End Game: Clinton vs Pelosi?

26 May 2008 |permalink | email article

The Democratic National Committee’s rules committee meets Saturday with Hillary Clinton determined to turn the seating of the rogue Florida and Michigan delegations into what the Huntington Post described as a cause celebre – connected to her push to win the overall popular vote.

Her supporters make up the third and largest vote on the Rules committee, but lack a majority of the rules committee members.

But two groups of committee members – those loyal to Barack Obama, and those loyal to DNC chairman Howard Dean – likely could produce the necessary majority and block Clinton’s so-called “nuclear option.”

The Huffington Post reported that reliable sources in the Clinton campaign and the DNC are working toward a possible compromise that would either seat the full delegations, giving each member half a vote, or cut the size of each delegation in half.

Aside from the “assassination” gaffe on Friday Clinton complained that some in the Obama campaign and the media were trying to force her out of the race in an interview with the S.D. Sioux Falls Argus Leader on Friday.

Besides rejecting the party unity argument on the ghoulish theory that anything could happen before the convention Clinton also did not help her case by comparing the seating of both delegations to the abolition of slavery.

The Washington Post reported that while she’s trailing in delegates and facing growing debt, Clinton is consumed with winning the popular vote in the final three primaries in Montana, South Dakota and Puerto Rico next week.

The significance of passing Obama who has a 458,427 vote lead is unclear. But symbolically it would signal to her partisans that the race is far from over and hope remains alive.

But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the convention chairwoman, an undeclared superdelegate and second in line of succession to the presidency, has flatly rejected Clinton’s popular vote theory.

“It’s a delegate race. The way it works is that the delegates choose the nominee,” she told ABC News on March 14.

Pelosi was emphatic: “If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what’s happened in the elections it would be harmful to the Democratic Party.”   

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