While continuing to trumpet a large, although meaningless, victory in Puerto Rico yesterday, the Clinton campaign is pondering where to go from here:
WASHINGTON — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won another overwhelming victory over Senator Barack Obama on Sunday — this time in Puerto Rico — even as many Democrats, including some of her supporters, suggested it would be best if she dropped her threat to battle on past the end of the primary voting on Tuesday.
“There’s nobody taking Hillary’s side but Hillary people,” said Donald Fowler of South Carolina, a former national party chairman and one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent supporters, referring to her campaign’s suggestions that she might seek to challenge the way the party resolved the fight this weekend over seating the Michigan and Florida delegations. “It’s too bad. She deserves better than this.”
In a telephone interview Sunday from San Juan, P.R., Mrs. Clinton still raised the possibility that she would challenge the party’s decision on seating those delegates. “Well, we are going to look at that and make a determination at some point,” she said. “But I haven’t made any decision at this time.”
What possible decision is there to make at this point. After Saturday’s decision by the Rules Committee, it is fairly clear that Hillary Clinton has no chance of winning the Democratic nomination in anything approaching a legitimate fashion, a fact which even her own supporters are starting to realize:
[I]n a sign of the difficulties she would face if she chooses to appeal, some of her strongest supporters said in interviews that they thought it would be a mistake to keep the fight going, noting, for example, that the battle was really over the four delegates her campaign argued were improperly taken from her in Michigan.
“Unless something happens that I don’t expect to happen in the next, say, by the end of June, my answer to that is not only no but, hell no,” Mr. Fowler, the former party chairman, said. “What good does it do? What good does it do anybody?” Mr. Rendell said that if the nominating contest were closer, it might make sense to take the fight to the convention. “I think it’s outrageous they took four delegates away from her,” he said. “But I think with 170 delegates separating them, it’s not worth making the case.”
And there were signs that continuing the fight, should Mr. Obama collect enough superdelegates to declare victory this week, could alienate many Democratic leaders who have stepped back as the fight went on.
Art Torres, the California Democratic chairman who has not endorsed a candidate in the race, said it was urgent for the party to avoid divisive battles. “Everyone is paying respects to her — as we would for Obama if he were in a similar situation,” Mr. Torres said. “But it now becomes a matter of commitment to the nation and the party. We cannot allow this election to slip through our fingers.”
And yet there are signs that the Clinton campaign is still seriously considering the suicidal strategy of taking a fight they cannot win all the way to the convention:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign was out in full force on the Sunday shows, insisting that Mrs. Clinton will be leading in the popular vote at the end of the primary process this week and will be making a final appeal to the party’s uncommitted superdelegates on that basis.
The Clinton forces also left the door open that they could press forward with a fight to the credentials committee, as it threatened to do yesterday. Mrs. Clinton could challenge the Democratic Party’s rules committee on Saturday allocated the delegates from Michigan. We’ll have more on that argument in a later post.
But much of the campaign’s focus today was about the popular vote.
“These are difficult decisions that these remaining superdelegates will have to make,” said Harold Ickes, an adviser to Mrs. Clinton, in an interview with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” Sunday morning. “Not since 1972 has our party nominated a candidate who was not leading in the popular vote.”
“It appears as if you’re trying to put an asterisk on the nomination,” Mr. Russert responded.
“In choosing the nominee, there are a number of factors to take into account,” Mr. Ickes said. “And we think popular vote is a very, very strong measure and should be weighed heavily.”
And even the candidate herself is talking like someone who fully intends to continue fighting:
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — As she prepared to take off from Puerto Rico, Hillary Clinton came to the back of the campaign plane to remind reporters that her delegate situation might not stay as grim as it looks. “One thing about superdelegates is they can change their minds,” she said, adding fuel to speculation that she is preparing to extend the nomination contest.
To bolster her case, Clinton brought on board Kevin Rodriguez, a superdelegate from the Virgin Islands who started out backing Clinton, switched to Barack Obama, and has since returned to the Clinton fold.
And there’s always the suggestion that Clinton has made more than once that even pledged delegates are, at least to her, fair game.
All of these questions will be up in the air today, tomorrow, and considering that neither party can possibly win enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination in the final two primaries, after that for as long as Hillary wants them to.
There is, of course, one group that can bring this debate to an end quickly; the 204 superdelegates (a number which reflects the superdelegates allocated to Michigan and Florida on Saturday). At most, Barack Obama will need about 60 of them to make up their minds in his favor, and this race will be over.
