So where is Bernie's campaign getting the idea that they can get Hillary's superdelegates? Just because he's a couple points ahead of Trump in the polls?
Or are they just seriously delusional?
They're obviously out of touch with reality.
If he ignored superdelegates at this point he'd be essentially admitting defeat, which would cause many of his supporters not to vote. He wants as many delegates as possible to maximize his influence for platform/process changes at the convention, so he needs to keep up the charade.
If he's still saying it after June 7th, then we know he is delusional and has gone off the deep end. At that point it would be time for Obama/Biden and the rest of the party to bring down the hammer. I doubt it will come to that though.
That's a good point. It's easy to forget how little of the party apparatus has actually come out for Hillary. Obama and Biden haven't stayed out of the race because they were too busy going sunglasses shopping. They wanted to make Bernie's inevitable defeat seem as fair as possible to try to prevent exactly what's happening right now from happening. In that sense, they really ought to just endorse now and get it over with, since Bernie's doggedly determined to stir up chaos and convince everyone the process was rigged against him regardless of reality. But if he doesn't have the decency to drop out and endorse Hillary after June 7, we're going to see Obama, Hillary, and Pelosi give Bernie a royal smackdown from on high.
Yeah, very true. Despite all the hype about how the process was "rigged", the reality is that the party has for the most part gone out of its way to be fair to him. Hillary and her surrogates rarely attack him viciously and for the most part use kid gloves, usually complimenting him but quibbling about his voting record or naiveity. Even when his campaign got more negative in the later stages they rarely went after him with the intensity establishment allies of both Clinton and Obama in 08 went after each other.
In fact, he has never had a single negative ad run against him. Hardly anybody has called for him to drop out of the race, yet many people in the Democratic establishment were calling for Hillary to drop out in 08 because she was "hurting the party" or whatever. This despite the fact that she arguably won the popular vote and was much closer in delegates than Bernie is. Oh, and two entire states were disenfranchised in 2008 because of muh arbitrary dates, one of which was a strong huge Hillary state and another of which would've been very competitive. Imagine if the DNC disenfranchised, say...Washington and Illinois this year. Then they'd see REAL unfairness.
It's not like the DNC took any measures to strangle the Sanders campaign in its infancy, and despite the protestations of the whiners, plenty of those methods would've been available if they truly wanted to go scorched earth. If they really wanted hardball, they could've done so. For instance, they could've used technicalities to even prevent him from running in the first place due to the fact that he wasn't a registered Democrat. Hillary and her surrogates could've viciously attacked him as a communist, far left fringe candidate, bringing up the rape essays, kind words for foreign dictators, his wife's work at Burlington College, and all the other stuff that was in that Slate article (Bernie is luckily he won't get to the general, Trump will never get the opportunity to destroy his image.) It wasn't hard to see even early on that Bernie would do well in caucuses. The DNC could've had a change of heart and decided they wouldn't reward such undemocratic contests, and either force all states to adopt a primary or risk getting no delegates or their delegates cut in half. Obama and Biden could've put their entire weight into crushing him once he started to look like a threat. Remember the data breach? They could've revoked his access permanently, instead they let him off with a warning. If the Hillary campaign had done something like that, the media would have literally been invoking Watergate.
Really, the only two things where the party was "in the tank" for her was the superdelegates declaring their support for her en masse and the debate schedule. The former which will be irrelevant in the end, and the latter which is actually ironic due to the fact that she performed very well in most of the debates.
