Did you miss the announcement? So did I. But Nancy Pelosi and Jimmy Carter are two of six uncommitted (or previously committed to Clinton) superdelegates who have said they will support the candidate who wins the most pledged delegates. Last night Barack Obama became that candidate.
Source: Open Left
Senator Barack Obama says he is close to securing the Democratic Party’s nomination to run in the US presidential election in November.
Mr Obama looks set to win a majority of “pledged” delegates, allocated in primary elections, although he is still short of a confirmed overall victory.
Source: BBC News
From Yahoo! News
Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man, is backing Barak Obama for US president and thinks current US economic policy will push the dollar lower against other global currencies
Buffett told a press conference here Monday he had offered support to both Obama and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton but that since it appeared Obama would win the party’s nomination, “I will be very happy if he is elected president.
“He is my choice,” Buffett said.
After Hillary’s ‘big’ win in West Virginia on Tuesday Obama’s campaign needed a little bit of massage to revive the Senators standing as front runner.
Step in John Edwards. Former Democratic contender and all round nice guy to help out.
To a packed crowd in Michigan Mr Edwards delivered a glowing speech endorsing Obama:
“There is one man who knows and understands that this is a time for bold leadership…there is one man who knows in his heart that it is time to create one America, not two - and that man is Barack Obama.“
Press coverage:
Former Sen. George McGovern, an early supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton, urged her to drop out of the Democratic presidential race and endorsed her rival, Barack Obama.
From Huffington Post
Despite almost unanimous acceptance that the race is over in the media, Hillary Clinton today announced that she intends to remain in the presidential race “until there’s a nominee.”
It is difficult to understand why - although she is perhaps banking on a rebound from almost certain victory in the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky - she is (for now) claiming that she will soldier on despite every possible argument for not doing so, including the inclusion of non-contests in Michigan and Florida, now being lost.
Hello Hillary, the race is over!
Continuing the contest, despite news that last month her campaign was only perpetuated by loaning herself $6.4 million, can only cause harm to the Democratic Party she claims to love. As other Democrats despair, superdelegates again trickled toward Obama today - a trickle which surely must soon become a flood if they are to end unnecessary division.
Having fought a campaign mirroring the worst of the Republican tactics which Obama last night said we should move beyond, the Clinton campaign has few friends, no argument, and diminishing support. She perhaps hopes to claim that the nomination was ’stolen’ from her by the very superdelegates she was relying on to overturn the choice of voters, but in her heart she knows (being a consummate politician) that the race is over.
The superdelegates now need to reinforce last night’s message - that Obama is going to fight McCain - to avoid a needless distraction of a horse race between a thoroughbred and a lame filly. If they can do so without pulling out the pistol, all the better. If not, there are many who will happily supply the bullet.
In many Democrat minds, the contest in November was always going to be best defined by the candidate who had the judgement to oppose the Iraq War from the start, but Obama’s surprising appeal and his ability to raise massive fortunes from over 1.5 million individual donors has also not gone unnoticed. A message of ‘the future not the past’, fought between a 72 year old Republican and a young Senator barely tarnished by Washington politics-as-normal, will also help in a year where voters are already demonstrating a desire for change.
The future is tall, black, and dynamic. It is not old, muddled, and tarnished.
The following memo has been sent to superdelegates by the Obama Campaign manager, David Plouffe, in an effort to end this race before any further damage to the Democratic Party’s cause is done by Hillary Clinton’s (so far) continued determination to fight on:
There are only six contests remaining in the Democratic primary calendar and only 217 pledged delegates left to be awarded. Only 7 percent of the pledged delegates remain on the table. There are 260 remaining undeclared superdelegates, for a total of 477 delegates left to be awarded.
With North Carolina and Indiana complete, Barack Obama only needs 172 total delegates to capture the Democratic nomination. This is only 36% of the total remaining delegates.
Conversely, Senator Clinton needs 326 delegates to reach the Democratic nomination, which represents a startling 68% of the remaining delegates.
With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.
We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.
Just as the Presidential election in November will be decided by the electoral college, not popular vote, the Democratic nomination is decided by delegates.
If we believed the popular vote was somehow the key measurement, we would have campaigned much more intensively in our home state of Illinois and in all the other populous states, in the pursuit of larger raw vote totals. But it is not the key measurement. We played by the rules, set by you, the DNC members, and campaigned as hard as we could, in as many places as we could, to acquire delegates. Essentially, the popular vote is not much better as a metric than basing the nominee on which candidate raised more money, has more volunteers, contacted more voters, or is taller.
The Clinton campaign was very clear about their own strategy until the numbers become too ominous for them. They were like a broken record , repeating ad nauseum that this nomination race is about delegates. Now, the word delegate has disappeared from their vocabulary, in an attempt to change the rules and create an alternative reality.
