Superdelegates WILL Decide: Will They Allow Clinton To Take the Scorched Earth Path?
By Rob Kall
The real Democratic primary is over. Obama won. Hillary lost. The DNC and Dem leadership must decide-- Do nothing and allow a Clinton scorched earth attack or cut the required delegates to win by the number of MI and FL delegates no longer counted, in which case, Obama wins handily, exceeding the number needed to win, if even a small percentage of remaining uncommitted superdelegates commit for him.
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The real Democratic primary is over. Obama won. Hillary lost.
The DNC and Dem leadership must decide-- Do nothing and allow a Clinton scorched earth attack or cut the required delegates to win by the number of MI and FL delegates no longer counted, in which case, Obama wins handily, exceeding the number needed to win, if even a small percentage of remaining uncommitted superdelegates commit for him.
The numbers tell the truth. There is no way Hillary can succeed in pulling ahead of Obama by winning primaries, even by massive margins, even if she won every remaining primary. Jonathan Alter's done the numbers and Hillary has virtually lost the race, in terms of pledged delegates. Even if there are "re-dos" in Michigan and Florida, she will not pull a very strong margin.
And in Florida, where the Republican legislature laughed at the potential for mischief their legislation of a primary date that violated DNC rules created, the vote is hopelessly distorted. If a "re-do" is run, Republicans will be able to change their registration and influence the vote. Independents who already influenced the MacCain election will be able vote twice, thus influencing two elections. This is what the Republicans in the Florida legislature wanted. It was predicted shortly after the Florida legislation was passed. Don't buy the line that it was passed unanimously. The onerous date designation was added on to a major bill requiring paper ballots-- a bill that Democrats could not have opposed.
The fact is, the only way Hillary has any chance at winning is to destroy Obama, to viciously attack him directly and through surrogates, so she can then argue that Obama has been so weakened that only she can take on McCain.
The fact is, the DNC can do several things to help deal with this.
First, since Michigan and Florida delegates are no longer to be included in the primary, the number of delegates allotted to those states should be subtracted from the 50% plus 1 number of delegates required for either candidate to win. Michigan has 156 delegates and Florida has 185, which totals 341, or 394 if you include disqualified superdelegates too. Deduct 171 from the number required to win and the new number to reach becomes 1854 or deleting the disqualified superdelegates too, we see 1827.
If you assume that the two candidates stay about even for the balance of the race, then, according to Slate's delegate calculator, Obama will have 1677 and Hillary will have 1537 pledged delegates.
Without the disqualified Michigan and Florida delegates included in the calculations of required delegates, Obama will have enough delegates, including the superdelegates already committed to him, without any more superdelegates committing, to win.
If you take Jonathan Alter's wildy unrealistic projection wherein Hillary wins massively in every race yet to be held, "it makes the score 1,625 to 1,584 for Obama."
Then, Obama will only need 30 more superdelegates, out of the hundreds of still uncommitted delegates. But that scenario is highly unlikely. More likely, Obama will have enough. That means that he already has enough to win.
If we extrapolate and hypothesize in fairytale land, where Alter has explored the unlikely Hillary-wins-all-the-states-scenario, then the superdelegates will have to decide.
If the DNC announces that, since the MI and FL delegates are not being included, the new number the candidates need to achieve to win the primary will be 1854. Then, if the DNC announces that, since further primary votes will NOT change the pledged delegate outcome, it encourages the superdelegates to declare for their candidate now, this primary season could be over.
Imagine how many hundreds of millions in campaign funds this will save the Dems, that will then be applicable to taking on McCain, how much sooner the healing process will be able to begin.
The mainstream media will hate it. They will lose hundreds of millions in advertising. They will lose their cheap, easy political news feed.
The democratic congress may not like it either. The political frenzy has kept the light off of their failures, off the blue dog democrats who function more like right wingers, selling out the constitution.
But that's what leadership is all about. If Howard Dean is the man I think he is, he will try to do this. He may not succeed. The Clinton forces, combined with the right wing of the Democratic party, (really, the same thing, except for the over 50 women who are doing all they can, understandably, though misguidedly, to get a woman president,) to keep the scorched earth Democratic armageddon machine running.
If there is a way to lose the 2008 election, the Clinton Democrats will figure out how to do it. They will poison the well for Obama, alienate the young people, the black and independents who Obama has charismatically drawn into the election world, often for the first time, and they will draw in all the Hillary and Clinton hating independents and right wingers who would sit home sulking or even vote FOR Obama.
Leadership. That's been a challenge for the Democratic party for a long time. Will the Democratic party find leadership that will rise up now? Can Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel see through their DLC blinders to realize that if they want those increases in Democratic power they can almost taste, both in the house and senate, that they must stand up, speak out and stop the Clinton scorched earth Panzer that will, if not stopped, do untold damage to the prospects of the Democratic party?
Now is the time for them to wake up, smell the coffee and decide it's time to get tough. The worst thing they can do is allow the Florida Republicans win in their game to influence the presidential election even before the Democratic candidate is decided. It is tragic, but also disgusting that the Clinton campaign seeks to hand them that win.
Now, why aren't Joe Scarborough, Mika Brehzinski, Chris Matthews, Wolf Blitzer, Lou Dobbs and the rest of the news arbiters talking about any of this?
Authors Bio:
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.
To watch Rob having a lively conversation with John Conyers, then Chair of the House Judiciary committee, click here. Watch Rob speaking on Bottom up economics at the Occupy G8 Economic Summit, here.