in the fall election (and a second brouhaha erupted in 1980 between Kennedy and Carter delegates) wiser heads in the party prevailed. They established a commission in 1982 that created the superdelegate system to assure conventions ran more smoothly –– and political conventions have run like clockwork ever since.
The superdelegate system was so appealing that Republicans adopted the model. About 23 percent (576) of the Republican party’s 2,516 delegates will also be superdelegates –– not pledged to any candidate –– and they too will hold the balance of power at the Republican convention in Minneapolis.
So if you are trying to figure out who won Super Tuesday, none of the above is a pretty good answer.
In the Democratic race, there will be no rest for the Clinton and Obama camps. They will still have to fight it out in all the states to come –– if only to win the news cycle every day over who has “momentum” –– but neither will be able to close the deal without the superdelegates.
Floor Fights
If Obama is ahead by a few hundred delegates when the convention convenes, seating the Florida and Michigan delegates (336 delegates, two-thirds pledged to Clinton) will become a battle royal in the credentials committee. And who will decide that fight? The superdelegates.
On the Republican side, if McCain enters the convention as the odds on favorite, there is no guarantee he will have smooth sailing. The Rush Limbaugh wing of the Republican party has already declared war on his candidacy, and there are many battlefields upon which they can wage it, especially when the right wing can lard up the party platform with so many planks on immigration, abortion, creationism and new Constitutional amendments that McCain cannot in good conscience run on it. Here again, the superdelegates will be pivotal.
The New Groundhog Day
If Tuesday’s election brought any finality, maybe it will put an end to pundits predicting the race will be over every time another state goes to the polls. It will not.
More attention should now be paid to how Clinton and Obama respond to this uncertain situation. By looking at how the candidates run their campaigns over the next two months you can see how they will govern, and there were signals in both Clinton’s and Obama’s Tuesday night victory speeches.
Appearing just before the California polls closed, Clinton used her time to make one last tactical appeal to West Coast voters. She hit all her talking points, with a promise for every interest group, as if she were walking the parapets shoring up her positions against the upcoming siege. For Clinton, Tuesday was the new Groundhog Day. She saw her shadow in the camera lights and burrowed back in for six more weeks of campaigning. [LINK]
Obama’s speech, by contrast, came across like rolling thunder. “Across the prairies of Iowa . . . from the foothills of New Hampshire . . . to the coast of South Carolina,” he promised, “this time is different.”
While Clinton prepares for a war of attrition, Obama makes no bones about wanting to build a movement. “Our time has come. Our movement is real, and change is coming to America," he intoned as if no other argument needed to be made. [LINK]
The Road Ahead
In the month ahead, realism and idealism will fly like flags over the campaigns of the two remaining Democratic contenders. And forward they will march.
“The Potomac Primary” – including contests in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. – is the next Tuesday contest. But first the candidates will have to sneak off to Washington, Nebraska and Louisiana this weekend to chase their 158 delegates (and hope they are not recruited to appear in drag at a Mardi Gras party.) Then it’s on to Wisconsin February 19 and Texas and Ohio March 4.
A messy democracy? You've come to the right place this year. But who would want it any other way? Can you imagine living in an orderly democracy?
See you on the tarmac.
