Superdelegates are generally seen as seasoned elected officials or as the kind of party apparatchiks whose natural habitat is the figurative smoke-filled room.

Not everyone fits the stereotype. Among those who will help decide the Democratic contest is a 51-year-old office administrator and piano teacher in Dublin, Ireland, who has not lived in the U.S. for more than two decades and follows the race in large part through coverage in the Irish and British media.
Liv Gibbons, a native of Los Angeles, will cast her vote at her party’s convention in Denver for Barack Obama.  read more »

Officially, Hillary Clinton is as “in to win” as ever, ready to take her quest for the Democratic presidential nomination all the way to the party’s August convention in Denver.

“I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started,” she recently declared.  read more »

Responding to Jon Corzine's comments today indicating that he would consider switching his support to Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton if the Illinois Senator were to win the popular vote, Mark Penn said in today's Clinton conference call, "All superdelegates are going to look at this race, they are going to look at the popular vote including Michigan and Florida."

Penn's comment serves as an illustration of the increasingly selective metrics the Clinton campaign is trying to sell to superdelegates.  read more »

When you’ve got a 42-day gap between primaries, you’ve got to fill it with something. So now we’re talking about whether Hillary Clinton should drop out.

In reality, the Clinton-Obama contest has basically been frozen in place since Clinton’s March 4 mini-revival. Obama leads in the pledged delegate race and the popular vote race, and will almost certainly lead in both categories when the primary season wraps in early June. But his margins are close.  read more »

There’s this curious notion being circulated that just because Barack Obama has won “more votes” and “more states” and has earned “more delegates” than Hillary Clinton, he has a more legitimate claim to the Democratic nomination than Hillary Clinton.

But these metrics, as the Clinton campaign reminded reporters this week, are not the only data that can be relied upon to determine which candidate will have earned the Democratic nomination.  read more »

Steven Ybarra, a California superdelegate who heads the voting-rights committee of the DNC Hispanic Caucus, said that he would decide which candidate to support based solely on who would best deliver for Latinos.

"Which of these two candidates," he asked, "is going to step up to the plate and say, here is our $10 million and commit this money to making sure that Latinos get educated, that they get registered and that they turn out to vote."  read more »

It should come as no surprise that Democratic Party officials haven’t exactly been rallying to Hillary Clinton in her time of need.

While most Democratic voters remember Bill Clinton’s presidency with fondness, as the era of peace and prosperity and two straight wins in presidential elections, more than a few elected officials and Democratic leaders remember him as the selfish careerist who, time and again, threw them all under the bus.

Sure, he won reelection in 1996—the first Democrat to do so since Franklin Roosevelt—but at a steep price for the party.  read more »

Hillary Clinton held a conference call with top supporters and donors this morning to raise more money but also to reassure her most influential backers that they had sufficient resources to compete with Barack Obama in Texas and Ohio and March 4.

"It was a cheerleading call," said Paul Beirne, a prominent New York investment banker and one of Clinton's so-called Hillraisers.

According to Beirne, Clinton's message was upbeat.  read more »