Clinton’s only road to nomination may tear party asunder

With defeats in last night’s Hawaii and Wisconsin primaries, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., is left in a very bad position.

Clinton has staked her presidential campaign on wins in the Texas and Ohio primaries, which will be held on March 4. By the time those states vote, Clinton could well be down about 150 pledged delegates in the race for the presidency. It will be all but impossible for her to make up that gap, even with a big victory in those two states and a big win six weeks later in Pennsylvania. Even if everything breaks Clinton’s way — she wins 60 percent of the delegates in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, wins all the remaining states save North Carolina, where she pulls out a surprise tie, gets every possible bit of luck — Clinton would still trail Obama by a few pledged delegates.

Given that, it’s only natural for the Clinton campaign to see if there’s any possible way to win. And there is. The only problem is that it could tear the party apart.

If Clinton is close, she can appeal first to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, states stripped of their voting rights for moving their primaries up too early. Clinton won both, but with an asterisk: Clinton was the only major candidate on the ballot in Michigan, and none of the major candidates actively campaigned in either state.  Both states could well be seated, but only if they won’t make a difference in the outcome. If Sen. Barack Obama has a 200-delegate lead, they’ll be seated. If Hillary Clinton somehow gets a delegate lead, they’ll be seated. Otherwise, they probably won’t.

That will force Clinton to rely on superdelegates, party elders and pooh-bahs who make up 795 of the 4,048 delegates at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton will have to ask them to do something drastic: ignore the winner of the pledged delegates, and anoint her instead.

Oh, the Clinton campaign rationalizes that it would be asking superdelegates to do no such thing. Some Clinton supporters have crunched exit poll numbers to suggest that maybe Clinton has received more votes than Obama from registered Democrats. Obama has received more votes overall, they say, but they’re not the right kind of votes.

The Clinton campaign has also argued that Obama has not won the right sorts of states — winning a bunch of small states, caucus states, red states, and states with too high a proportion of African-American voters. Clinton has shown her mettle, the story goes, by winning big states like her native New York and California.

The problem for Clinton is that eventually this becomes a more difficult line to maintain. Obama won Virginia last week, a big state that has been slowly trending Democratic over the past few cycles. And Obama won his native Illinois, which he probably should have — but it’s a win no less meaningful than Clinton’s victory in California.

This leaves the Clinton campaign with little cover if they are to try to outflank Obama for the nomination. They will have to essentially admit that they’re relying on superdelegates to do what they could not convince the voters to do — back Hillary Clinton for the presidency.

The Clinton campaign says that they are just playing by the rules, and they’re right — they are. The superdelegates were created as a check on the stupidity of voters, as a way to avoid another George McGovern candidacy. They were created precisely so that an establishment candidate could keep an insurgent from winning the nomination. Clinton is simply playing the game as it’s been set up.

But it will be difficult for Clinton to convince Obama supporters that she has earned the endorsement — and extremely difficult for her to unify the party behind her. And if she tries, and fails, to win on superdelegates — or worse, succeeds, and loses in the general election — Clinton will find her political future cut abruptly short.

So will Clinton roll the dice? Much will depend on the outcome of the March 4 primaries. If Clinton loses either Texas or Ohio — indeed, if she even wins both, but narrowly — she will be too far behind to be able to pull this off, no matter how willing she is to pull the trigger. But if she gets the big wins there she’s been hoping for, then she will have a hard decision to make: risk going for the presidency and losing her partisans at the same time.