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Democrats worry about deadlock
10/03/2008 11:10 - (SA)
Washington - Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton prepared on Monday for their next skirmish in Mississippi as Democratic bosses grew rattled about where their presidential nomination war was headed.
Obama, bidding to be the first African-American president, is tipped to win most of the Magnolia State's 33 delegates on Tuesday after defeating the former first lady by a landslide in Wyoming on Saturday.
Recent polls have given the Illinois senator anything from a six- to 24-point edge in Mississippi, where more than half of Democratic voters are black.
While Obama was to address supporters at two campaign stops in Mississippi on Monday, Clinton headed to the much bigger battleground of Pennsylvania, a blue-collar state whose 158 delegates will be up for grabs on April 22.
The New York senator campaigned in Mississippi at the end of last week and, like Obama, promised to help rebuild communities obliterated by Hurricane Katrina in mid-2005.
"We do not yet have the level of response and urgency that a national disaster which turned into a national disgrace deserves," she said on Friday.
'Dream ticket' talk
Talk of a "dream ticket" has intensified as the Democrats stare at deadlock between their brightest electoral stars all the way through to the party's August nominating convention in Denver.
But Obama is the front-runner with a lead of about 100 delegates, and is in no mood to bargain with his rival from New York at a time when their aides are escalating a war of words.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic standard-bearer in 2004 who is backing Obama, noted that Clinton's campaign was ridiculing Obama's capacity to take on Republican John McCain for the post of commander-in-chief.
"On the other hand, they're saying maybe he ought to be vice-president. You can't have the argument both ways," he told CBS on Sunday. "That's exactly the politics that Barack Obama is running to change."
Party grandees are sparring over whether to bring Florida and Michigan in from political purgatory, after the two states were punished for advancing their primaries into January.
Clinton will find it virtually impossible to overhaul Obama's delegate lead in the 11 contests still to come. Even with Florida and Michigan in play, neither Democrat can reach the winning line of 2 025 delegates.
But Clinton's campaign is furiously lobbying "superdelegates" with the argument that she has won the biggest states so far and, with Florida and Michigan included, is ahead in the popular vote by about 32 000 ballots.
Democratic National Committee chairperson Howard Dean urged the two pariah states to come up a solution in line with DNC rules to get their 313 elected delegates reinstated.
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