WASHINGTON, 9 May 2008 — Tuesday’s voting in Indiana and North Carolina put Hillary Rodham Clinton no closer to overtaking Barack Obama on the path to the Democratic presidential nomination. That now leaves Clinton with one overriding task: To make the path longer.
For most of the year, June 3 beckoned as the end of an exhausting nominating calendar, but now Clinton is preparing to push the contest beyond the voting phase of the process and into the realm of committee meetings and credentialing rules, where her campaign believes she may have a chance to overtake Obama before the party’s nominating convention in late August.
This means continued uncertainty over whether the Democrats can unify in order to focus its sights on beating presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.
Tuesday’s voting all but ensured that Clinton, who shows no signs of giving up and vowed in her Indiana victory speech to go “full speed onto the White House,” has no choice but to try to lengthen the nominating process.
She failed to come up with the dual victories that she needed Tuesday to raise doubts that Obama can beat McCain this fall and that the Democratic superdelegates, whose votes will likely provide the margin of victory to whoever wins the nomination, should rally around Clinton.
In fact, Clinton’s chance to overtake Obama in the number of elected delegates probably disappeared with her lopsided loss in North Carolina. And to overtake Obama in the popular vote, she would likely have had to post a large margin of victory in Indiana.
That is why Clinton in the past day has begun talking about raising the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination — in essence, moving the goal line in the nominating process.
Under current Democratic rules, a candidate needs 2,024 delegates to win the nomination — and Obama is likely to emerge from Tuesday’s voting within 250 delegates of that goal.
But Clinton has started to argue that the winner needs 2,209 delegates to win.
Her claim is that the party should seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of their participation in the nomination fight as punishment for moving their primary election dates earlier than allowed. The argument, of course, benefits Clinton.
The Clinton camp will point to her continued strength among blue-collar workers and white voters without college degrees as proof that she would pose the stiffer challenge to McCain. Obama’s camp will certainly point to his proven ability to energize the black vote — Obama won more than 90 percent of African-Americans in both states — and to draw new and younger voters to the polls. And it will argue that Obama’s success Tuesday proves he survived the controversy over his former pastor’s racially explosive remarks.
But even before the polls closed Tuesday, the debate over those demographics was giving way to a new battle within the more Byzantine world of convention rules and delegate selection procedures. Looming larger than the remaining primary votes in places like West Virginia, Oregon and South Dakota is a May 31 meeting in Washington, D.C., in which a key Democratic Party committee will decide how to handle the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan.
Activists from both states are challenging last year’s decision to strip the states of seats at the nominating convention. The Clinton campaign is pressuring the committee to reinstate the states’ delegates, and to use the Jan. 29 primary results in those states to decide the breakdown.
The Obama camp says this amounts to changing the rules in the middle of the game.
