Has Hilary Gone Too Far For the Democrats? Find Out Which Rocky Road She’s Chosen!

Democratic Party Leaders looking to avoid a prolonged fight continue to use coded terms such as “avoiding a bloodbath,” “timetables,” and “the will of the people” to subtly nudge Senator Hillary Clinton from the race. Despite that push, Clinton recently brought up a legendary boxer as she vowed to fight on:

“Could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten halfway up those art museum stairs and said, well, ‘I guess, that‘s about far enough.’ That‘s not the way it works.  Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common.”

Never mind that Rocky lost in that movie to his opponent Apollo Creed.  It sure feels like the ref, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean, wants to call the fight early, asking the undecided superdelegates to make a decision well before the late August convention.

Said Dean: “We also have these unpledged delegates that have been part of the rules for 25 years.  There‘s about 800 of them.  About 470 of them have voted, I‘d like the other 330 to say who they‘re for between now and the 1^st of July.”

Chairman Dean may believe he‘s doing what‘s best for the party, but they created these rules and this schedule, and by expediting the race he‘s also basically ensuring that Clinton will have no chance. She will almost certainly be down in both popular vote and delegates at the end of the primaries.  She will have to hope to make a momentum argument to the superdelegates and hope for an Obama slip up. Time is her greatest ally, and it sure seems like the leaders in the party don‘t want to give that to her.

It certainly seems that the leading Democrats are all using coded terms — “it‘s going to be OK, it‘s going to work itself out,” — which basically means Obama‘s going to win and we‘ll be able to get rid of Hillary Clinton?

I don’t really have a problem with what Dean is trying to do. However, I do think it’s really problematic when people like Pat Leahy suggests she’s got to get out now before all the votes have been cast and counted. When people like Dean, or Harry Reid, or Nancy Pelosi start to suggest, well, maybe July 1^st is a deadline, well, they can say whatever they want. It’s certainly interesting. I’d like to know. It gives us all a deadline to look forward to. But the fact is that it’s not binding. The superdelegates can come out and cast their votes either way. Dean can’t force them. And if they throw their support behind Obama, then Dean can’t force them to stick with it when they get to Denver in August.

Now, no one is taking the position officially that Clinton should get out now. You’ve got Leahy saying it, but you got no sort of so-called objective observers out there. You don’t have Obama saying it, you don’t have his campaign officially saying it. But isn’t there a wink and a nod here when Harry Reid and Howard Dean are saying, you know, we’ll be able to fix this pretty soon, so don’t worry?

My problem is not with the intellectually honest ones like Leahy who’s saying, for example, you know what, get out. That’s fine. That’s Leahy’s opinion, and people can judge him on that. My problem is with the Democratic Party establishment. I mean, here’s Nancy Pelosi, who backed off from a previous comment she made which certainly sounded anti-Clinton, and here’s what she’s saying today:

“I believe that the elections must run their course, that the people’s voices must be heard, and that the superdelegates voting their conscious, but paying attention to the will of the people. We’ll come to a resolution long before July.”

Perhaps there’s something I’m not getting when I look at the will of the people, but paying attention to the will of the people when you know that Hillary Clinton has almost no chance to come away with a popular vote victory — it’s possible, but not realistic — and that her only real hope is with the superdelegates. Isn’t this effectively Pelosi, and I add her now to the group I mentioned earlier with the wink and the nod, saying that Clinton is done?

When this ends in early June, Hillary Clinton’s best hope is to say, you know what, we’ve got momentum, and it’s going to take some time to convince people. And if everyone is saying let’s cut it off June 15^th or July 1^st or whatever the date is, sometime before the convention, then that is bad news for Clinton. At this time, there’s no way that time is anything but an ally to Hillary Clinton.