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Clinton, Obama Supporters Wrangle Over Delegates    â€¢
Kerry Urges Superdelegates to Pick Before July    â€¢

     Washington - Democratic Party chief Howard Dean says Barack Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and their supporters should beware of tearing each other down, demoralizing the base and damaging the party's chances of winning the White House in November.

     In an interview with The Associated Press, Dean also said he hopes the Democratic nominee will be determined shortly after the voting ends in early June and that he will encourage the superdelegates who will play a role to make up their minds before the August convention in Denver.

     Dean said the charges and countercharges between Clinton and Obama have gotten too personal at times. He declined to say how they have crossed the line, but he said he's made it clear privately when it has happened.

     "You do not want to demoralize the base of the Democratic Party by having the Democrats attack each other," he said Thursday during the interview in his office at Democratic National Committee headquarters. "Let the media and the Republicans and the talking heads on cable television attack and carry on, fulminate at the mouth. The supporters should keep their mouths shut about this stuff on both sides because that is harmful to the potential victory of a Democrat."

     Superdelegates - the nearly 800 party and elected officials who can support whomever they choose at the convention, regardless of what happens in the primaries - should make up their minds before August to avoid a fight at the convention, Dean said.

     "There is no point in waiting," he said. The Democratic political organization "is as good or better as the Republicans,' and we haven't been able to say that for about 30 years. But that all doesn't make any difference if people are really disenchanted or demoralized by a convention that's really ugly and nasty."

     Dean commented during a wide-ranging, 40-minute interview about his leadership during a nominating season that has lasted longer than most expected and that has left the party with some tough issues to resolve. Among them:

• Florida and Michigan Democrats brazenly violated party rules by holding primaries ahead of schedule and lost their delegates to the convention as punishment. Both states are now demanding that they not be shut out of the decision-making process because of it.

• Since neither Clinton nor Obama are likely to secure the nomination with just the delegates won in the primaries and caucuses, the nominee will probably be determined by the superdelegates. That has some activists objecting that insiders could overturn the will of the voters.

• Dean has raised record amounts of money - the $51.5 million the DNC brought in in 2007 was a record for a non-election year. And he's spent it, too, on trying to build organizations in the 50 states. Campaign finance reports this month show the party with $4.5 million after accounting for debt, compared with $25 million for the Republican National Committee - and the Democrats have no nominee to help replenish the coffers.

• Not to mention that Clinton's and Obama's campaigns spend every day trying to tear each other down - and are unlikely to stop anytime soon - while Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the certain Republican nominee, is busy preparing for the general election. Even Dean said he doesn't expect the campaign to end until the last nominating contest is held in June.

     Dean, the former governor of Vermont and 2004 presidential candidate, said he knows his critics say he should take a bigger leadership role in resolving some of these disputes. But he said that's not his role. Rather, he thinks of himself as a referee who enforces the rules in a close basketball game.

     "Somebody is going to lose," Dean said. "My job is to make sure the person who loses feels like they have been treated fairly so that their supporters will support the winner."

     But former Michigan Gov. James Blanchard said the DNC has handled the situation badly.

     "They have put their rules ahead of common sense, of electing a Democratic president, of the voters in two major states," Blanchard, a Clinton supporter, said during the taping of Michigan public television's "Off the Record" program. "They're treating the rules like they're the U.S. Constitution or the Ten Commandments. They've lost their way."

     Dean said the massive numbers of people showing up to participate in Democratic nominating contests across the country gives him encouragement that the eventual nominee will be well-positioned to win the White House.

     He said it is good for the candidates to debate controversies like the incendiary sermons by Obama's pastor and Clinton's different accounts of danger on a trip to Bosnia as first lady. If Democrats didn't deal with them now, he said Republicans will surely make use of them in the fall.

     Dean also reflected the concerns of many Democrats who worry about Obama and Clinton tearing each other down.

     "What I don't want to do is have the Democrats make a stupid mistake in April and then be sorry they said that in October and end up with some more right-wing extremists on the Supreme Court," he said.

     Dean's supporters say he's working behind the scenes to resolve some of the issues. He's been consulting with party stalwarts about how to wrap up the nomination quickly after the voting ends in June, including former Vice President Al Gore, former presidential candidate John Edwards, former Sen. George Mitchell, former President Carter, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, civil rights activist Jesse Jackson and former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo.

     "There'll be some nasty fights if it goes to convention, and people will walk out," Dean said. "But I've also been talking to a fairly significant number of, by and large, nonaligned people about how we might resolve this."

     Dean wouldn't talk in detail about what the plan is, but it likely involves encouraging superdelegates to pick a candidate shortly after the voting ends. He said he will not encourage any delegate to vote one way or another.

     "I am going to stand up for the rules, and I know I'm doing the right thing most of the time because I've got both Clinton people and Obama people mad at me," he said.

