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Mr. Woodfine
Join Date: May 2007
Location: San Diego, CA, USA
Posts: 4,069
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Obama takes the lead in superdelegate count
Quote:
Obama takes the lead in superdelegate count
(CNN) -- Sen. Barack Obama has surpassed Sen. Hillary Clinton in the race for superdelegates, according to CNN's latest count.
Obama on Monday picked up endorsements from Maine Rep. Tom Allen and Dolly Strazar, a superdelegate from Hawaii.
"Most of the primary voters across the nation have now spoken. It is time to bring a graceful end to the primary campaign," Allen said.
"We now need to unify the Democratic Party and focus on electing Sen. Obama and a working majority in the United States Senate. That is how we can change the direction of the country," said Allen, who is also a candidate for the U.S. Senate.
He said Obama and Clinton are both "supremely qualified to be president."
Obama released a statement praising Allen's record, saying, "I'm thrilled to be working alongside him in this critical election, and I look forward to working with him as president."
Strazar said in a statement that she felt it her duty to let the campaign process play out before publicly committing to a candidate.
"I am now convinced that it is time to pull together behind a single candidate who has the backing of a growing number of Americans. I therefore announce my wholehearted endorsement of Sen. Barack Obama," she said.
With the endorsements, Obama now leads in the race for superdelegates, 275 to Clinton's 273.
At the beginning of the year, Clinton led the superdelegate race by more than 100.
Superdelegates are party leaders and officials who will vote for the candidate of their choice at the Democratic convention in August.
The focus of the Democratic race has largely turned to the superdelegates because they outnumber the remaining pledged delegates that are up for grabs.
Obama has a comfortable lead in overall delegates, 1,866 to Clinton's 1,697.
The Democrats next face off Tuesday in West Virginia, where Clinton is expected to win by big margins.
Her campaign is renewing the argument that if she leads in the popular vote, she should be the Democratic nominee.
"Hillary is within striking distance of winning the popular vote nationwide -- a key part of our plan to win the nomination," campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe said in a letter to supporters Sunday.
"That means we need every last vote we can get in West Virginia on Tuesday and in the races to follow."
Her campaign is trying to turn out the vote in the remaining six contests, hoping the popular vote argument will persuade superdelegates to endorse her instead of Obama.
Clinton's campaign has argued that she would be more electable in a general election because she has done well in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, as well as Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of their delegates.
West Virginia is also a key swing state. Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, and George Bush carried it in 2000 and 2004.
West Virginia Gov. Joe Manchin, an uncommitted superdelegate, said the delegate numbers are in Obama's favor, but the popular vote is important to the people of his state.
"I think we see what happened in 2004, when Al Gore won the popular vote, and where the country has gone and the feelings toward government since then. I put a lot of stock in that," he said on CNN's "American Morning."
"If the people believe that it was over, they wouldn't be voting maybe in the way they might vote tomorrow or in the next few campaigns," he said.
Clinton is expected to trounce Obama in West Virginia, but Manchin said he thinks Obama would also be able to carry the state in the general election.
The senator from New York has a 43-percentage-point advantage over Obama, 66 percent to 23 percent, according to a survey from the American Research Group released Friday.
The poll was conducted after last Tuesday's contests and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.
Following Obama's double digit win in North Carolina and Clinton's narrow victory in Indiana, party leaders have suggested Clinton has reached the end of her campaign.
But Clinton has vowed to stay in the race until someone gets enough delegates to clinch the nomination.
Just 28 delegates are up for grab in West Virginia.
Still, Clinton is campaigning hard there, with stops scheduled Monday in Montgomery, Clear Fork, Logan and Fairmont.
Obama has an event scheduled in Charleston and is then expected to travel to Kentucky for a rally in Louisville.
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http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/05/...rap/index.html
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Almost there - Barack Obama deserves the nomination. It is not yet clear whether he deserves the presidency
IN CARTOONS there is often a moment when a hapless character, having galloped over a cliff, is still unaware of the fact and hangs suspended in the air, legs pumping wildly, until realisation dawns, gravity intervenes and downfall ensues. Hillary Clinton's campaign looks a bit like that this week. After her heavy loss in North Carolina and her barely perceptible victory in Indiana, a state she needed to carry triumphantly, Mrs Clinton's campaign is surely close to its end.
As The Economist went to press, Mrs Clinton was publicly still promising to keep on fighting right the way to the Denver convention. That remains her right. But it is hard to see what she, her party or her country can gain from the struggle.
