Wednesday Muse; Obama Outperforms Expectations, Clinton Stays in

May 7th, 2008

The “Rocky Balboa” Candidate Starting to Look Like Sylvester Stallone, Gets Pounded By Mason Dixon

Barack Obama outperformed all expectations yesterday, winning North Carolina 56% to 42% while losing Indiana by only 2 points. He gained a net of 10-15 delegates and 210,000 votes, putting him ahead in every possible count of the popular vote, and giving him a prohibitive 800,000 vote lead in DNC sanctioned contests. Despite all this, Hillary Clinton has said that she intends to stay in the race until the convention, with her campaign announcing yesterday that she has given another 6.4 million dollars of personal money to her campaign in the past month, adding to the 5 million dollars she gave her own campaign in February.

George McGovern, the 1972 nominee of the Democratic party and a Clinton supporter (up until today), has called for Clinton to drop out of the race, and more are expected to follow. Clinton now needs upwards of 70% of remaining superdelegates to make a claim at the nomination, and only leads the group 270 to 264, trailing by 160 delegates overall.

At this point a good question to ask is why Clinton is still in the race. Here are seven potential reasons (in no particular order):

1. She wants Obama to lose so she can be the nominee in 2012 – If Obama is president for eight years, Clinton will by 68 by the end of that timespan and likely too old to run for president. If McCain is elected president, he’ll likely only be there for one term and Clinton will be able to run in the next election as a “see, you should have nominated me” candidate

2. “I deserve it, damnit” – Some speculate that the Clintons believe that they’ve done so much for the party that they should just be handed the nomination, and believe that it’s better that the Democrats are destroyed than that the Democrats abandon their machinery.

3. As a contingency plan – Nobody likes to talk about it, but Americans have a tendency to shoot their inspiring political figures in the head. JFK, RFK, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey Long (sort of). Obama is probably the most likely person to join that list since RFK, and in that horrible event, Clinton would want to be in the race for the party to coalesce around. Also, if Obama’s polling numbers start getting demonstrably worse than Clinton’s in a general election scenario, superdelegates might the nomination to her to keep the party’s chances.

4. Steal a man’s dinner then offer him a fish – If Clinton keeps eroding Obama’s scant support among old, white, working class Democrats, Obama might have to make Clinton his VP nominee to appeal to those same people.

5. She Truly Would Rather Have McCain Win – She has said before that McCain is more qualified to be Commander In Chief than Barack Obama, and her husband has had nothing but good things to say about the Republican nominee, perhaps she feels McCain is more alligned with her conservative foreign policy and pro-corporate sentiments. Maybe she also really thinks that somebody with only a few years of national experience can’t run the country.

6. She thinks she can still win this thing – Whether she’s anticipating the entire delegations from Florida and Michigan to be seated or a Bradley effect among superdelegates, it could be as simple as that it’s worth another couple of months of 20 hour work days for her entire family to fight for her 1% chance of being elected president.

7. She thinks if she stays in until the end, she’ll be able to to be the de facto 2012 nominee if Obama isn’t elected – Similar to option one, except she’s not trying to bring him down against McCain, she just wants to rack up enough delegates and organization this time around that she’d have an even bigger head start in 2012 than she did in 2008.

I think any of these individual options would seem unlikely, but one of them is probably true. And that’s the muse.