Hillary’s Last Stand?

30 May 2008 |permalink | email article

Tomorrow the Rules Committee of the Democratic National Committee meets to determine the fate of Florida and Michigan rogue delegations at the August convention in Denver – a meeting certain to be contentious with the candidacy of Hillary Clinton potentially hanging on the outcome. C-SPAN Live

Anxious party officials want the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wrapped up soon, urging uncommitted superdelegates to make their choices known by next week, allowing the nominee to begin formally engaging John McCain early this summer. Obama is believed to be less than 62 delegates away from winning the nomination depending upon various calculations.

Clinton, under intense pressure and battling to keep her prospects alive and claiming she’s a better candidate to defeat McCain than Obama, has oddly equated seating the full delegations of each state with democracy and feminism.

She got bad news late Tuesday when DNC lawyers informed the committee that both states must lose half their delegates for skirting party rules and holding earlier elections.

The DNC had decreed that their primaries would not count and enjoined all presidential candidates from campaign in those states. Obama and John Edwards complied by removing their names from the Michigan ballot. Clinton did not and won both states.

Last August , when the DNC Rules Committee voted to strip the two states of their delegates if they persisted in clinging to their dates, the Clinton delegates on the committee backed those sanctions as did every other member.

Significantly, Harold Ickes, a leading Clinton strategist and veteran numbers cruncher in past Democratic presidential campaigns, said then that “this committee feels very strongly that the rules ought to be enforced.”

That was when it was assumed Clinton would wrap up the nomination early in February before she was blindsided by Obama’s insurgent campaign.

Trailing in both pledged delegates and superdelegates, Clinton is brazenly trying to change the rules by reneging on the sanctions her delegates in the committee agreed to uphold ten months ago.

If she loses will she fight all the way to the convention?

Not according to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “We cannot take this fight to the convention. It must be over before then.” She is the convention chairwoman.

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