« Poetic Commentary: William Blake On The Fall Of The U.S. Dollar
Journalists Are Angry, Too »



Will Hillary Clinton Go After Obama’s Pledged Delegates?

March 10th, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

Print Print

Will Hillary Clinton go after Obama’s Pledged delegates? The issue has come up before via unnamed sources in news stories but never addressed by Clinton until now — and it sounds as if it is an option.

Note this quote from an interview with Newsweek:

How can you win the nomination when the math looks so bleak for you?

It doesn’t look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they’re all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we’re going to follow the process.

If the Clinton campaign goes after the pledged delegates she will split the Democratic Party. The bitterness between Obama and Clinton supporters is so bitter now that if delegates voters voted for thinking they had cast votes for a specific candidate are peeled away and jumped ship, the Democratic Party would likely lose big chunks of some segments of voters (particularly young voters and African-American voters.

Could Clinton still win in a general election if she got the nomination this way? Nothing is impossible. But she would then assume office a more polarizing figure than ever.

H/t Political Wire



This entry was posted on Monday, March 10th, 2008 at 12:55 am and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, Conventions, Brokered Convention, Superdelegates, Democratic Party, Barack Obama, 2008 Elections, Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 11 Comments