I've spent a fair amount of time recently discussing how the Clinton campaign is using spin to keep its prospects alive, despite a tremendously difficult path to the nomination. And though I've criticized the type of journalism that gives both sides a say and calls that objectivity, I'm going to let the campaign explain how it plans to traverse that path.

Here's Clinton's delegate counter, Harold Ickes, from a conference call earlier today. Note that the Clinton campaign refers to superdelegates as "automatic delegates."

The unvarnished facts are that neither one of these candidates will be able to achieve the nomination — whether with the lower amount [of delegates], 2024, without Florida and Michigan, or whether with the higher amount, 2208 — neither candidate can achieve the nomination solely with pledged delegates because they're split damn near right down the middle.

Thus, either candidate is going to have to have a very substantial number of automatic delegates to reach the nomination. As we look down towards the end of [the primary campaign], we think that both candidates are going to be within a hair of each other by the time the last states vote, which will be Montana and South Dakota. And assuming that the remaining unpledged automatic delegates generally stay where they are — unpledged as they watch this race unfold, as they see new information being developed, particularly about Sen. Obama — at the end of this process, neither candidate will have the nomination and each candidate is going to have to depend on the remaining automatic delegates to make their decisions, and that applies to Sen. Obama as well as Sen. Clinton.

In a word: superdelegates.

Ickes mentioned at a different point in the call that the Clinton campaign is still holding out hope for revotes in Michigan and Florida.

What Ickes doesn't acknowledge is that while Obama and Clinton will both need superdelegates to push them over the top, the Obama campaign has the pledged delegate lead and the popular vote lead, which lends credibility to its pitch to the undecided party honchos who will ultimately decide this thing.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

The LA Times catches John McCain dismissing a key criticism of the Iraq war:

"I know of no one who believes attention to Iraq at that point diverted our attention from Tora Bora," McCain said....

"We should have put more boots on the ground there to apprehend [Osama bin Laden]. Everyone agrees. But I have no reason to believe that because we urged attention to Iraq, it had any tactical effect on the battleground."

Tora Bora was where the American military had bin Laden pinned down in late 2001, only to have him escape from its grasp (you can read more here). As Think Progress helpfully points out, then-CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks, who oversaw the Middle East, had the following reaction to the Bush Administration's instructions in November and December of 2001 to start planning for war in Iraq: "They were in the midst of one war in Afghanistan, and now they wanted detailed planning for another? Goddamn. What the f--k are they talking about?"

Want to know more? Read Plan of Attack. Or The One-Percent Doctrine. Or Cobra II. Planning for a second war while trying to fight the first compromised our effectiveness in both. That's indisputable, no matter what John McCain says.

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

Unless something truly monumental produces lopsided victories for Hillary Clinton in the upcoming primaries, her chances for the Democratic nomination rely on superdelegates overturning the will of Democratic voters. Knowing this, her campaign has regularly identified criteria upon which the superdelegates might choose Clinton over Obama, some of which directly reflect the voters' intent (pledged delegate count, popular vote) and some of which are essentially judgment calls (electability, readiness). The campaign's problem is that the former criteria currently favor Obama and the latter don't lend themselves to a slam dunk consensus. In fact, they have so far been rejected by the majority of Democratic voters, who think electability and readiness are either better found in Obama or are trumped by Obama's ability to usher in change. If superdelegates were to cite Clinton's electability and readiness in order to coronate a nominee, it could drive voters out of the party.

But the Clinton campaign has found a new angle: imaginary electoral college votes. It is sending surrogates out to push the idea that superdelegates should vote for the candidate who would have come out ahead if the primaries were awarding electoral college votes instead of delegates.

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet

The White House has responded to a judge's order asking it to explain why it shouldn't be required to make copies of all of its hard drives to ensure the recovery of missing emails by claiming that many of the relevant hard drives have been destroyed. You read that correctly: the White House position is "We don't have to preserve hard drives containing missing email because we already destroyed them."

[Read more]

• Print
• Email
• Tweet