CBS: Obama leads Clinton even after factoring in superdelegates
CBS News appears to be one of the first mainstream media outlets reporting an overall Barack Obama lead, even after factoring in Hillary Clinton's lead among superdelegates.
According to CBS, Obama has a total of 1,143 delegates versus Clinton's 1,132. A total of 2,025 delegate votes are needed to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination.
This again raises the obvious question: If Obama goes into the covention with a pretty solid lead among state (pledged) delegates, what are the chances that most of those Clinton superdelegates will move to the Obama camp? Bill Kristol at the New York Times believes not only that they will, but that they will do so sooner rather than later. He also predicts that Obama's momentum will carry into today's Beltway primaries and beyond:
"All in all, Clinton seems to be slightly ahead. She won’t be for long.
"On Tuesday Obama is expected to prevail in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. So around 9 p.m. Tuesday night, television networks probably will be announcing, for the first time, that Barack Obama holds an unambiguous delegate lead.
"His lead in votes — which is already in the neighborhood of 200,000 — will probably have widened. And Obama should be able to increase those delegate and popular vote totals on Feb. 19, when Wisconsin and Hawaii go to the polls."
Kristol believes, as I do, that the superdelegates will likely support the popular candidate rather than their original choice, in order to not incur the wrath of voters when they themselves come up for reelection (most superdelegates are Democratic members of Congress and state governors -- in other words, elected officials).
There is a good reason to trust Kristol's instincts on this one. There is a certain clarity that comes from the detached observation of one end of the political spectrum by someone firmly cemented at the opposite end. And Kristol, considered by many as one of the founders of neoconservatism, is about as far away from the left as possible.
I read Kristol's excellent column in the New York Times and agree that Obama is on the path to the nomination if he pulls a hat trick today in the Potomac states.
Clinton is trying to build a firewall in Ohio and Texas and is putting all of her eggs in one basket. It reminds me of Rudy Guliani's failed strategy in Florida...
The OH and TX firewall is by necessity. The demographics of the Democratic voters in the Potomic States almost guarantees and Obama win. So now Hillary has abandoned those states, and is trying to raise the Obama expectation so that he will win, but not by as much as "expected."
OH and TX are potentially friendly territory for Hillary because they're big state primaries that won't be dominated by African American voters.