Archive for June 1st, 2008
Obama on the brink
I see Yglesias has been pondering the delegate math along the same lines as yours truly:
If it’s really true, as many people are saying, that Barack Obama has a “bank” of 2-3 dozen superdelegates prepared to endorse him then wouldn’t this weekend be a good time to start making withdrawals? The literal impact of him getting a bunch of superdelegate endorsements today and tomorrow in order to ensure that the primaries on Tuesday and Wednesday put him over the finish line, and him getting a bunch of superdelegate endorsements that put him over the line on Thursday and Friday is identical, but on a symbolic plane it seems to me that you want to clinch things with an election result rather than an endorsement announcement.
Matt’s entirely correct, of course. Such an unfolding of events would undercut any potential plans on the part of Hillary to mount a last stand, because the heart of any potential ressentiment strategy rests on branding the process as undemocratic. Several dozen party hacks formalizing your opponent’s presumptive status looks undemocratic in a way getting the same thing from thousands of ordinary voters does not.
So, the non-existence of the much talked about “bank” (a big pool of unannounced Obama-supporting SDs) seems clear; the real question is why doesn’t this bank exist, given Obama’s strength, and the near certitude of his eventual nomination. One supposes this points to the residual strength of the Clinton brand in Democratic circles — kind of a last vestige of their once ironclad hold on the party.
I’ve grown weary of the near impossible task of trying to keep up with intricacies (and changes) of the delegate math, but, given Obama’s likely haul today and Tuesday, he would probably need, what, not much more than a dozen or so SDs to put him over the top (right? does that jive with anybody else’s understanding?). So, maybe we will hear of a mediumish clutch of new SDs pledging for Obama tonight, tomorrow and Tuesday morning.
UPDATE: AP is reporting that, if Obama and Clinton split the delegate haul from Tuesday’s contests, Obama will be about thirty shy of going over the top. I’m guesstimating he’ll get more than 50% on Tuesday, so that likely means he needs about two dozen superdelegates to become the presumptive nominee.
