The Clash of the Alpha Females Comes Out of the Shadows (Part 3)

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi finally brought her subterannean campaign against U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton into the light today. In today's edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, Speaker Pelosi said "I will step in" if there is no resolution by late June regarding the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan, the two states that defied party rules by holding early primaries.

Speaker Pelosi's now frontal assualt on Senator Clinton is being waged in the name of "Democratic Party Unity," but is really rooted in her own ambition.After all, "There can be only one" Alpha Female in town, and Pelosi desperately wants to avoid her historical moment as first female U.S. House Speaker not to be upstaged by the first female U.S. President.

When the Speaker "steps in," it will be to attempt to bum rush the remaining uncommitted (cowardly) Superdelegates into supporting Barack Obama. It's no secret that her more ardent supporters support Senator Obama and the remanining uncommitted superdelegates who are U.S. House Democrats are afraid to endorse Senator Clinton out of fear of the Speaker.

Speaker Pelosi will also try to use her influence and statements to undermine the argument that sexism is the root of Senator Clinton's failure to win the Democratic Nomination. This would be false for two reasons: (1) managing to get elected by a majority of the 230+ House Democrats to the most powerful Constitutional position does not actually mean sexism doesn't exist, it just means Pelosi's a smart Pol (i.e., a female Speaker does not equal a lack of national sexism); (2) Just because a powerful female comes out and engineers things to benefit a man, does not mean that the man did not previously benefit from sexism.

Those are are just logical flaws in Pelosi's attempts to undermine the sexism argument. They don't even address her hidden agenda, which I discussed above and earlier (click on the Alpha Female tag below)

Clash of the Alpha Females (pt.2)

From Time Magazine's piece on the End of the dem nomination contest:

All that could change after the last two states, South Dakota and Montana, vote on June 3. That's the time party chairman Howard Dean, Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are expected to tell the superdelegates — about 300 of the roughly 800 delegates overall who have yet to commit — that it is time to make up their minds. Pelosi in particular is key, as more than 70 of those uncommitted superdelegates are House members. For many, holding back now is more a matter of principle than preference. "They don't want to be perceived as telling voters how to vote," says former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who is heading Obama's superdelegate effort.

Don't underestimate Pelosi's influence here. She'll come down hard for Obama for reasons I discussed here. Additionally, her position that the elected delegates should decide and the automatic delegatees shouldn't weigh in is completely slanted towards Obama, instead of being neutral as it is commonly portrayed.

The 70 uncommitted House Members mentioned above are all beholden to Speaker Pelosi for their House Committee assignments and leadership positions. Don't forget that Pelosi took Jane Harman's Intelligence Committee Chairmanship away from her because Harman disagreed with Pelosi on aspects of the War on Terror. ALL Democrats remember that and are afraid of that. For that reason, they won't go against Pelosi in order to stay in her good favor. The Obama supporters generally come from the rival pro-Hoyer (House Majority Leader) faction of the party.

Clash of the Alpha Females, p.2: Hillary Strikes Back

The competition to be the Alpha Female is well under way. Speaker Pelosi is now under attack from the Clinton campaign for her repeated assertion that the remaining uncommitted automatic delegates should discard their right to vote for their first choice and instead vote for whomever has the largest number of elected delegates.
This position is such an irritant to Senator Clinton's Presidential aspirations that financial backers of Senator and former President Clinton sent a letter to the Speaker asking her to avoid further public pronouncements along these lines. Implied by the "shakedown letter," as it has become known, is that the donors will cut off fundraising for and donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of Speaker Pelosi's House Democrats.

The Speaker's position is inconvenient for the Senator because if heeded, it would serve to ensure that Barack Obama (see article inset below) becomes the nominee even if his delegate lead shrinks to an insignificant number. Despite the Speaker's constant since early February (find cite)her repeated public pronouncements of it

Pelosi's Delegate Stance Boosts Obama
By DAVID ESPO – 2 days ago

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it would be damaging to the Democratic party for its leaders to buck the will of national convention delegates picked in primaries and caucuses, a declaration that gives a boost to Sen. Barack Obama.