     For instance, while Obama's campaign has been encouraging superdelegates to support the candidate with the most pledged delegates - which almost certainly will be Obama - Dean says the rules don't require that and superdelegates are free to chose who they want.

     On the other side, Clinton has been arguing lately that even pledged delegates - awarded to a candidate based on the outcome of state contests - aren't bound to vote for that candidate at the convention. Dean called that "a very technical argument."

     "You aren't going to get pledged delegates to move unless something really shocking happens," he said. And he thinks it unlikely the superdelegates would support a candidate who did not have the most pledged delegates.

     Dean also said the Michigan and Florida delegates will be seated at the convention. But he won't force a resolution because he said there's nothing the Obama and Clinton campaigns can support at this point.

     "You bring both sides together and say, 'Don't you think it's time that the two campaigns made a deal on how we're going to do this?'" Dean said. "Let me just say that the campaigns believe that kind of a deal is premature right now."

    --------

    Associated Press Writer Kathy Barks Hoffman in Lansing, Mich., contributed to this report.

    Go to Original

    Clinton, Obama Supporters Wrangle Over Delegates
    By Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten
    The Los Angeles Times

    Sunday 30 March 2008

The acrimony is evident at district conventions in Texas this weekend, with each side accusing the other of underhandedness.

     Houston - Less than a month ago, Texas Democrats turned out in huge numbers for the presidential nominating contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, confident that, no matter who won, the party would have a popular, well-financed candidate.

     But that exuberance is gone now.

     Across the state this weekend, tense confrontations - even shoving matches - erupted as partisans for Clinton and Obama battled over how to interpret the March 4 election results and how to choose delegates to the Texas Democratic convention.

     At one particularly raucous session Saturday at Texas Southern University, a leading Clinton backer, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, was booed by hundreds of Obama supporters, and police were called later to break up heated exchanges that left some in tears.

     "It's bedlam," said Houston lawyer Daniel J. Shea, a Clinton backer.

     Democrat-on-Democrat clashes over delegates have been playing out in Iowa, Colorado, Florida and other states - the latest indication that the feel-good nomination race of the era has veered into a political ditch.

     The contentious battle in Texas shows the high cost of this unending campaign. To hold his delegate lead, Obama has kept a team of 65 paid organizers and lawyers in the state this month, while Clinton has 45.

     As the feud rages - even in states that voted weeks or months ago - each side has its own game plan for victory. For Obama, it means highlighting his lead in delegates to the party's national convention in Denver. For Clinton, it means lengthening the campaign so that she can use every tactic to narrow her delegate deficit and to win upcoming primaries in her bid to raise doubts about Obama's electability in the fall.

     The candidates have also become far more combative, and that hostility has party leaders worried. In a year that looked to be a Democratic romp, Obama and Clinton are burning money, erasing goodwill and eviscerating each other's reputation while the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, prepares to kick off his general-election campaign with a nationwide tour designed to highlight of military and congressional experience. On Saturday, Clinton told the Washington Post that she was prepared to take her campaign all the way to the party convention in August.

     "This thing has turned from being an adventure to being a grind," said Robert M. Shrum, a Democratic strategist who managed John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign.

     Polls published last week showed some of the dangers: McCain has gained ground against both Democrats, and at least 20% of each Democratic candidate's supporters now say they would consider abandoning the party in November if their candidate is not the nominee.

     The potential for anger is more pronounced - and the consequences more dire - than in most campaigns because this contest is being waged along the fault lines of gender and race, with the would-be first female president versus the would-be first black president.

     That was starkly evident Saturday at one convention in Houston, where mostly white Clinton supporters repeatedly challenged the credentials of black Obama backers in a heavily black district that had voted overwhelmingly for Obama. Democratic leaders, who had been thrilled by the massive turnout in early-voting states, now fear the consequences not only in the presidential race but also in state and local ones.

     "When you have a divided party, I think it hurts you up and down the ticket," said Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, who said his party cannot afford to lose seats in an evenly divided state Senate and a state House controlled by a narrow Democratic majority. "Somebody who's mad enough at one of the candidates to want to vote for John McCain is more likely to [vote] down that side of the ballot."

     Bredesen has circulated a plan to stave off a potentially divisive national nominating convention in August by holding a "primary" earlier this summer among the nearly 800 superdelegates - the party's elected officials, leaders and activists - whose votes could decide the race and forestall the type of delegate fights now unfolding in Texas.

     Another party elder, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, proposed Saturday that Clinton and Obama avert a "disaster" by agreeing to share the ticket, with the delegate winner running for president and the loser for vice president.

     "If, on the other hand, the candidates refuse to work out a way to keep both constituencies firmly in the Democratic camp for the general election," Cuomo wrote in the Boston Globe, "the 2008 primary may be the story of a painfully botched grand opportunity to return our nation to the upward path and [instead] leave us mired in Iraq and government mediocrity."

