Given the week’s events, the biggest mystery in the presidential race may be this: Why hasn’t there been a big shift in superdelegate support away from Barack Obama, or toward Hillary Rodham Clinton?
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been on cable news pretty much 24/7 all week long. Obama slapped him down, but his poll numbers have still been sinking. And one of the reasons superdelegates exist – though most don’t like to talk about it on the record – is to save the party from disaster in case the front-runner has a scandal so damaging that it makes them unelectable.
And yet, Obama has still been picking up superdelegates this week. Clinton has too, including North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley, a significant catch.
But even at the height of the Wright ruckus, Obama won the endorsements of Reps. Baron P. Hill of Indiana, Ben Chandler of Kentucky, Bruce Braley of Iowa, and Lois Capps of California.
He also got two former Democratic National Committee chairmen to weigh in over the last two days. Yesterday, it was Joe Andrew, who was the DNC chairman during the last two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Today, it was Paul G. Kirk, Jr., who chaired the DNC in the 1980s. In all, he collected 11 new superdelegates this week.
Kirk was an easy catch. He already was identifying himself as an Obama supporter when reporters asked, including in my interview earlier this week, and just hadn’t made an official statement until this morning. But Andrew’s switch from Clinton to Obama got a lot of people’s attention. So did the Hill and Chandler endorsements, since both live in conservative-leaning swing districts.
Their comments, as well as the views of Democratic sources on the Hill, make it pretty clear why Obama has been able to hold his own among the superdelegates. The most important reason is also the most basic one: They just don’t think Wright, even now, has damaged Obama enough to make him unelectable.
“It became clear that what Senator Obama stands for is totally the opposite,” Kirk told me earlier today. “We’re not red or blue, we’re not black or white, we’re not rich or poor. We’re one nation, and we need to come together. It’s a message that, particularly after this storm, needs to be heard again.”
But there are other reasons, congressional Democrats believe. The superdelegates don’t want to be seen as running away from Obama because of a racial controversy. They still want to be on the winning side, and they don’t see any evidence yet that Obama is not the winning side.
Some of the new Obama superdelegates also say they’ve been turned off by Clinton’s embrace of a proposed “gas tax holiday,” which they see as political pandering because most experts don’t think it would really do anything to lower prices.
Andrew was especially passionate about this in a conference call with reporters yesterday. “The idea that we would sell short our real energy needs for half a tank of gas was really the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” he said. Clinton would use traditional political tactics “better than anyone else,” he said, but “what’s inspiring about Barack Obama is that he simply doesn’t do that.”
And, most of all, why shift one way or another – or come off the fence – before the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on Tuesday? If Obama has really been wounded by the Wright episode, it will become clear then. And if he hasn’t, no mass shift of superdelegates is necessary.
That may be the biggest reason the new endorsements trailed off today. As one Hill Democrat told me, most superdelegates probably see no point in making commitments until after Tuesday. When the returns start coming in, they’ll know whether it’s Obama or Clinton who needs their help the most.
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Comments
It would take more than the snap shot of what is going to happen next Tuesday in IN and NC for the super delegates to decide to go against the voters in 31 out of 46 elections so far this season. This is just spin. What if they had all decided to jump ship when Hillary was being hammered day after endless day with the video from Bosnia that proved she was an out and out liar. Does no one remember how her polls dived then? Wright is news this week, but he won't be big news two or three weeks from now and Obama will still be the winner of the most delegates, votes, states and money raised to compete. Obama takes nothing for granted and he'll work for every vote in every state. Clinton may decide to do that now, but it would have mattered more if she hadn't chosen to dismiss a whole lot of states earlier this year. There are a whole lot of states who are disgusted with her cavalier dismissal of them and her single minded attachment to what happens in a few states. Obama has worked hard in every state and built infrastructures in every state that will impact the general election in a positive way. Hillary said last week that she was proud to be married to the only democratic president who had been elected to two terms since FDR. The bigger question would be what do democrats need to do in order to even up the playing field so that they get more than one two term president every 50 years or so-------and the answer is, bring more states into play. That fifty state strategy that Obama has worked so hard for is the path to changing the fortunes of the democratic party in the future. If the goal is to have more democratic presidents, then it is folly to just cede so many states to the republicans instead of working to win over hearts and minds across the entire country. That's what Obama has been doing and that's why he's brought so much energy and so many new voters into the democratic party. The super delegates aren't stupid. They see what's happening and they know that no democrat will be elected president without the black vote and that it would be crazy for the future of the party to turn off the next generation of dems. And then there's the fact that a super delegate who turned over the will of the people would be through in politics. It would be hard to get elected to dog catcher if they did that and they know it. 7 out of 10 of the undecided super dels would have to be willing to end their political careers in order to advance Hillary's. That just isn't going to happen.
Posted by: karela
| May 4, 2008 10:56 AM
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