Hillary Clinton’s “shameless will to power” will keep her in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination to the bitter end, according to National Review Editor Rich Lowry.
Barack Obama’s campaign touts “the math” as pointing to an insurmountable delegate lead for the Illinois senator. But in an article that appears on the RealClearPolitics Web site, Lowry writes about Hillary:
“She’s not electrifying on the stump, her campaign is dysfunctional, and — truth be told — she’s not particularly experienced. What Hillary has is a shameless will to power, and a near lock on an old-school Democratic coalition built on working-class whites. That is enough for her to try to pry the nomination from Obama’s hands one finger at a time.”
Obama will most likely continue to lead Clinton by about 100 pledged delegates, but won’t get enough to secure the nomination before the convention in August. Obama, and Hillary for that matter, will need superdelegates — elected officials and party officers who are free to vote for whomever they choose, Lowry notes.
And those superdelegates won’t necessarily support the candidate with the most pledged delegates. The Washington Post spoke with 80 superdelegates who said they will support the candidate who will run the strongest campaign against Republican John McCain. That could lead to a bitter floor fight at the convention.
“When Hillary and Bill Clinton talk of Obama as Hillary’s pick for vice president, they are targeting Obama’s toughness,” Lowry observes. “They surely believe that, faced with a Hillary who will go to the convention and spoil his nomination with a nasty floor fight if she has to, Obama will blink. For the sake of his party and the cause of change, he’ll take a unifying deal that puts him in the No. 2 slot.”
Obama has downplayed the possibility of taking the vice presidential slot, but hasn’t totally ruled it out, and until he does, “doubts will remain about whether he has the stomach for what Hillary will drag him through,” writes Lowry, who adds:
“About this there can be no doubt: When Hillary said at the beginning of her campaign that she’s ‘in it to win it,’ she meant it.”
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