After Puerto Rico’s Democrats vote on June 7, there will be extraordinary pressure on the remaining publicly undecided super-delegates to get off the fence and make their preferences known. The Democratic convention is not until the end of August, so there’s a potential for three more months of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama slugging it out, running negative ads, airing opposition research, jabbing each other in speeches, and driving up each others’ unfavorable ratings.
There are several hundred super-delegates who have not publicly committed, and even when you win the support of a super-delegate, you don’t always get to keep it. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia announced at the end of last month that because his district overwhelmingly supported Obama, he will vote for the Illinois senator if it comes to a floor fight (which looks extremely likely). And then, sometimes one of your super-delegates is forced to resign because of involvement with a prostitution ring. Some days, Hillary just can’t catch a break.
But not all super-delegates are equally influential, and the Democrats could possibly avert that protracted summer fight if, after June 7, a group of the most prominent remaining undecided superdelegates jumped on one of the bandwagons. Perhaps the lowest point of the campaign for Hillary Clinton was the rumor just before the Ohio and Texas primaries that Obama had 50 super-delegates that were ready to endorse at the end of the week. Had the boast panned out, her campaign would have been instantly rendered a Sisyphian effort to keep the final score respectable. But Hillary won Texas, won Ohio by a significant margin, and won Rhode Island — and those 50 super-delegates never materialized.
Each of the ten figures listed below has remained on the sidelines for a reason. But sooner or later, they will have to decide, and a collective endorsement from several of them could create the impression that the fight is effectively over.
The ten, in order of influence:
1. Former Vice President Al Gore. Earlier this year, there was widespread speculation — expectation, in fact — that Gore would endorse Obama, owing to lingering resentments and bad blood from his chilly relationship with Hillary during her husband’s presidency. But it hasn’t come, long after it would really do Obama some good. (A national figure like Gore really needed to make his endorsement at least one news cycle before Super Tuesday to benefit the endorsee. An endorsement today would leave Gore fans from California to Tennessee to New York lamenting, “Now you tell me!”)
The fact that Gore hasn’t endorsed may mean that reports of his antipathy to Hillary Clinton have been greatly exaggerated, or that he’s not interested in losing his less-partisan savior-of-the-planet reputation, and suddenly alienating about half the Democratic party. Gore’s endorsement ended up being the high point of the Howard Dean campaign in 2004, but this nod is likely to be more decisive than the last one, as he’s not trying to sell an untested outsider to wary Democrats (as with Dean) but simply play the role of a tiebreaker in a very close contest.
2. Former President Jimmy Carter. Carter has praised Obama — and indicated he privately criticized Bill Clinton about the latter’s comments after the South Carolina primary — but stopped short of endorsing the Illinois senator. Carter has not traditionally been a major player in Democratic presidential primaries, but as the Democratic primary gets uglier and nastier with no visible resolution, he may rethink whether neutrality really is in the best long-term interests of the party.
3. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi has pledged to support the delegate winner and is urging other super-delegates to do the same. In fact, she has said that the super-delegates “overturn what’s happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic party.” On paper, that would put her in Obama’s pile. But if she were to endorse Hillary before the convention, she would be offering a powerful and unspoken argument that Obama would not give the best chance to expand the Democratic majority. Similarly, coming out and endorsing Obama would be a vote of confidence, a declaration that his rough patch hasn’t damaged his ability to generate a blue wave to follow 2006.
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