After Senator Clinton’s resurgent victory in Tuesday’s contests, the media is all abuzz about her newly-discovered momentum. Barack Obama is certainly no longer considered the presumptive nominee, and both camps are digging in for a battle that’s going to last a lot longer than most expected.
A representative from Senator Clinton’s campaign said that “it’s not about the delegates, it’s about the momentum.” The sad news for them is that it is in fact about the delegates. At the time of this writing it’s unclear just how many delegates Clinton will gain from her victories, but thanks to the Texas caucus, it’s likely that the number will be in the single digits. When one considers that Obama maintains a comfortable 150+ delegate lead on his opponent, Clinton’s surge seems even less relevant.
In addition, the delegate math looks very bad for the New York senator. To detail the calculations would be outside the scope of this article, but by playing around with various delegate calculators available online, it’s been discovered that if Senator Clinton won every remaining contest by a 24.9% margin, she would still be 50 votes shy of Senator Obama’s pledged delegate total. DailyKos blogger PocketNines said it better than I can: “I humbly submit that if Clinton IS breaching those numbers and blowing out Obama in states where he will have ample opportunity to campaign, then he has been caught with a live boy or dead girl.” The blogger’s analysis can be viewed at http://pocketnines.blogspot.com/ and the delegate calculator used is available at http://www.slate.com/features/delegatecounter/ - I urge you to do your own research on this topic, because they’re far from the only sources trumpeting this message.
So why, exactly, is Senator Clinton staying in this race? Because there remains a solitary path to her nomination: taking the contest to the convention and soliciting superdelegate support for her campaign. Those following the race are aware of the role of superdelegates – uncommitted delegates sent to the convention by each state, who are free to change their minds and vote for either candidate.
It is not difficult to see why this is such a dangerous, divisive road. If Senator Clinton is able to garner enough superdelegate support to take the nomination, she’ll be disenfranchising the majority of Democratic voters who have voted in favor of Senator Obama, cheapening the position of Democratic nominee, and wresting control of a campaign that, frankly, she’s lost. It doesn’t need to be pointed out that this will fragment the party.
I guarantee you that Senator Clinton’s Tuesday night speech was much better news to Senator McCain than was Huckabee’s. While McCain is campaigning for the general election right now, the Democrats are still raging against each other, and the likely Democratic nominee is being ridiculously labeled a Muslim, unfit for that 3 AM phone call. What it all boils down to is this: Senator Clinton cares far more about her own interests than getting a Democrat in the White House in 2008.
Therefore, Senator Clinton, it’s over. You ran a good race. Step down while you can still keep a little dignity in doing so. Because on March 4, when you failed to gain any significant amount of delegates from Ohio and Texas, that 3 AM phone call came. And you pretended like you couldn’t hear it ringing.
