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Feb
11
Could Lawyers Be Planning Clinton v. Obama Lawsuit?
Filed Under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Election 2008, Hillary Clinton, Superdelegates, lawsuit
Theodore B. Olson writes about the possibility of Democratic lawyers playing out a repeat of the 2000 election legal showdown over popular votes vs. those cast by Democratic Party superdelegates resulting in a Clinton v. Obama lawsuit.
Could a convoluted process result in the nomination of the candidate who didn’t receive the most voter support?
What splendid theater the Democratic Party presidential nominating process is shaping up to be. And they are just getting started. The real fun would be a convention deadlock denouement a few months from now, the prospect of which is already quickening the pulses of scores of Democratic lawyers who have been waiting more than seven years for an encore of their 2000 presidential-election performances.
Press reports following super-duper Tuesday’s primaries and caucuses gave Sen. Clinton a narrow popular vote lead over Barack Obama. At the same time, Sen. Obama’s supporters were claiming a narrow lead among pledged delegates. The delegate count keeps changing, of course, and Sen. Clinton’s team is also claiming a delegate lead, based in part on a larger share so far of what are known in Democratic Party circles as superdelegates: 796 slots (20% of the total) set aside for members of Congress and a menagerie of assorted elected officials and party Pooh-Bahs.
These superdelegates, Byzantine hyper-egalitarian Democratic Party delegate selection formulas, and the fact that many delegates are selected at conventions or by caucuses rather than primaries, combine to offer the distinct possibility that by convention time the candidate leading in the popular vote in the primaries will be trailing in the delegate count.
How ironic. For over seven years the Democratic Party has fulminated against the Electoral College system that gave George W. Bush the presidency over popular-vote winner Al Gore in 2000. But they have designed a Rube Goldberg nominating process that could easily produce a result much like the Electoral College result in 2000: a winner of the delegate count, and thus the nominee, over the candidate favored by a majority of the party’s primary voters.
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4 Responses to “Could Lawyers Be Planning Clinton v. Obama Lawsuit?”
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Only if O’Bama wins.
Ditto what Kenn said. This is nothing more than Hillary and Bill dirty tricks.
Let me ask you guys this. Do you think that Hillary can lose gracefully?
Hi Kenn,
How do you assess Obama’s chance of winning? Or, is it too close to call at this point?
Hi Buzz,
I don’t see a graceful Hillary Clinton loss — if it gets to that point. I foresee more dirty tricks and whispers aimed at Barack Obama from the Clintons.