Following up on the Hillary Clinton Conceding Story, which came down to the PTB (powers that be), telling her to get out.
today show
vp question?
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Key Group Clinton Did Not Hold
Superdelegates. Yes, if you look back through the contentious fight for this nomination, it was always a core group that never took the leap to Clinton.
I have always thought as I was looking for a candidate, I wanted someone different, new, not the same old democrat shoved down my throat.
Coming from a progressive family and growing up with politics as active conversation at the dinner table, I knew that I was tired of the same thing always dished to democratic voters.
I knew if I felt this way, that many other democratic voters felt the same way too.
By mid-March, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign knew it had a problem with what it had once assumed was a reliable firewall — its support among superdelegates.
The fight for pledged delegates for the Democratic nomination was essentially over. Senator Barack Obama was ahead, after winning a series of caucuses in states that Mrs. Clinton virtually ignored.
Still, it became apparent that neither he nor Mrs. Clinton could claim the presidential nomination with pledged delegates alone, and the two would need superdelegates — elected officials and party activists — to fill the gap.
For Mrs. Clinton in particular, that signaled danger. The commanding lead she had held in superdelegates at the start of the contests — she was about 100 ahead of Mr. Obama — had dwindled by mid-March, to 12.
My personal take is that many of these superdelegates were of independent mind, and also was of mind of a complete change. Not disrespecting the Clintons, but have moved past the Clintons, as many democrats eventually did.
“Sure, Senator Clinton was the favorite early on, but that was simply because of the institutional support that she already had,” said Jason Rae of Wisconsin, a superdelegate who endorsed Mr. Obama in February. “In the beginning, people were unsure of Senator Obama. But as they continued to see primary after primary, and him excelling, and him attracting all these new voters, I think the superdelegates really started feeling more comfortable with him.”
Of all the assumptions the Clinton campaign made going into the race, its support among the party establishment seemed like a safe bet. Many of the superdelegates, who help pick the nominee at the convention in August, came of age during the Bill Clinton presidency. Many were personal Clinton loyalists, cultivated to help deliver the vote.
And then, again, I have always said, that 11 straight losses in February doomed Clinton. The Democratic Party selects its nominee on the most pledged delegates from these primary states, not the popular vote. Clinton was behind after Wisconsin in February by over 115 pledged delegates, making this simply impossible to overturn even with all the other primaries up until June. One other thing, the Clintons belief that the superdelegates would overturn what the primaries and caucuses was a wild card. That would have caused anarchy at the convention in Denver and no matter how one feel about the Clintons, the Democratic Party is first and foremost.
Representative David E. Price, a superdelegate from North Carolina, said the idea that Mrs. Clinton could amass enough superdelegates to overturn the verdict of pledged delegates “was never in the cards.”
Many books will be written about this primary season. But in the end, it was Clinton's own constituency that pulled the plug on her, gently telling her to come back to reality.
chuck todd, msnbc, first read
the obama pound
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