The Quad-City Times - News, Sports and more from the Quad Cities region or Iowa and Illinois

You are not logged in.
Login

Log in to qctimes.com
Email:
Password:
Remember my information.
Register
Site Help

Note to users: Technical difficulties are causing some comments to not appear. We appreciate your patience as we work on it.

Democratic senators still hesitate to commit

Font Size:

Default font size

Larger font size

By David Broder | Monday, May 12, 2008 2:05 AM CDT | () comments

WASHINGTON — Three days after last Tuesday’s primaries seemingly tilted the Democratic presidential nomination decisively toward Barack Obama, the surprising fact was that almost half the party’s senators had not announced a choice between him and Hillary Clinton. Twenty-one of the 49 Democratic senators were publicly silent as the last six primaries approached.

Those senators, along with most other Democrats, desperately want the race to be over so the winner can start focusing on John McCain. But Dick Durbin understands their reluctance to step forward ahead of the other 200-odd uncommitted superdelegates who have the power to bring this marathon to an end.

As Senate majority whip, charged with rounding up votes on all the major issues, he knows their psychology well. “They want to avoid hard votes,” Durbin told me at midweek, referring to his colleagues. “They want to be spared controversy. Most of them are looking for certainty, for inevitability, before they commit.”

Durbin, who encouraged his fellow Illinoisan to run, said he thought Tuesday’s results — an Obama landslide in North Carolina and a narrow loss in Indiana — should be enough to meet the “inevitability” standard.

But the ranks of the uncommitted did not thin significantly. The question is: What is the cost at this point of delaying Obama’s triumph?

The answer you hear from Obama’s headquarters is that the time lag from May 6 to June 3, the last day of voting, is not much of a problem, so long as Clinton does not use it mainly to point out his weaknesses. The lateness of the convention — not until the final week of August — leaves enough time to heal the intra-party wounds and plan the general election campaign.

That said, there is still a price to be paid for letting the nomination campaign drag on.

At the most personal level, it denies Obama the rest he badly needs.

Beyond that, the iron law of politics is that time lost can never be completely recovered. Since McCain effectively cinched his nomination back in February and mostly fell out of the news, he has accomplished a lot. He has targeted potential constituencies with appearances and messages tailored for them, knowing that other voters probably are not paying attention. One week recently he was hanging out with civil rights heroes and hurricane victims. Another, he was courting conservative critics of the judiciary and plugging for more business tax cuts.

Obama needs to do similar work, but because the nomination fight goes on, he doesn’t have the time or relative obscurity to do it. To take but one example, primary results all across the country have shown he is a stranger to many Latinos. If Clinton weren’t still challenging, he could easily devote a week to a swing through Hispanic enclaves from California to New York.

History says that the earlier a candidate nails down his nomination, the better his chances of winning. I saw that vividly demonstrated in 1968.

I certainly hope that Obama’s path is not marked by the violence, riots and other calamities that undid the Democrats in 1968. But those supercautious superdelegates ought to understand how precious time is in every campaign.

Contact David Broder at davidbroder@washpost.com.