Redstate

A man who knows what he wants.

By Moe Lane Posted in 2008 | Barack Obama | Hillary Clinton | superdelegates | The Best Democratic Primary EVER — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

And a man ready to name his price:

DNC Superdelegate Puts His Vote Up For Sale
Steven Ybarra Wants $20 Million For His Vote

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (CBS13) ― In this tight battle for the Democratic nomination we've heard a lot about the candidates courting superdelegates.

But, one superdelegate is courting the candidates. He says he'll sell his vote for a price. A very high price: $20 million.

Steven Ybarra of Sacramento says that eight-figure price is peanuts for the presidency.

This is not going to be an attack on Mr. Ybarra, by the way: he's just an example. The real problem for the Democrats are the super-delegates who are being quiet about their special needs.

Read on.

First off, let's establish something: what Mr. Ybarra wants is not precisely a bribe. He's looking to use that 20 million to register Mexican-American Democrats in the Southwest, which is a project that the DNC should be getting involved in. They can't, because Howard Dean spent his Party's cash reserves making Democrats in Montana feel better about being surrounded by all those Republicans, but that's only Ybarra's problem in the abstract. Naturally, he's not really a disinterested party in this: Ybarra wants to be the guy who can hand out the dozen or so jobs that a project like that entails, which will benefit him indirectly, and on a more local level, and in the long run. Put another way: Ybarra is looking to parlay this suddenly-important status of his into increased influence in the California Democratic Party; and he's probably smart enough to do that while being scrupulously remaining within the letter of the law. As he said, it's done all the time.

That's the issue, really.

The Washington Times put out a story today - "Superdelegates hold back" - which is ostensibly about the problems that Hillary Clinton is having getting SDs from districts that she's won to endorse her. Good news for Obama... except that they aren't endorsing him, either. There was a good deal of talk around the blogosphere about how the super-delegates were going to flood over to the junior Senator from Illinois after Tuesday's results, but it's still at the usual trickle. And here's an interesting factoid from the Times:

Of the more than 200 undeclared superdelegates, just 23 are from places that have yet to vote: West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana.

The Obama campaign is, of course, planning to act as if 50% of pledged delegates will ensure him the nomination (instead of the 62% that the rules actually require*, and which he will not get): it's the best hand that they have to play, particularly now that their run of the demographic tables have not quite put them over the edge. That's for public consumption. What's going to happen in private is that both he and Clinton are going to be carefully, very carefully: finding out the reason why each one of the remaining delegates won't get off the fence; finding out what the price is for getting off the fence; seeing what they can do to get that price; and of course making certain that the people that they've already got off the fence aren't getting restless.

And this will happen all the way to the convention. Bottom line: if the remaining races break 50/50, and even assuming that the Democrats will actually be stupid enough to keep Michigan and Florida from counting, Obama will walk into that convention with about 1,700 guaranteed votes and Clinton with about 1,550. The best of a set of bad choices for the Democratic candidates right now is to lock in as best they can the super-delegates that both need to win this on the first ballot (because nobody - and I mean nobody - knows what will happen if this goes to more than one). It only remains to be seen how many of those super-delegates are like Mr. Ybarra: ready to deal, and already having a hand out.

And how many of them are ready to renegotiate, now that Mr. Ybarra has put the idea in their heads.

Moe Lane

*OK, let's walk through this. You need 2,025 [(4,049/2) + 1] delegates to win, right? There are 3,253 pledged delegates total. The Obama campaign plans to declare victory once they get half of that, or 1,627 pledged delegates. They should get that, no problem. Unfortunately for them, the system has been set up - whether deliberately, accidentally, or some oddball combination of both - to make it the responsibility of the super-delegates to decide if no candidate gets 62% (2,025/3,253) of the pledged delegates.

One thing is for certain: no matter who wins in August, the Democrats are going to drastically overhaul their primary system. It has catastrophically failed in its first real test in forty years; worse, it has embarrassed a good number of people who do not like to be embarrassed in public. Also: this is almost certainly the zenith of Howard Dean's career, and his fall from grace will be surprisingly swift when it comes. Rightly or wrongly, he's the one who will be blamed for this mess.