February 19, 2008
It depends what you mean by “pledged”
I should have known this but I confess I didn’t:
Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination.
This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.
What? Isn’t that impossible? A pledged delegate is pledged to a particular candidate and cannot switch, right?
Wrong…
The notion that pledged delegates must vote for a certain candidate is, according to the Democratic National Committee, a “myth.”
“Delegates are NOT bound to vote for the candidate they are pledged to at the convention or on the first ballot,” a recent DNC memo states. “A delegate goes to the convention with a signed pledge of support for a particular presidential candidate. At the convention, while it is assumed that the delegate will cast their vote for the candidate they are publicly pledged to, it is not required.”
Since you can be “pledged” without being “bound”, this surely raises the question whether you can be “bound” without being “required”, or vice versa, or indeed whether you can be “required” without being “actually required”, or “bound, in fact”. Fortunately the party has a few lawyers on hand, so I’m sure the correct result will emerge in the end…but am I alone in thinking that this system leaves something to be desired?
It is clear that Hillary Clinton cares not a fig for the will of the voters, but hopes to win the nomination by a combination of backroom deals and low road attacks on Barack Obama. If this strategy works, the only result will be to put John McCain in the White House.
I have voted for a Democrat for president every year since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, but I am more outraged at Hillary’s tactics now than at anything that a Democratic presidential candidate has engaged in since Hubert Humphrey’s cave-in over the Vietnam war in 1968.
Please chalk up one old guy for Obama. If Hillary takes the nomination away from him with tactics like these, I am either staying home in November, or will vote for my senior (but not by much), Senator McCain.
Posted by: algasema | February 20th, 2008 at 12:19 am | Report this commentAfter Wisconsin, Hillary is gone, outta here, as we like to say in New York. Now, instead of wasting any more ink on her, we can all focus on Obama-McCain. After listening to McCain’s rather inane victory speech last night (as American “prestige” and “power” around the world are not exactly foremost among the concerns of voters in the job-loss plagued Midwest) I realize better why the Republican establishment is so quick to rally around him.
McCain’s platform: Even bigger military spending and more redistribution of wealth in favor of the privileged few by continuing the Bush tax cuts for the rich and starving social programs. What could be dearer to the heart of what President Eisenhower accurately called the “military-industrial complex” over 40 years ago (but which is even more powerful today under Bush II)?
Only one thing is missing in order to enable McCain to hold the Republican coalition of militarism, economic reaction and populist racism together. This is a complete turnabout on immigration, in which McCain publicly recants his purported previous support of “amnesty”, much as Galileo recanted his heliocentric view of astronomy. This should not be long in coming. It may not help much, however, because it would probably lead to McCain’s being burned anyway - by Latino voters in November.
Posted by: algasema | February 20th, 2008 at 1:56 pm | Report this comment“Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign intends to go after delegates whom Barack Obama has already won in the caucuses and primaries if she needs them to win the nomination. This strategy was confirmed to me by a high-ranking Clinton official on Monday. And I am not talking about superdelegates, those 795 party big shots who are not pledged to anybody. I am talking about getting pledged delegates to switch sides.”
There is no way that the Democratic electorate will permit this to happen, no matter what attempts are made by the Clinton campaign. Not only that, but the level of repugnance of the electorate would be so great that any positive opinion of either ex-President Bill Clinton or Senator Clinton would disappear among those who admire them to a greater or lesser extent.
In other words the attempt would be for naught and the negative consequences for making it would be material to the Clintons’ reputation now and forever.
Posted by: Wendell Murray | February 20th, 2008 at 7:06 pm | Report this comment