Faced by a string of recent primary defeats, and scrambling to shore-up its “firewall” against Democratic Senator Barack Obama, the campaign of Senator Hillary Clinton is now making rumblings about triggering a divisive convention delegate war that could polarize the Democratic Party — and possibly leave the probable GOP Presidential nominee Senator John McCain smiling.
During the Vietnam War there was the now-clichéd saying about blowing up a village in order to save it. Recent comments from the Clinton camp suggest it is prepared to blow up the Democratic Party in order to win it. The New York Times:
Senator Barack Obama emerged from Tuesday’s primaries leading Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton by more than 100 delegates, a small but significant advantage that Democrats said would be difficult for Mrs. Clinton to make up in the remaining contests in the presidential nomination battle.
Neither candidate is expected to win the 2,025 pledged delegates needed to claim the nomination by the time the voting ends in June. But Mr. Obama’s campaign began making a case in earnest on Wednesday that if he maintained his edge in delegates won in primaries and caucuses, he would have the strongest claim to the backing of the 796 elected Democrats and party leaders known as superdelegates who are free to vote as they choose and who now stand to determine the outcome.
Mrs. Clinton’s aides said she could still pull out a victory with victories in the biggest primaries still to come, including Ohio and Texas next month. But Mr. Obama’s clear lead in delegates allocated by the votes in nominating contests is one of a number of challenges facing her after a string of defeats in which Mr. Obama not only ran up big popular vote margins but also made inroads among the types of voters she had most been counting on, including women and lower-income people.
Should the cracks in her support among those groups show up in Ohio and Texas as well, it could undermine her hopes that those states will halt Mr. Obama’s momentum and allow her to claim dominance in many of the biggest primary battlegrounds.
With every delegate precious, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers also made it clear that they were prepared to take a number of potentially incendiary steps to build up Mrs. Clinton’s count. Top among these, her aides said, is pressing for Democrats to seat the disputed delegations from Florida and Michigan, who held their primaries in January in defiance of Democratic Party rules.
Mrs. Clinton won more votes than Mr. Obama in both states, though both candidates technically abided by pledges not to campaign actively there.
The Atlanta Constitution gives this background:
After eight losses in a row and no victories in sight this month, Hillary Clinton’s campaign renewed calls Wednesday for the votes in Florida and Michigan to count toward delegates that would help her catch Barack Obama.
Obama’s camp said her demand was a blatant attempt to ignore the ground rules set when the national party stripped both states of their delegates for breaking early-primary rules. Last summer, all of the major candidates agreed to boycott the two renegade states.
“Now, when they believe it serves their political interests, they’re trying to rewrite the rules,” Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters in a telephone call. “Now, at the 11th hour, the Clinton campaign is trying to rewrite rules that were firmly established, and I don’t think there’s a lot of appetite for that in the country or a lot of appetite for that at the DNC.”
In fact, when the national party inflicted its punishment on Florida in August, Clinton’s campaign did not protest. And on Sept. 1, Clinton went along with the boycott urged by four smaller states authorized by the DNC to hold the earliest contests.
About one month later, her chief rivals took their names off the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not, but said during an interview on public radio, “It’s clear, this election they’re having is not going to count for anything.”
But when Michigan voted on Jan. 15, Clinton stood up for voters there and in Florida — states she expected to win handily. “The people of Michigan and Florida have just as much of a right to have their voices heard as anyone else,” the campaign said in a statement as the Michigan results came in.
Since then, as Obama has racked up more victories and nudged ahead in delegates, Clinton and her supporters have repeatedly called for the two states to count. On Wednesday, the day after her defeats in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, top advisors said she was entitled to 178 delegates from Florida and Michigan.
The irony is that polls now show Mrs. Clinton with an edge in future contests.
If Clinton were to win this way, she would, I believe, guarantee the Democrats will lose in November. A bitter, polarizing, divisive battle for Michigan and Florida with the result being a Clinton nomination would prompt large numbers of independents and Obama Democrats to stay home or even vote McCain. Would the Clintons sacrifice their party for their own ambition? You bet they would.
And, indeed, Sullivan is correct. There are any number of conventions in American history that left partisans bitter and feeling cheated…even if the ultimate victors won using loopholes or exploiting rules that many felt were unjust (and even were later changed). And the person who won via that kind of convention lost. Read TMV columnist Shaun Mullen’s history-packed post on brokered conventions.
If the Clinton campaign wins this way, it would be ignoring some key facts about Obama’s campaign: he is winning the support of independents and many other demographic groups, plus attracting a lot of new voters who have stayed home or been too young to vote before. They will not simply go to the polls anyway because Mrs. Clinton’s operatives (or lawyers) get the nomination in a way that a large portion of the Democratic Party feels is not legitimate.
And then there’s this: McCain remains underestimated by many Democrats. Even as the Arizona Senator begins to move to the right to try and unite his party, many independent voters would be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in a general election because he has a long history of appealing to them. If there is a huge controversy over how Clinton won the nomination, McCain will most likely benefit from Democrats who don’t vote, who cast protest votes and from chased-away independent voters.
From the beginning of the primary season, Clinton has had to work to overcome perceptions that she is polarizing and will polarize the nation if she wins the White House. It’ll be hard to do that if she winds up with a nomination that many members of her own party didn’t feel she got fairly — and if voters see a polarized Democratic Party and read stories about turned-off young voters.
Clinton’s best bet: impressive wins in her firewall states. She already has double-digit leads over Obama in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
Sometimes if you blow up a village, you just get a blown-up village.
Cartoon by Mike Lester, The Rome News-Tribune.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.