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Is The Obama Campaign Making A Mistake ?

May 31st, 2008
By PATRICK EDABURN

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In watching the debate at the DNC rules committee I am starting to wonder if the Obama campaign is making something of a tactical mistake of being so aggressive in pursuing its position regarding Michigan and Florida.

To begin with, I think they could have chosen a better spokesman from Florida. Perhaps it is just me but Congressman Wexler comes off as quite arrogant and seemingly unable to conceive that any fair minded person could disagree with him. Given the problems Obama has had on this topic recently I might have chosen a different spokesperson.

Further, I’m not sure that they need to fight so hard to ‘win’ this fight considering where the math is. Right now Obama has a lead of about 180 delegates and about 500,000 popular votes (not counting Michigan and Florida). Polls suggest Clinton will win Puerto Rico and Obama will win Montana and South Dakota. Just to be generous to Clinton, lets assume she wins PR by a 2-1 margin and ties Obama in Montana and South Dakota. This moves the delegate count to around 140 vote lead for Obama and the popular vote would be around 400,000 or so.

If you go with the Clinton plan to fully seat the delegations and split the delegates based on her share of the popular vote, there really would not be much of a change. In Florida she won 50% while Obama and Edwards split the rest. Since Edwards has endorsed Obama, it is likely his delegates would go with Obama, so there would basically be no delegate shift. In Michigan lets give Obama 40% for the undecided voters and Clinton 60% (she actually won 55% there). This gives her a gain of about 25 delegates, so Obama ends with a lead of more than 100 delegates.

In the popular vote, Clinton beat Obama by 100,000 votes in Michigan and about 250,000 in Florida, so Obama would also retain the lead in the popular vote, especially if you tie seating Florida and Michigan in full to also counting the votes from the various caucus states. So Obama could come in and offer to basically give Clinton what she wants and he’d sill be ahead plus he’d have taken away her major argument in terms of staying in the race.

I’m not one to give the Obama campaign advice, but it seems like they could have taken a smarter road.



This entry was posted on Saturday, May 31st, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, Denver Democratic National Convention, DNC, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, 2008 Elections. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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