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Friday, February 08, 2008

Welcome to 1968
Posted by Jill | 6:07 AM
In 1968, we had a Democratic presidential candidate, the sitting vice-president to the president that had escalated the Vietnam war, running against two antiwar candidates. After Lyndon Johnson was defeated by Eugene McCarthy in New Hampshire and withdrew from re-election consideration, Vice President Hubert Humphrey declared his candidacy, running against McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. Kennedy was assassinated after the California primary, while Humphrey disdained the primaries altogether, choosing instead to focus on winning delegates in states that did not have primaries. In those states, party bosses chose the delegates.

For forty years, there's been much speculation as to whether Bobby Kennedy would have been able to wrest the nomination away from Humphrey, as a kind of insider/outsider. But in 1968, the antiwar movement still hadn't progressed much beyond the young, and with the power of the nomination still largely in the hands of the party bosses, an insurgent candidacy had little chance. So Hubert Humphrey became the nominee, with the albatross of Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam record hanging around his neck, and lost to Richard Nixon in a close election by only about a half-million votes.

Of course on the way to becoming the nominee, we had the 1968 Democratic Convention as we remember it, with kids protesting outside and Chicago cops busting their heads, while inside party bosses chose the Democratic nominee.

At this convention, George McGovern, who would become the 1972 nominee, headed a commission to change the way delegates were chosen, creating today's primary system in which delegates were to be chosen by the people, minimizing the impact of party bosses and Washington insiders. After the 1980 election, however, the superdelegate structure that's causing us trouble today was implemented to counter some of these reforms. The reason was to avoid the nomination of another George McGovern -- a "fringe" candidate popular among the party base but too far to the left (or in the case of the Republicans, who adopted similar rules, the right) to win a general election.

According to WaPo's Paul Kane, there is now no way that either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton can win the Democratic nomination without winning a majority of the superdelegates:

Here's the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination.

To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process -- with Clinton and Obamb roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece.

That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.

So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.

Ain't gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they'll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and bothing finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates.

And then the super delegates decide this thing.

That's the math.


And guess who has more pledged superdelegates. Guess who's more entrenched with the party bosses, governors, Congresscritters, and state legislators who compose the superdelegates?

(Hint: It isn't Barack Obama.)

It's a fool's game to believe that Republicans, despite the current hue and cry by right-wing talk show hosts and Regnery press authors, they absolutely, positively will not support John McCain for the presidency. It's foolish to assume that the Democrats have this thing locked up. It is in the nature of Republicans to obey authority, and if the standard bearer of their party is John McCain, they'll show up. They'll show up for the very reason Mitt Romney used as his excuse for withdrawing yesterday -- because they believe down to their very toenails that to allow a Democrat to be elected president is to "surrender to terrorists."

These days, polls show Barack Obama to be a more formidable opponent against John McCain than Hillary Clinton. And yet, if we look at the cold, hard math, it is Hillary Clinton, by virtue of her experience in the White House and relative seniority in the Senate, who is going to lead in the superdelegate count.

So here we are once again, in which a candidate whose appeal comes from the party base and young people, is up against an entrenched Washington insider (for all that said insider was regarded by people like Sally Quinn as an arriviste just a decade and a half ago.)

Young Obama supporters who bemoan the fact that the protesters of 1968 were unable to effect lasting change are going to get one serious wakeup call this summer. When they (and the rest of us) watch people like NJ Senator Bob Menendez, who stated quite openly to Chris Matthews on Tuesday, that no matter who voters in his state selected, he was pledged to Hillary Clinton lo unto eternity, give Hillary Clinton the nomination even though she is more likely to lose to John McCain, they will get their first taste of just how mind-boggingly difficult is to not just crash the gates, but also to hide all the tools, nails, and lumber so that the hacks can't come up behind us and rebuild the gates as fast as we can crash them.