We want to be clear – we believe that the winner of a majority of pledged delegates will and should be the nominee of our party. And we estimate that after the Oregon and Kentucky primaries on May 20, we will have won a majority of the overall pledged delegates According to a recent news report, by even their most optimistic estimates the Clinton Campaign expects to trail by more than 100 pledged delegates and will then ask the superdelegates to overturn the will of the voters.
But of course superdelegates are free to and have been utilizing their own criteria for deciding who our nominee should be. Many are deciding on the basis of electability, a favorite Clinton refrain. And if you look at the numbers, during a period where the Clinton campaign has been making an increasingly strident pitch on electability, it is clear their argument is failing miserably with superdelegates.
Since February 5, the Obama campaign has netted 107 superdelegates, and the Clinton campaign only 21. Since the Pennsylvania primary, much of it during the challenging Rev. Wright period, we have netted 24 and the Clinton campaign 17.
At some point – we would argue that time is now – this ceases to be a theoretical exercise about how superdelegates view electability. The reality of the preferences in the last several weeks offer a clear guide of how strongly superdelegates feel Senator Obama will perform in November, both in building a winning campaign for the presidency as well as providing the best electoral climate across the country for all Democratic candidates.
It is important to note that Senator Obama leads Senator Clinton in superdelegate endorsements among Governors, United States Senators and members of the House of Representatives. These elected officials all have a keen sense for who our strongest nominee will be in November.
It is only among DNC members where Senator Clinton holds a lead, which has been rapidly dwindling.
As we head into the final days of the campaign, we just wanted to be clear with you as a party leader, who will be instrumental in making the final decision of who our nominee will be, how we view the race at this point.
Senator Obama, our campaign and our supporters believe pledged delegates is the most legitimate metric for determining how this race has unfolded. It is simply the ratification of the DNC rules – your rules – which we built this campaign and our strategy around.
For more on Obama’s delegate count, check out the official Obama campaign Results Center.
Despite the campaigns being held against the backdrop of what Barack Obama called a “rough couple of weeks” he decisively won North Carolina and came within a whisker of also winning Indiana. He is now the the presumptive nominee.
Hillary Clinton meanwhile has cancelled all public appearances today, including scheduled interviews on morning TV shows, as speculation grows that she will soon concede that the race is over for her. If she doesn’t, and last night she talked of going on, then she can expect diminishing financial support as well as being handed defeat as superdelegates swing behind the presumptive nominee.
Barack Obama has now won 32 of 47 contests; is 34 pledged delegates short of a majority; and just 173 total delegates shy of the winning line. It’s clear now that the Democratic Party will unite behind Barack Obama and focus on soundly defeating John McCain in November.
Another finalist in the Obama in 30 seconds ad contest is called “Join me”:
The battle over the Indiana primary is being fought for the most part on the McCain/Clinton “Gas Tax Holiday” proposal, which has been universally slated by economists. As we said before, it is a fight Obama is not shrinking from, despite being a populist move on Clinton’s part.
Early in the morning, Barack Obama held a press conference to condemn the plan (see video above) and stated that it had already been tried but proved to be a failure in Illinois. He attacked Hillary Clinton for her choice of language the day before when she called on members of Congress to support her policy, echoing President Bush’s phrase “you’re either with us or against us”.
Later in the day, the Obama team released a second TV advert about the proposal:
Hillary countered by reiterating that she planned to introduce legislation in the Senate, forcing Obama and other Democrats to vote against it, then releasing a follow-up TV ad of her own:
Meanwhile there are indications that Barack Obama’s principled stance may be resonating with superdelegates. One undeclared superdelegate, Congressman and Senate candidate Mark Udall, wrote a stinging rebuke of her policy on his website yesterday saying:
“The so-called ‘temporary gas tax holiday’ that Senators Clinton and McCain propose won’t deliver this needed relief. This will not create the economic relief they say it will, because prices will continue to rise until we address the real source of this problem. We do need to provide immediate relief for families hard-hit by spiraling gas prices, and we can do that by demanding the President stop adding to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This will ease the production crunch that is causing these skyrocketing gas prices.
“Senator Clinton claimed yesterday that I either stand with her on this proposal or stand with the oil companies. To that I say: I stand with the families of Colorado, who aren’t looking for bumper sticker fixes that don’t fix anything, but for meaningful change that brings real relief and a new direction for our energy policy. We can’t afford more Washington-style pandering while families keep getting squeezed.
“It is exactly the kind of short-sighted Washington game that keeps us from getting real results to our energy problem. Experts across the ideological spectrum agree that it will increase the deficit, drain money away from Colorado roads and bridges, and hurt the environment, all without actually making prices lower for drivers.”
Senator Barack Obama
visit barackobama.com
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