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Before country, Obama must unify party

— Photo: AP

Barack Obama will have to find creative and interesting ways to reach out to Clinton voters.

So this is what party unity sounds like. Alice Huffman, a member of the Democratic party’s rules and bylaws committee, which met on Saturday to decide the fates of the Florida and Michigan delegations, was explaining herself. She had just sought to allow all of Florida’s delegates to vote at the Democratic convention in August, despite the disputed scheduling of the state’s presidential primary. But that motion failed, and she was explaining to her 29 fel low committee members and the rest of us in a Washington hotel why she was now — in the interest of party unity — going to support a second motion that would seat the delegation at half strength.

At the end of the evening, committee member Don Fowler leaned into his microphone to thank the co-chairs, James Roosevelt Jr and Alexis Herman. The Clinton supporters in the room, to put it mildly, did not share Mr. Fowler’s gratitude and made their disapproval known. But hey, Florida and Michigan are settled. The primaries held in defiance of party rules now count, or half-count. The bottom lines are these.

First: Hillary Clinton netted a gain of 24 delegates, 19 out of Florida and five out of Michigan. She was hoping for more than twice that. Second: as for the “magic number” — the number of delegates needed to clinch the nomination — forget the figure 2,026, which did not count the two States. The new magic number is 2,118 (or, according to some people, 2,117). Third: Barack Obama picked up 63 delegates in Saturday’s scrum. He now has 2,053 delegates and is 65 short of sewing up the nomination. Ms Clinton gained 87 delegates. She has 1,877, and is 241 delegates short. (This is pending the tally from June 1’s Puerto Rico vote — she was expected to win there and pick up another 10 or 12.) And fourth: the number of outstanding delegates is 291, meaning that Ms Clinton would have to persuade more than 80 per cent to throw their lot in with her.

The above numbers confirm what we have known, really, since mid-February. Barack Obama is going to be the Democratic standard bearer. So what have we been doing these past three-and-a-half months? On the plus side, we’ve been watching a very useful and necessary toughening of the nominee. Everything that’s happened since Wisconsin — the emergence of Jeremiah Wright, the flap over the “bitter” white working class, and so on — has constituted Mr. Obama’s trial by fire. We have also been hostage to the Clintons’ inability to come to grips with the fact that Hillary was going to lose. Her final descent into rancid demagoguery about Florida and Michigan, comparing them to Zimbabwe and likening the “cause” of seating the states at full strength to the civil rights movement was, for some observers, the last straw.

We have no idea whether the fuming Clinton partisans at Saturday’s meeting represent thousands or millions. But however many of them exist, the fact is that Ms Clinton worked them into this lather — Eve Fairbanks of the New Republic filed a stomach-turning report for her magazine’s website on some of the things said about Mr. Obama outside the hall — and Ms Clinton is responsible as things move forward for working them out of it. That means, for starters, ending her quest soon and letting her backers know that she’s not fighting on to the Denver convention.

But an even greater responsibility falls on Mr. Obama as the nominee. Losers have to be gracious, but winners have to be magnanimous. He needs to show that he takes the frustrations of Ms Clinton’s supporters seriously. And since it seems highly unlikely that he’ll offer her the vice-presidency, he’ll have to find creative and interesting ways to reach out to Clinton voters.

(Michael Tomasky is the editor of Guardian America) — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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