Time's Up Superdelegates: Obama or Clinton?

This is the message from DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Pencils down. Is that your final answer? Via CNN:

An increasingly firm Howard Dean told CNN again Thursday that he needs superdelegates to say who they're for--and "I need them to say who they're for starting now."

"We cannot give up two or three months of active campaigning and healing time," the Democratic National Committee Chairman told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "We've got to know who our nominee is."

If Dean has shown us anything over the course of this election cycle--and readers of this column have varying opinions on the subject--it's that he means what he says. So it appears that he is not going to let the campaign linger on until August. No, a mile-high Credentials Committee won't be the thing to decide this thing.

Once again, this is bad news for Hillary Clinton.

For the past month, Clinton has worked hard to convince superdelegates that she, not Barack Obama, is the viable Democratic candidate. Her argument is simple: Plagued with too much baggage (Pastor Wright, flag pin, Weather Underground, the "bitter" comment, Tony Rezko), Obama will be grist for the Republican mill. So, she has done her level best to argue that the supers should swoop in and overturn the popular vote and delegate count that stand in Obama's favor, and anoint her as party savior. This strategy was epitomized in Wednesday night's Philadelphia debate, during which Clinton meticulously addressed the concerns about Obama's chances in the general, before giving the whole game away when asked point-blank whether or not Obama could win. Her answer? Yes he can.

From the IHT/NYT, however, we learn that Clinton's efforts at swaying the undecided big-wigs, have fallen somewhat flat:

But although Clinton gave it her best shot in what might have been their final debate, interviews on Thursday with a cross-section of these superdelegates--members of Congress, elected officials and party leaders--showed that none had been persuaded much by her attacks on Obama's strength as a potential Democratic nominee, his recent gaffes and his relationship with his former pastor and with a onetime member of the Weather Underground.

In fact, the Obama campaign announced endorsements from two more superdelegates on Thursday, after rolling out three on Wednesday and two others since late last week in what appeared to be an orchestrated show of strength before Tuesday's Pennsylvania primary.

Every day, it seems we hear of another superdelegate going Obama's way. Today it's Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's former Secretary of Labor, and the author of a pretty fine blog devoted to economic matters. An old friend of the Clintons, Reich's decision was not, in case you were wondering, prompted by pressure from Howard Dean. No, it seems that what caused him to get off the sidelines was Hillary's mode of attack. From New York Magazine:

"I saw the ads"--the negative man-on-the-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama's bitter/cling comments a week ago--"and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It's the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness, and negativity. The second is taking out of context something that your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And the third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign."

This sums up the way a lot of us feel about Hillary Clinton. Her wounds are largely self-inflicted. Is she qualified to be Commander-in-Chief? Absolutely. She's incredibly smart, and has an admirable record in the Senate. When it comes to policy, she bested Barack Obama in the final debate. In others, she was bested by him. I agree with the bulk of her ideas, just as I do with Obama's. In many ways, this decision might have been made by a flip of the coin. What it really came down to was a question of style, since both candidates have the substance.

So, the question today, given Dean's throw-down, is whether or not we can gage the behavior of the remaining 250 undecided superdelegates based on the recent behavior of their brethren. If we can, then it's over for Clinton. If those fence-sitters buck the current trend, then Hillary's "Candle in the Wind" may stay lit for a while longer yet.