WASHINGTON — Some time over the weekend, depending on whose count you use, Hillary Clinton fell behind in the superdelegate count, laying to rest her last, best hope.
Barring a cataclysm that no one even wants to imagine, Illinois Senator Barack Obama is now the presumptive presidential nominee for the Democratic Party.
That is why Mr. Obama's campaign has already begun to take on the aura of a presidential campaign. The opponent now is not Ms. Clinton, it is presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pushed the same tripartite argument against Mr. McCain that Mr. Obama now increasingly employs.
A T-shirt bearing a likeness of Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama on the cover of Time magazine is for sale before a campaign appearance by Obama at Summit High School in Bend, Ore., Saturday, May 10. (Don Ryan/AP)
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“He's wrong on the war. He's wrong on the economy. He's a clone of George Bush,” Mr. Reid told ABC.
While the campaign pivots to confront Mr. McCain, everyone in the Obama camp is working overtime to make Ms. Clinton feel welcomed and wanted, even going so far as to hint that Mr. Obama's powerhouse fundraising machine could be used to help the New York senator pay off her campaign debts.
Ms. Clinton will “make the right choice” at the appropriate time for the sake of Democratic unity, Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, an Obama supporter, told NBC yesterday.
“The country wants a very different direction, and I have every confidence that she's going to be as strong a supporter of Barack Obama as anyone would be when it comes to this November election.”
The turning point came as five more superdelegates announced their support for Mr. Obama yesterday, adding to those who had announced Friday and Saturday, taking his superdelegate count to 272, eight ahead of Ms. Clinton, according to The New York Times count. At the beginning of the year, he was about 100 behind.
Add that to Mr. Obama's lead of 1,593 pledged delegates over her 1,425, according to the NYT tally, and the situation for Ms. Clinton becomes impossible.
She will win an enormous victory in West Virginia tomorrow – she is believed to be ahead of Mr. Obama by as many as 40 percentage points – and is also expected to rack up large victories in Kentucky and Puerto Rico later in May and on June 3.
But Mr. Obama will offset that with wins in Oregon, and probably in South Dakota and Montana. And even if he doesn't, it won't matter.
The only way Ms. Clinton was ever going to overcome Mr. Obama's lead in delegates, states and popular vote was by generating a groundswell of superdelegate support in her direction. And since her large loss in North Carolina and too-narrow victory in Indiana last week, precisely the opposite has occurred.
Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign's communications director, once again attempted to redefine the criteria for victory. Now, you shouldn't be the nominee unless you can win West Virginia.
“Why can't Senator Obama beat Senator Clinton in West Virginia?” he asked on Fox News yesterday. “Voters there have heard that he's the presumptive nominee. They've seen the great press he's gotten in the past couple of days. Let's let them decide.”
Unfortunately for Mr. Wolfson and campaign director Terry McAuliffe, West Virginia won't decide it, even though its high proportion of older, white, low-income voters makes it the perfect Clinton state. Forty-five other states have already voted, and they have given Mr. Obama a lead that is truly insurmountable.
Even seating the Florida and Michigan delegates in a manner that entirely favoured Ms. Clinton (by fully seating the Michigan delegation and awarding Mr. Obama zero delegates in that state) would not be sufficient to overcome his lead, and the Democratic Party's rules and bylaws committee would never employ a formula so prejudiced against the candidate who is certain to become the nominee.
But that's not what matters. What matters is that there isn't a scandal large enough to drive the remaining 259 superdelegates en masse into Ms. Clinton's camp. The question for her, and her campaign, is how and when to end her quest in a way that preserves her dignity, honours the choice of the many millions who came out to support her and maximizes her negotiating advantage in seeking whatever it is she might want from Mr. Obama.
The timing is in doubt. But no longer the outcome.
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