Clinton Scenario Meets Liberal Guilt

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RealClearPolitics - Articles - Clinton Scenario Meets Liberal Guilt

By Peter Brown

Any realistic scenario in which Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wins the Democratic presidential nomination assumes that the party bosses will have both the will and the power to stop Sen. Barack Obama's nomination.

But there is one good reason why they might not try, even if she is able to string together a series of primary and caucus victories: Call it liberal guilt, or call it fear of reprisal from the party's powerful black base.

Either way, it is very difficult to see the Democratic Party bosses of the 21st century -- we call them superdelegates -- overruling a (slight) majority of their constituents and blocking the nomination of the first African-American major-party presidential nominee.

If the superdelegates go along with the votes of their constituents and ratify the verdict for the candidate with the most delegates in the primaries and caucuses, then simple math says Obama will win the nomination.

Even Clinton's own supporters agree that, given the party's rule that allocates delegates based on a candidate's percentage of the popular vote, it is virtually impossible for Clinton to have more elected delegates when the process ends in June.

At that point, those superdelegates who have not yet picked a candidate will either do so or wait until the actual balloting at the Democratic convention Aug. 25-28 to disclose their preference.

A Democratic nomination fight that goes to the convention would be a major boost for Republican Sen. John McCain, because it would force Clinton and Obama to spend their time and money for the next five months running against each other rather than against him.

In the old days, party bosses picked the presidential candidate largely based on who they thought could win in November. And it would be wrong to believe that is not a big priority for the superdelegates today.

But those superdelegates are demographically and ideologically a far cry from the balding, cigar-chomping men who used to run the party from smoke-filled rooms.

Among the current leaders of the party are many more women, African-Americans and Hispanics -- but they're less diverse ideologically. The once moderate-conservative wing of the party has virtually disappeared, with millions following Ronald Reagan to the Republican Party or, these days, given the disillusionment with President Bush, calling themselves independents.

Today's Democratic leaders are the reformers who seized control of the party decades ago -- and their ideological children. They operate differently than the folks who used to inhabit those smoke-filled rooms.

After all, they have presided over a party that has -- with the exception of Bill Clinton -- generally nominated presidential candidates from the North, with views and values that are in sync with those who vote in the primaries but apparently, if election results are to be believed, not with the rest of the American people.

Today's Democratic leaders, if too young to have been part of the civil rights movement, embrace it as one of the Democratic Party's crowning achievements. They see enhancing the rights and opportunities of minority Americans as an integral part of their role in government, even though only Lyndon Johnson in 1964, among Democratic presidential candidates since Franklin Roosevelt, has carried the majority of white voters.

Being part of an effort to deny Obama, who has a white mother and an African father, the nomination makes them very uneasy, especially when to do so they will have to overrule the verdict of the primaries and caucuses.

Remember, these superdelegates are elected officials and members of the Democratic National Committee -- people invested in their own political future and that of the Democratic Party.

The threat of a revolt among African-Americans, not to mention among young voters of all races, if Obama is denied the nomination by the superdelegates might be enough to discourage even those who see Clinton as the better general election candidate.

Without the 80 percent or more of the black vote and large black turnouts that Democrats generally receive, party candidates would be hard-pressed to win in most states.

That's why it is difficult to see, even if Clinton wins Pennsylvania and some of the other remaining states, how she would become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Peter A. Brown is assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. He can be reached at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu