A fight “all the way to the convention”
That’s what it’s looking like, more so with each primary. But the Clinton campaign assures that it will be.
Bottom line: Say hello Puerto Rico.
“We are going to fight all the way to the convention,” Ickes said.
[Harold] Ickes, a veteran of the Clinton White House and a central figure in Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, told reporters that the campaign expects Clinton “will able to hold her own in Wisconsin” and win Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. “We think the demographics of Pennsylvania very much suits her candidacy,” he said. “By the end of this process by the 7th of June, when Puerto Rico votes, she will be neck and neck with Mr. Obama . . . Then she will wrap up the nomination.”
That is called two things: wishful thinking, and spin. Here’s more of the same:
Ickes was quick to note that “superdelegates,” the more than 790 Democratic elected officials and party leaders who may well determine the eventual nominee, should be referred to as “automatic delegates,” complaining that the word “super” has “some sort of sense that they’re going to descend to us from Mars.” (“The fourth estate,” he added, “invented the name ‘superdelegates.'”)
Funny, the Clinton team never said a word when they controlled the message of “the fourth estate” – the media. But the Clinton team is not used to not controlling the message.
Noting recent comments by Howard Dean, chair of the Democratic National Committee, David Axelrod, Sen. Barack Obama’s chief strategist and Rep. Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip– and side-stepping comments made by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Ickes asserted that automatic delegates should exercise “their best judgment in the interests of the party and the country” in choosing their nominee.
That’s sort of a threat.
This remains a race headed for a showdown at the conventions. And this is only on the Democrats’ side.