Clinton: All The Way to Denver

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Sen. Clinton gave a pretty astonishing interview to the Washington Post in which she appears to say she will stay in the race till the convention in August, where she will take her fight to the credentials committee to have the delegates from the non-sanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries seated.

The convention of course starts on August 25th, roughly five months from now.

The key quote from the interview is this one: “I know there are some people who want to shut this down and I think they are wrong. I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next 10 contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan. And if we don’t resolve it, we’ll resolve it at the convention — that’s what credentials committees are for.”

So she’s promising to remain in the race at least until June 3rd when the final contests are held in Montana and South Dakota and until Florida and Michigan are ‘resolved’. Now, that can have no other meaning than resolved on terms the Clinton campaign finds acceptable. It can’t mean anything else since, of course, at least officially, for the Democratic National Committee, it is resolved. The penalty was the resolution.

The Obama campaign has always been willing to ‘resolve’ the matter by splitting those states’ delegates down the middle. But of course that’s something the Clinton campaign can never accept since splitting them down the middle is the same as not counting them at all. It leaves both campaigns right where the started, i.e., with him ahead and her behind.

That leaves two real possibilities: seat the non-sanctioned January primary delegates or hold the primaries again, a revote.

I don’t know many people who’ve ever thought possibility one was going to happen. And the consensus seems to be that the time window on possibility two has closed (though it’s not completely clear to me why it couldn’t be reopened if everyone agreed they wanted to do it.) So that really does sound like she’s saying she wants to take this to the credentials committee at the convention at the end of August, regardless of the outcome of the next ten primaries and caucuses.

So there it is. Since neither side now seems to think revotes are likely and the Obama campaign and the DNC will never agree to seat the delegates from the non-sanctioned primaries, Sen. Clinton seems to be saying pretty clearly that she plans on taking her campaign all the way to Denver.

By saying she’ll continue through the remaining ten contests, regardless of the outcome, and implicitly, I take it, regardless of any superdelegate declarations over the next two months, Sen. Clinton is saying it’s no longer about pledged delegates, or superdelegates or popular votes. It’s about Florida and Michigan. Period.

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