New Clinton spin on caucus delegates
Posted: Monday, March 10, 2008 10:59 AM by Chuck Todd
From NBC's Chuck ToddA few weeks ago on one of those "set the tone for the media" conference calls by the Clinton campaign, Harold Ickes took pains to try and blur the distinction between pledged delegates (those earned in the primary/caucus process) and Superdelegates (Ickes' preferred term is "automatic delegates" though even slips and calls them "Supers"). They wanted delegates to be counted without prejudice as to how they were earned.
Well, that was the pre-March 4 Clinton spin. The new Clinton spin? Create THREE categories of delegates: pledged, caucus and supers.
Here's Hillary Clinton in an interview with
Newsweek.
Asked how she can win the nomination despite the math, Clinton: "It doesn't look bleak at all. I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process."
And here's Pa. Gov. Ed Rendell, serving as a Clinton surrogate, on "
Meet the Press" Sunday, when asked about a revote in Florida and Michigan: "Caucuses are undemocratic. That's another thing. We talk about the superdelegates being undemocratic. If you're a caucus, older people can't vote, older people who vote by absentee ballot. There's no absentee ballots in a caucus. Tim, if you're a shift worker and a lot of our workers, because they're low-income workers, are shift workers, you can't vote in a caucus. So we want primaries. That's the way we elect presidents. We don't have caucuses to elect presidents in the fall. Let's have a primary. Let's decide this. Let's hear from the Obama campaign about a revote in Florida and Michigan."
So clearly there's a new push to somehow distinguish between delegates earned in caucuses and delegates earned in primaries. Why do I smell a new chart being developed in the Clinton delegate war room if it shows Clinton ahead somehow if just primary pledged delegates counted.
*** UPDATE *** I did the quick math, Obama's gotten more delegates via primaries than Clinton (1086 or 1088 depending on the certified California results) to Clinton's (1074 or 1076). So clearly, the caucuses are what's helped put Obama's delegate lead nearly out of reach but even when just measuring primaries, Obama's ahead.