"If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what's happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic party," Pelosi said in an interview taped Friday for broadcast Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

The California Democrat did not mention either Obama or his rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, by name. But her remarks seemed to suggest she was prepared to cast her ballot at the convention in favor of the candidate who emerges from the primary season with the most pledged delegates.

Obama leads Clinton by 142 pledged delegates — those delegates picked in nomination contests to date, in The Associated Press' count.

Barring an unlikely string of landslide victories by the former first lady in the remaining states, he will end the primary season with a delegate lead, but short of the 2025 needed to win the nomination.

That gives the balance of power to the so-called superdelegates, prominent Democrats who are automatically entitled to attend the convention because of their status as members of Congress or other leaders. Clinton leads Obama for their support in the AP count, 249-213.

Pelosi's comments could influence other House Democrats who are neutral in the presidential race and will attend the convention as superdelegates.

In her interview, Pelosi also said that even if one candidate winds up with a larger share of the popular vote than the delegate leader, the candidate who has more delegates should prevail.

"It's a delegate race," she said. "The way the system works is that the delegates choose the nominee."

More than 500 delegates remain to be picked in primaries beginning on April 22 in Pennsylvania, which has 158 at stake on April 22.

In addition, Democrats in Michigan and Florida are demanding to have their delegations seated, even though they moved up the dates of their primaries to January in defiance of Democratic National Committee rules.

Clinton said Saturday she supports an effort by Michigan Democratic leaders to hold a do-over primary in early June, but the Obama campaign has not yet said whether it will agree. A full delegation would give the state 128 pledged delegates, not counting superdelegates.

In Florida, a plan for a mail-in primary appears doomed, leaving two major possibilities if the state's Democrats are to participate in selecting a nominee.

One is for a full-scale primary.

The other is a negotiated agreement in which Obama and Clinton split the 185 pledged delegates that would have been awarded had the Jan. 29 primary counted.

One prominent official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there have been preliminary discussions among the state's House Democrats to see whether a compromise can be reached along those lines.

Clinton would have won 38 more delegates in the primary than Obama, had the primary results been used to award delegates, according to The Associated Press' calculations. Merely dividing the delegates evenly would leave Obama's delegate lead unchanged. Obama appeared to open the door to some sort of agreement earlier this week, when he spoke of a procedure "that doesn't advantage one candidate or another too much."

In Defense of Superdelegates: They Actually ARE Elected

It is a common meme in the MSM that superdelegates are unelected. That is not true.

First of all, the term superdelegate is a misnomer - they are more accuratey referred to as "automatic deleates." There are 796 superdelegates in the Democrat party. Approximately 230 of those are elected Members of the U.S. House of Representatives (I can't recall the exact make up right now), and another 50 are elected U.S. Senators. Therefore at least 280 of the 796 superdelegates are elected. They are just elected by their own states or Congressional Districts during federal elections.

Most of the remaining superdelegates are State Party National Committeemen, State Party National Committeewomen and State Party Chairs. These positions also are elected, abeit by the activist core of each state party. About the only "automatic delegates" who have never been elected to anything are the 54 Executive Directors of the state (and territorial) parties. The remaining automatic delegates are current and former party leaders in the U.S. House and Senate (i.e., Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt are both automatic delegates because they are previously elected leaders of their respective Congressional Caucuses), as well as a former Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. These last two categories are insignificant both percentage-wise and in absolute numbers.

Ergo, 742 of the so-called superdelegates actually are, elected to positions of leadership within their state parties, within the nation or within their respective Congressional caucuses. Given that over 90% of the automatic delegates ARE elected in some capacity, then the claims that they are somehow unrepresentative of the party is just plain B.S. (or lazy journalism).

Often overlooked is that the current presidential election cycle is the first time that the Republican Party has implemented automatic delegates. However, this number is limited to 200 some odd delegates consistin of the State Chairs, State Party National Committeemen, State Party National Committeewomen and State Party Executive Directors of the 54 states and territories. According to a GOP State National Committeewoman, the reason for this is that in the past these people, ironically, have sometimes not been elected as delegates due to their responsibilities within the state party interfering with their ability to compete for a delegate position.