In less than two weeks, the Obama campaign will have claimed a majority of the pledged delegates, and depending on the circumstances, possibly a majority of the superdelegates, too. At that point, according to one report today, the Obama campaign will feel comfortable claiming victory.
Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it.
It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race.
Yes, the finish line has been static for nearly a year now. The first candidate to get 2,025 delegates wins the nomination. As we get close to wrapping this contest up, though, the Clinton campaign has decided that the agreed-upon threshold needs to get pushed back a bit.
The Obama campaign agrees with the Democratic National Committee, which pegs a winning majority at 2,025 pledged delegates and superdelegates — a figure that excludes the penalized Florida and Michigan delegations. The Clinton campaign, on the other hand, insists the winner will need 2,209 to cinch the nomination — a tally that includes Florida and Michigan.
“We don’t accept 2,025. It is not the real number because that does not include Florida and Michigan,” said Howard Wolfson, one of Clinton’s two chief strategists. “It’s a phony number.”
Reasonable people can certainly disagree about the value of Obama declaring victory on May 20, but to call the DNC finish line “phony” doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Why? Because the Clinton campaign has been using this “phony number” for quite a while.
* Clinton used it on national television a month ago.
* Howard Wolfson has used the “phony number” he doesn’t “accept” in a strategy memo.
* The Clinton campaign has used it in press releases, too.
And therein lies the problem. It’s more than a little awkward to announce, after 50 of 56 contests have already been held, and after accepting the DNC’s agreed-upon finish line for nearly a year, that the 2,025 threshold the Clinton campaign has been aiming for no longer counts.
Of course, the good news for the Florida/Michigan dispute is that once the Clinton campaign packs it in, Obama will no doubt rush to ensure their delegations are seated at the convention. Yglesias noted this morning:
Nothing would do more to help resolve the Florida and Michigan issue than for Clinton to drop out and endorse Obama. If she did that, the only remaining issue would be to strike a balance between representing FL and MI at the convention and slapping FL and MI on the wrist hard enough that states don’t pull this kind of stunt again. That’s a needle you can thread any number of ways.
It’s the fact that the campaign is continuing that makes the question difficult to resolve because it has both campaigns focused on maximizing their delegate counts rather than dealing with the aforementioned issue. Which, I suppose, is part of what makes it such an appealing pretext for staying in the race — as a rationale it has a nice circular logic where the campaign can’t end ’till MI and FL are resolved, but the issue can’t be resolved until the campaign ends, so on and on we go.
Stay tuned.