If you are a total geek, you can look at the delegate selection process for Democrats Abroad. The short version is that Obama crushed Clinton in the voting 65.6%-32.7% but only earned 2.5 delegates to her two. He’ll probably pick up a couple of extra delegates when they have their convention in April. Possible headlines?
Obama wins 11th consecutive contest.
Obama passes 1200 pledged delegates.
Mark Penn declares that the world is insignificant.
Meanwhile, keeping with international sources, The Guardian reports that the Obama campaign wants a concession.
Barack Obama’s campaign, riding a wave of 10 straight victories in the contest for the Democratic nomination after wins in Wisconsin and Hawaii, today urged Hillary Clinton to bow to the inevitable and accept defeat.
Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, dismissed her camp’s hopes of making a comeback when the power states of Texas and Ohio hold their primaries on March 4, and said Clinton would be unable to bridge a widening gap in delegates.
“This is a wide, wide lead right now,” Plouffe said in a conference call with reporters. “The Clinton campaign keeps saying the race is essentially tied. That’s just lunacy.”
How do you pronounce ‘Plouffe’?
Here’s some understatement from the Brookings Institute:
While Clinton can ask the party to wait until March 4, she cannot hope to prolong the verdict for an additional seven weeks until her next bastion—Pennsylvania, on April 22—unless the March 4 results indicate that she has halted Obama’s surge.
Even if March 4 yields results that outside observers view as disappointing, the Clinton campaign may be tempted to soldier on. The flow of funds would surely slow, however, and the victory scenarios would become increasingly problematic. A narrow majority based on superdelegates against a clear majority of pledged delegates for Obama would create a furor, as would successful raids on delegates elected to support Obama. Worst of all would be a majority built on delegations seated pursuant to the contested primaries in Michigan and Florida. At some point, the Clinton campaign would have to ponder the relation between the worth of victory and the manner in which victory is achieved. Democrats old enough to have endured the agony of their 1968 convention cannot forget its electoral consequences.
Meanwhile, Joe Klein went to Doha, Qatar and found the Muslim world intrigued by Obama but mostly just exhausted.
The final speaker, a charismatic religious leader from Egypt, didn’t want to talk about the next President at all. He wanted to talk about the problems of Islamic youth. But, I pressed, what do you want from the next President? “Change,” he said, innocently, “and hope … for the future.”
The Americans in the audience smiled at that: clearly an Obama voter. The notion that the U.S. might elect someone named Barack Obama seemed almost surreal to most of the Islamic delegation. But what was most striking was the overall sense of subdued despair after all the battles and outrages of the Bush years. “The past few years, the Muslims were throwing tables at us,” a U.S. Middle East policy expert told me. “Maybe they’re just worn out.”
Of course, Klein adds:
The distress was deeper than exhaustion. Many of the Muslim delegates seemed stunned, finally, by the rush of history unleashed by the Bush Administration. “Everything the United States has favored is now radioactive, especially democracy,” said Rami Khouri, a Lebanese journalist. The Administration had pushed for elections in places like the Palestinian territories where the essential components of democracy—a free press, a free economy, the rule of law—did not exist. Religious parties had won, or gained momentum, in most of these elections, and the U.S. had backtracked, refusing to accept the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories, re-embracing autocrats like Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. “Our indigenous democratic reformers,” Khouri said, “are in retreat across the region.”
They should not expect any miracles in the near future. Democrats are going to embrace realpolitik in the interest of stability. We don’t have a better option at the moment. If there will be any positive movement, it will have to be on the Israeli/Palestine conflict, not on democratization. Bush’s attempt was premature, sloppy, and insincere. Our first priority is now to shore up our alliances and get out of Iraq without it causing a regional conflagration or a crippling disruption of energy supplies.
