On Fox News Sunday, Howard Wolfson, the communications director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, dismissed talk of Clinton quitting the race and declared, “The voters are going to decide this.”
But that’s not the true stance of the Clinton campaign. Its plan, as the campaign acknowledged last week, is to persuade the superdelegates that Clinton would be the best candidate in the fall against John McCain. That is, its position is that the superdelegates ought to vote for Clinton no matter what the voters in the Democratic primaries and caucuses decide. And given that it’s essentially a mathematical certainty that Obama will end up with more voter-determined delegates, this means that the Clinton camp is actually insisting that superdelegates, not voters, determine the winner.
With Clinton campaigning fiercely in West Virginia, which holds a primary on Tuesday, she has not yet given up. That may happen in the coming weeks or when the primaries end on June 3. But while she remains in the race, she has only one path to the nomination: superdelegates voting against the results of the primaries and caucuses. And her odds are diminishing. Each day, Obama picks up one or more superdelegates, and he now leads among these delegates. So it seems Clinton really has one hope: something happens. (Divine intervention?) All this–staying in the race, targeting superdelegates, waiting for Obama to crash–is within Democratic Party rules. But let’s not confuse such a strategy with empowering voters. The Clinton campaign is hoping to draw enough voter support in the final primaries so it can have the opportunity to overturn the will of the voters.
