The Osterley Times: Dean urges superdelegates to choose between Clinton and Obama by July 1

Friday, March 28, 2008

Dean urges superdelegates to choose between Clinton and Obama by July 1

The tide is turning against Hillary in the Democratic presidential race to be nominee. Howard Dean has now stated that super delegates should make their mind up by July 1st. It's impossible to believe that Hillary will have reversed Obama's lead in the delegate count by then which would lead to the conclusion that the majority of them would support Barack Obama.

And it appears that this is the result of consultation with a series of leading Democrats.

"I think it would be nice to have this all done by July 1. If we can do it sooner than that, that's all the better," Dean told ABC television. "We don't want this to degenerate into a big fight at the convention."

Dean said he was floating the proposal after consulting with senior Democratic leaders including Al Gore, Jimmy Carter, Jesse Jackson and John Edwards, the one-time rival to Clinton and Obama.

Dean has also held discussions with Clinton and Obama.

And the support for Obama is coming in all directions:

He got an additional psychological boost with a call from Patrick Leahy, a senator from Vermont, for Clinton to get out of the race. "There is no way that Senator Clinton is going to win enough delegates to get the nomination. She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," Leahy told Vermont public radio.

The support from Casey, an anti-abortion and anti-gun control Democrat popular among working-class male voters, could help Obama narrow Clinton's double-digit lead in the state.

"I believe in my heart that there is one person who's uniquely qualified to lead us in that new direction and that is Barack Obama," Casey told a rally in Pittsburgh yesterday.

I've said for ages that the men in grey suits should politely tell Hillary to step off the stage and, although she is proving reluctant to do so, the only other way is for the super delegates to pledge their allegiance early and bring this farce to an end. Hillary simply doesn't seem to have worked out that this is over and someone needs to spell it out to her. I suppose the super delegates are the very people to do that job.

The pointlessness of Hillary continuing is summed up in this article from Peggy Noonan and her experience attending a Hillary rally:

I sat next to a woman, a New York Democrat who'd been for Hillary from the beginning and still was. She was here. But, she said, "It doesn't seem to be working." She shrugged, not like a brokenhearted person but a practical person who'd missed all the signs of something coming. She wasn't mad at the voters. But she was no longer so taken by the woman who soon took the stage and enacted joy.

The other day a bookseller told me he'd been reading the opinion pages of the papers and noting the anti-Hillary feeling. Two weeks ago he realized he wasn't for her anymore. It wasn't one incident, just an accumulation of things. His experience tracks this week's Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing Mrs. Clinton's disapproval numbers have risen to the highest level ever in the campaign, her highest in fact in seven years.

Anyone who reads here regularly will know that, in the beginning, I didn't care which Democrat won the nomination as I would have happily supported either of them. However, Hillary's negativity - especially when measured against Obama's ability to inspire and uplift - simply wore me down.

At first I was prepared to think that Bill's Jesse Jackson comments were simply a way of reminding the party that the Clinton's were ready to fight the Republican attack dog machine in a way that Obama wasn't.

I was willing to cut them some slack. However, eventually she simply wore me down with her constant attacks and the final one - that she and McCain had experience and Obama didn't - was simply too much to bear.

Noonan again:

What, really, is Mrs. Clinton doing? She is having the worst case of cognitive dissonance in the history of modern politics. She cannot come up with a credible, realistic path to the nomination. She can't trace the line from "this moment's difficulties" to "my triumphant end." But she cannot admit to herself that she can lose. Because Clintons don't lose. She can't figure out how to win, and she can't accept the idea of not winning. She cannot accept that this nobody from nowhere could have beaten her, quietly and silently, every day. (She cannot accept that she still doesn't know how he did it!)

She is concussed. But she is a scrapper, a fighter, and she's doing what she knows how to do: scrap and fight. Only harder. So that she ups the ante every day. She helped Ireland achieve peace. She tried to stop Nafta. She's been a leader for 35 years. She landed in Bosnia under siege and bravely dodged bullets. It was as if she'd watched the movie "Wag the Dog," with its fake footage of a terrified refugee woman running frantically from mortar fire, and found it not a cautionary tale about manipulation and politics, but an inspiration.