     Such concern prompted one prominent U.S. senator, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, an Obama supporter, to call Friday for Clinton to step aside, while Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean urged the candidates to find a resolution by July.

     The acrimony was on sharp display Saturday in Texas as Democrats met in 280 district conventions, part of the complicated system the state uses to determine the makeup of its delegation to the national convention.

     Clinton won the primary in Texas, but Obama won the caucuses that followed after the polls closed. It was those caucus results that were being challenged Saturday at conventions that drew thousands of boisterous participants.

     Even after Saturday, individual delegates can still be challenged. The count will not be secured until the state party convention in early June, and possibly not even then.

     While party leaders openly fret about the potential harm in the November election, the ongoing battles in Texas and other states come with political benefits for Clinton - particularly in states that held caucuses in which Obama was far more successful.

     Not only do Clinton aides believe that scrutinizing the caucus process can help them squeeze out more delegates, due to math or certification errors, but they believe that a drumbeat of complaints about the caucuses bolsters Clinton's argument to superdelegates that they are not as legitimate as primary elections. In addition, the fighting delays the official delegate count, which helps keep Obama's lead from growing too fast and gives Clinton more time to raise questions about his electability.

     Both the Clinton and Obama teams encouraged supporters to get to Saturday's conventions amid reports that dirty-trick e-mails told delegates the conventions had been canceled or moved. Thousands of Texas households received a recorded phone call from former President Bill Clinton reminding delegates of the importance of attending.

     Definitive results were not available Saturday evening from the often chaotic district conventions. Nonetheless, both campaigns declared victory. Clinton field organizer Michael Trujillo said preliminary results showed a likely two-delegate shift toward Clinton, thanks to successful challenges in southern and rural Texas. The Obama campaign said Saturday's conventions confirmed that Obama still had the overall lead in the Texas delegation.

     During the day, supporters of both candidates said they were disturbed by what they considered intimidation and cheap tricks from the other side.

     Valerie Zavala, 38, said that as soon as she identified herself as a Clinton supporter, Obama backers demanded to know why she had even bothered showing up. "There's a lot of hostility," she said. "I see a lot of tension."

     Adib Faafir, an Obama supporter, suspected that trickery by Clinton backers had blocked his chance of participating. He held up his cellphone to show a text message telling him to show up for the convention at a local school miles from the actual location. By the time he arrived at the correct address, he was out of luck.

     "Only two of the people from my precinct have showed up, and they wouldn't let me register," he said.

     The Clinton campaign had announced last week that it would not be officially challenging delegates. But behind the scenes, Clinton staff encouraged and counseled individuals in the challenge process.

     Each side accused the other of gaming the system to its advantage.

     Trujillo didn't bother with diplomatic niceties, charging that the "abundance of pure cheating from the Obama side escapes the imagination."

     Obama's top field organizer, Temo Figueroa, said it was Clinton who had created the prospect of a nominating fight lasting to the convention, a nightmare for party leaders.

     "The new rules are that she is not going to quit," he said. "She is going to fight over every single delegate, and the fight may go to the last vote and the last delegate."

    Go to Original

    Kerry Urges Superdelegates to Pick Before July
    By Klaus Marre
    The Hill

    Sunday 30 March 2008

     Sen. John Kerry (Mass.), the last Democratic presidential candidate and a strong supporter of Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), on Sunday urged his party's superdelegates to make their choice so that the winner of the primary can focus on beating presumptive GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) in the fall.

     Kerry expressed a strong belief that the battle between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) will "resolve itself," but he noted that time is a factor.

     "I think that the superdelegates ought to decide early. I would even say earlier than July," Kerry said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos. "As a former nominee, I will tell you, this time right now is critical to us."

     In a week in which two prominent supporters of the Illinois senator, Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) have suggested Clinton should drop out of the race, Kerry said it is not up to the Obama campaign to tell the former first lady to end her pursuit of the nomination. However, the 2004 nominee indicated that he believes that there will be a "consensus about it, and I think it's going to occur over these next weeks."

     Appearing with Kerry was Clinton supporter and Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), who argued to let the primary process end before deciding on a nominee. In addition, he argued that Clinton would be the winner of the popular vote if Michigan and Florida would be allowed to revote.

     Victories by the former first lady in the two key states, which had the results of their January primaries voided because they had violated Democratic National Committee rules by moving up too far in the calendar, would "undercut the whole theme of the Obama campaign," Rendell said.

     Both Democrats displayed some concern that a negative tone in the campaign would hurt the eventual nominee.

     "The important thing is to be fighting against John McCain and not to be destructive in this campaign, either campaigns," Kerry said. "It is very important for both people to keep the eye on the real target - John McCain and the Republican disaster of the last seven and a half years."

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