This is largely to do with mathematics. After this week's two primaries, Barack Obama now leads by 166 elected delegates, and counting in the declared “superdelegate” party bigwigs only reduces his lead to 152. A mere six states are still in play. Mrs Clinton would stand a good chance in the first two, West Virginia and Kentucky. But thanks to the Democrats' proportional system, all the states will divide their delegates fairly closely. Mrs Clinton thus needs to win around 70% of the remaining superdelegates—a tall order when she will be behind in the popular vote. Even if she manages to get the hitherto disqualified primaries in Florida and Michigan counted (which, as it stands, would be unfair because nobody campaigned in one and Mr Obama was not on the ballot in the other), then she will come up short in terms of delegates and almost certainly in the popular vote count as well.
If Mrs Clinton bows out in the next week or so, her reputation as a tough fighter—one who has definitively forged a personality separate from her husband's—will have been enhanced. The only justification for her struggling on (assuming the money is there for her to do so) and probably plunging her party into legal warfare, would be the idea that her opponent is somehow unworthy of the nomination—in particular that Mr Obama is bound to lose in November, or that he is bound to be a poor president.
The arugula challenge
Neither charge stands up. This newspaper has hardly embraced Obamamania: we would still like to know more about what the young senator stands for; we have been appalled by some of the anti-capitalist rhetoric he (like Mrs Clinton) has spouted on the campaign trail; we worry about his strategy for leaving Iraq. But Mr Obama has plainly jumped over most of the hurdles the primary season has laid in front of him.
True, Mrs Clinton seems more popular among white working- and middle-class Americans. That puts Mr Obama at something of a disadvantage against John McCain, the Republican nominee. But arguments about Mr Obama's allure to white voters boil down rather too often to a coded argument about race: would America elect a black man? The United States still has big problems with race (see article), but its effect in the general election may be exaggerated.
Mr Obama's main problem with white voters may have more to do with class than race. To the white working man and woman, he has been seen too often as an aloof elitist, who can't drink whisky, displays a suspicious familiarity with the price of an arugula salad and memorably bowled a deplorable 37 in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Toffishness doomed John Kerry; but with Mr Obama, a child of a single mother who sometimes used food stamps, that picture is surely reversible.
Meanwhile, Mr Obama attracts other voters in a way Mrs Clinton never has. For every white bigot who switches sides because of Mr Obama's skin colour, there is likely to be a white independent—especially a young one—running to support him. The data show that young people, both black and white, prefer Mr Obama. Against Mrs Clinton, Mr McCain might have swept up all the independents; with Mr Obama he will have to split them. Mr Obama has raised money from close to 1.5m individuals, far more than anybody else ever has. That will stand him and his party in good stead come November. Each of those donors will be working hard to make sure that their investment is not wasted: an army of footsoldiers to fight the Republicans.
Tested to the point of destruction
The other point of the primary system is to see what somebody is like under pressure, and to measure their presidential character. Mrs Clinton, for instance, has stood out, thus far at least, by her refusal to quit; Mr McCain by his refusal to compromise on either Iraq or free trade. Mr Obama is a less feisty sort, but he has exhibited enormous grace under pressure. In the past few weeks he has had to cope not just with a fresh set of outpourings from his turbulent former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, now mercifully disowned, but also with Mrs Clinton throwing the kitchen sink—and a lot of sharp cutlery—at him. Mr Obama's refusal to follow her (and Mr McCain) in supporting an idiotic summer suspension of the petrol tax, crude economic populism at its worst, was especially notable.
There is one final reason why Mr Obama is almost there. More than any other candidate this year, he has articulated an idea of a nobler America. That is partly because of who he is. When Mr Obama's parents married, in 1960, a union such as theirs, between a white woman and a black man, was illegal in over half of America's states. Now their son stands at the threshold of the White House. But it also has a lot to do with what he says and how he comports himself. Despite considerable provocation, he has never wavered from his commitment to bipartisanship—nor from the idea of America once again engaging with the world. There are severe problems with the details, on which Mr McCain will hopefully push him even further than Mrs Clinton has, but the upside of an Obama presidency remains greater than that of any other candidate.
For all these reasons, Mr Obama in our view now deserves the Democratic nomination. It is surely not worth Mrs Clinton dragging this to the convention. It is time for her, at a moment of her choosing, to concede gracefully and throw the considerable weight of the Clintons behind their party's best hope.
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http://www.economist.com/opinion/dis...ry_id=11332147
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Last edited by bkadoctaj; 05-12-2008 at 08:02 PM.
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05-12-2008, 07:58 PM
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