Obama's delegates: California dreamin'

If you think this election season has been out of control, you ain't seen nothing yet! Are you ready for today's civics lesson? Good! Today we'll examine California's system of electing delegates to attend the Democratic Convention this summer. You probably thought California voters already did that, right? No, silly, it has to be much more complicated than that, because if you really understood how our election process worked, you'd be storming the Bastille! From The RawStory:

Party caucuses scheduled for Sunday will elect a slate of delegates for each candidate — 134 for Clinton and 107 for Obama, for a total of 241. More than 2,000 candidates are running statewide.

So in the California primary, voters gave Clinton 134 seats at the convention, and Obama 107. Who will be sitting in those seats will be decided in yet another vote this Sunday. And here's where the fun begins. Yesterday, it turned out that the Obama camp had purged almost a thousand names from the list of potential delegates. And most of those names were "progressives," the kind of people who work for causes and issues rather than for candidates. The kind of people who could potentially be swayed on the convention floor.

Earlier this week, Obama's and Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign took advantage of party rules to purge scores of potential delegates in a bid to ensure that only their loyalists travel to the August convention in Denver where the party will anoint a presidential nominee.

Most of the cuts, about 900 names, were dropped by Obama, leading supporters to complain that they had been unfairly excluded. Clinton's campaign dropped about 50 names from its list of prospective delegates.

There was much unhappiness in the land of Obama! Supporters blogged with stories like Obama Slashes and Burns Through the Delegate List, and even the Obama lovin' Huffington Post ran this story: Obama's "Big Tent" Campaign Cuts Out the Little People in California.

That's pretty bad when Huffington Post gets on the bandwagon. But Obama's team has seemingly realized how dangerous it just might be to piss off the hardworking campaign staffers in the field, and so we have this:

Obama reinstates Callif. delegates

Facing a backlash from supporters, Barack Obama's presidential campaign reversed course Thursday and reinstated hundreds of people to lists that will be used to choose California's delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

Campaign manager David Plouffe said in a letter to potential delegates that all names would be restored to ballots that will be used Sunday to elect the delegates, overturning the earlier decision. The letter did not refer to the complaints.

Driven by fears that some prospective delegates might be concealing their true allegiances, the campaigns searched campaign finance data, scoured the Internet and made telephone calls to weed out people they believed to be dubious candidates.

Excuse me, but my Cynic-o-meter just short-circuited. The candidate of change looks like he's bringing old-style Chicago politics to the national stage ....

Dept. of Fuzzy Math

The Obama campaign has been helpfully doing the math for anyone who will listen, showing that Hillary Clinton cannot win enough delegates to secure the Democratic nomination. What they're not saying, though, is that neither can he. According to CNN, the current delegate tally stands at:

Obama: 1,520
Clinton: 1,424

Remember, it takes 2,025 delegates to win the Democratic nomination. Basically, at this point neither one can win the nomination without the super delegates. The role of the super delegates is to use their own best judgment to vote for a nominee. That is what makes the m different from the pledged delegates. I understand the emotion behind those who would argue that super delegates should follow "the will of the people," but that's not their mandate. That's the role of the pledged delegates. Maybe we should get rid of the super delegates in the future, but I don't think we should force them to change the basis of their vote in this election, not at this point.

And next up, folks, is the Electoral College! That's right. There's some mighty fuzzy math coming out of the Obama camp concerning this issue, as well. From RealClearPolitics:

Add up all the states he has won in his historic drive to become the nominee, including all of those small and deeply "red" Republican states where the Obama supporters boast of their candidate's transcendental appeal, and so far Obama has won in places representing 193 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Add up Clinton's victories thus far and she has triumphed in states representing 263 electoral votes.

Of course, some states in Clinton's column -- Texas comes most readily to mind -- that have a large trove of Electoral College votes are highly unlikely to wind up Democratic in the fall. But the same holds true for Obama, whose strength in southern Democratic primaries has rested on the huge margins he has run up among African-American voters. African-Americans are a crucial constituency for Democrats, but their votes in recent contests haven't been enough to win such states as Alabama, South Carolina or Georgia.

So how has Obama fared in those states that are the crucial building blocks of a Democratic general election strategy? He's won his home state of Illinois, plus Wisconsin, Washington and Minnesota. Together, these states account for 51 electoral votes. Clinton has won her home state of New York, as well as California, New Jersey and Michigan, representing a total of 118 electoral votes. This sum deliberately leaves out Ohio and Florida, which will be hotly contested in the fall.

There is no papering over the depth of the problem Obama faced there. He won only five of the state's 88 counties, an inauspicious foundation for a general election campaign. Clinton trounced him among Catholic voters, 63 percent-36 percent, according to exit polls. She beat him among voters in every income category and bested him by 14 points among those making less than $50,000 annually.

This is why Pennsylvania, which is demographically similar to Ohio -- and a must-win state for Democrats in November -- is considered such fertile ground for Clinton on April 22.

The Democratic Party is indeed developing a general election problem, and it's only partly because Obama and Clinton will be sniping at one another for the next seven weeks. Obama, the leading candidate, still hasn't shown he has appeal in a large battleground state that will be pivotal in the fall. In this sense, Pennsylvania is where Obama's back, and not Clinton's, is up against the wall.

Don't write her off just yet: Clinton ahead in delegate count

One positive effect of this election year is that more Americans seem to be learning about how our electoral system works than in any previous campaign. For a variety of reasons, more people are engaged in the process, and that's got to be good.

So you probably learned a lot about how the Iowa caucuses work, (and the fact that the Republican and Democratic ones run differently). Now we gear up for the New Hampshire primary tomorrow, January 8. It's hard to avoid hearing the latest polls, but in case you didn't know, most of the current polls show Barack Obama with a double-digit lead ahead of Hillary Clinton. But don't write off Clinton just yet. She already has more than twice the number of delegates as Obama:

Number of Delegates as of January 3:
Clinton: 169
Obama: 66
Edwards: 47

If you're making that Scooby Doo sound now (huuunhh?), you've forgotten this is just the nomination process. CNN has a nice summary of how it works:

• There are currently 4,049 total delegates to the Democratic National Convention, including 3,253 pledged delegates and 796 superdelegates. The total number of delegate votes needed to win the nomination is 2,025.
• Superdelegates in the Democratic Party are typically members of the Democratic National Committee, elected officials like senators or governors, or party leaders. They do not have to indicate a candidate preference and do not have to compete for their position. If a superdelegate dies or is unable to participate at the convention, alternates do not replace that delegate, which would reduce the total delegates number and the "magic number" needed to clinch the nomination.

The delegate count for the Republicans is much closer:
Romney: 26
Huckabee: 20
Thompson: 6

• There are currently 2,380 total delegates to the Republican National Convention, including 1,917 pledged delegates and 463 unpledged delegates. The total number of delegate votes needed to win the nomination is 1,191.
• Unpledged delegates in the Republican Party do not have to indicate a candidate preference, but a majority are elected just like pledged delegates. Of the 463 unpledged delegates, 123 are RNC members who become delegates automatically.

And that's today's fix for all you political junkies out there. Perhaps another day we'll take on the Electoral College ....