Obama's campaign is quite aware of the uphill battle the candidate faces:

Barack Obama's advisers are anticipating the possibility of a Democratic presidential race deadlocked past the last primary, and the outcome may hinge on a fight over whether delegations from Florida and Michigan get seats at the party's national convention in Denver.

One scenario prepared for the Illinois senator's campaign and released inadvertently yesterday with another document projects Obama will end up in June with 1,806 of the delegates who select the party's nominee to 1,789 for New York Senator Hillary Clinton. That is short of the number needed to win the nomination.

Obama, speaking with reporters traveling to Omaha on his campaign plane, said he hadn't seen the document. ``I think it's going to be close,'' he said of the nomination battle. ``Down to the wire.''

A candidate needs half of the total delegates plus one. Right now, that figure is 2,025. Any additional convention delegates would raise the amount needed to win nomination.

The Obama forecast doesn't include Florida and Michigan, which were stripped of delegates by the Democratic National Committee for holding early primaries. Clinton won both uncontested and is vowing to fight for those delegates -- which were slated to be a total of 366 -- to be seated when the nominating convention opens on Aug. 25.

``This is only one of an infinite number of scenarios,'' Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said. He added that the information was released unintentionally.

Moreover, any scenario could be altered with changing circumstances or conditions.

Another issue is the so-called super delegates, 796 Democratic officials and officeholders who aren't bound by the results of primaries and caucuses. Obama's campaign forecast projects less than half will be pledged to either Obama or Clinton. The rest could swing the nomination.

After a year of campaigning and 26 contested primaries and caucuses since January, Obama and Clinton have essentially battled to a draw. The Feb. 5 Super Tuesday voting in 22 states across the country left the two candidates separated by less than 30 delegates.

Clinton campaign spokesman Phil Singer didn't respond to an e-mail requesting comment.


Barack Obama, like Howard Dean in 2004, has brought people into the process who don't usually participate. Young voters and African-Americans could very well provide the winning margin this fall. But what do you think happens when these voters -- African-Americans once again and young voters for perhaps the first time -- are told that what they think doesn't matter; what they want doesn't matter? Will there be marches and protests such as we had in 1968? Will these people be able to effect change that the protesters of 1968 could not? Or will the idealism, like it was with so many people 40 years ago, be tamped down into nothingness in the face of a system of entrenched interests that no longer believes it's accountable to the people?

The hideous irony of all this, of course, is that the two faces of this repeat of history are candidates that could never have been considered as viable presidential candidates in 1968. Some might say that's progress. But what progress is there when the party seems to deliberately set out to lose?

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4 Comments:
Blogger Unknown said...
I'm not sure I fully buy the analogy. The music was much better in '68.
2/8/08, 9:18 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Your analysis that Obama is more electable than Hillary based on early hypothetical national polls is flawed. What really matters is the electoral college math and, in that area, Hillary has a better chance of winning Florida, Ohio and Arkansas, as well as defending Michigan or California, than Barack Obama. That is patently clear from trends in actual primary votes and state polls.

Besides, we don't know if Obama's alleged appeal to independents will resist a true general election campaign against McCain and the Republicans, or whether his support among independents can compensate Obama's weakness among constituencies like Latinos, seniors, Jews, and Catholics who might well side with McCain in the fall.
2/8/08, 11:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...
I think Dems already lost. They managed not just split their party and their coalition, but created huge animosity between the camps in such a way that many on the both sides will not vote for another especially when McCain is the alternative.
2/8/08, 1:33 PM  
Blogger Bob said...
I don't think the animosity is as strong or as entrenched as media makes it out to be. Most ordinary primary voters like Hillary & Barack. It's the more liberal. smaller, issue-driven Edwards supporters feeling squeezed out at this point. But the superdelegate & Florida-Michigan problems need to be settled soon. Even if there must be a rerun of two primaries. Given the high participation in elections & caucuses, this nomination ought to be decided by voters, not by party insiders.
2/8/08, 2:34 PM  
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