How Obama Can End the Primary Race
Obama Should Agree to Seat Delegates from Michigan and Florida
Sen. Barack Obama is close to clinching the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Now he can remove the final rationale for Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Sen. Barack Obama came tantalizingly close to wrapping up the Democratic Party's presidential nomination with his win and closer-than-expected loss in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries last week. But Sen. Hillary Clinton remained in the race and scored an embarrassing 41-percentage point victory over him in West Virginia on Tuesday. That victory, and her expected double digit win in next week's Kentucky primary, will likely keep Clinton in the race through at least the middle of June. Clinton will remain in the race, taking shots at Obama, as long as she continues to win, and as long as the dispute over Michigan's and Florida's delegates to the Democratic National Convention goes unresolved. Sen. Obama should agree now to seat the disputed delegates and remove Sen. Clinton's lone hope of capturing the party's nomination.
The Democratic National Committee stripped Michigan and Florida of their convention delegates when the two states opted to move their presidential primaries prior to February 5th. The Democratic candidates agreed to forgo campaigning in the two states and most kept their names off the ballot. But Sen. Clinton reneged on her pledges and appeared on both state's ballots, while Sen. Obama was only on the Florida ballot. Clinton won both states and has been fighting ever since to have their delegations to the convention seated. Obama's campaign has argued that the ban imposed by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean should be upheld.
Now that Sen. Obama has all but wrapped up the nomination, however, he needs to find a way to prevent the dispute from causing a dramatic convention floor fight in Denver this August. As long as Sen. Clinton believes that the Michigan and Florida delegates can put her campaign over the top for the nomination, she will continue to press the issue. Therefore, Sen. Obama shoud agree to a plan now to seat the delegates. This is a counterintuitive strategy, since the move will close the delegate gap between himself and Sen. Clinton. But in reversing his position for the sake of party unity, Obama will gain much-needed credibility as a statesman and demonstrate his ability as a uniter.
Neither candidate can win enough delegates in the remaining primaries to secure the nomination. So the campaigns have been making their pitches to the Democratic superdelegates, a group of elected officials, party luminaries, and members of important interest groups who will end up deciding the race. Sen. Obama has been winning superdelegates to his side in small numbers since his win in North Carolina, but a substantial number remains uncommitted between the two candidates. By moving to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations, Obama will reassure these remaining undecideds that he will work to win votes in the important swing states in the fall.
This Democratic primary season has been like no other in modern American political history. Both Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton have run spirited, contentious, and substantive campaigns on issues that Democrats care about. But one of them has to lose. Sen. Obama has come close to assuring that the loser will be Sen. Clinton. If he has the courage to take a calculated political risk and agree to seat the Michigan and Florida delegations at his campaign's expense, he will hasten that eventuality and potentially save himself from some more embarrassing primary losses in the coming weeks.
