How To Make Love To A Superdelegate

[kentuck]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/how-to-make-love-to-a-sup_b_85896.html

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Both the Clinton and Obama campaigns have boiler rooms working 24/7 to squeeze public endorsements from as many of the 796 superdelegates as they can before the Party's convention in August. Both campaigns are deploying every gun they have, and they're whispering every blandishment they can muster. But the right question isn't which side this insider's contest will lock up the nomination for; the challenge is whether the recipients of all these love-bombs can turn the individual attention they're getting into something good and important for the country as a whole.

The superdelegates are being barraged by calls from the likes of Tom Daschle, Janet Napolitano, John Kerry, Madeleine Albright, Chelsea Clinton, Bill Clinton, right up to the candidates themselves. The boiler rooms have files that the FBI would envy, dossiers telling them that, say, DNC member Rachel Binah of Mendocino County, CA cares "most about the environment and about funding research for Alzheimers, the disease that took her father." As Harold Ickes, the seasoned hunter-and-trapper running Hillary's operation, explains the strategy, "You try to figure out, what factors influence them? Who do they talk to about presidential politics?... Sometimes, it's two or three close confidants, sometimes it's a chief of staff, or someone who raises money for them. Maybe there's an issue that's important to them."

How many superdelegates are so far supporting whom? Estimates and claims differ; Clinton seems to have between 213 and 270, and Obama between 139 and 170. But the truth is that all 796 are still in play, because the rules permit them to change their minds right until they vote at the convention. My friend Tad Devine, the original superdelegate arm-twister with whom I worked in the 1984 Mondale campaign, had a piece in Sunday's New York Times called "Superdelegates, Back Off." He says that they

"should resist the impulse and pressure to decide the nomination before the voters have had their say. The party's leaders and elected officials need to stop pledging themselves... before Democratic voters in the remaining primaries and caucuses have made their decisions.... After listening to the voters, the superdelegates... can ratify the results of the primaries and caucuses in all 50 states by moving as a bloc toward the candidate who has proved to be the strongest...."