Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s endorsement Monday of Sen. Barack Obama is bigger news for Obama’s press shop than it is for Klobuchar. Obama, who won 66 percent of the vote in the Minnesota DFL’s Super Duper Tuesday caucuses, already had the support of Democratic congressional colleagues Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, Betty McCollum and Jim Oberstar.

Nevertheless, the strategic aspect of the endorsing game cannot be discounted.

So here’s the question: was it really an easy decision for Klobuchar? Or were there some very real risks just beneath the glossy veneer of Monday’s announcement, to be mitigated before this move came about?

Continued: Click “Read more”The sequence of events leading to Klobuchar’s endorsement raises an important topic: risk in political campaigns, and how political leaders manage it. In an intense, hard-fought race like this one, the risks associated with a bad endorsement are many: endorse at the right time and your influence is maintained or even increased, but endorse a candidate who later goes down to defeat, and your own political fortunes are at risk. Maybe you’re blamed for the downfall, depending on how bad your timing is. Maybe if you’d endorsed just a few days earlier, a few more votes might have moved and your candidate might have won. Who knows? One can never be sure in such matters, nor can those very real risks be removed from view altogether.

In Klobuchar’s case, the risk now is that something catastrophic happens to Obama’s campaign, and suddenly Hillary Clinton is back in the driver’s seat for the Democratic nomination — leaving Klobuchar out in the political cold. Between Feb. 5 and mid-March, that risk waxed and waned — a string of Obama wins closed Clinton’s window a little, but her win in Ohio and extremely tight margins in Texas earlier this month threw the outcome back into question. Now that Clinton is back on the media downslide (thanks to a few less-than-truthful comments about sniper fire in Bosnia) and Obama seems to have weathered the Jeremiah Wright issue, it would appear that the risk of not endorsing — being left out by both campaigns for waiting too long to get involved — has simply become a greater concern than the risk of throwing in with her constituents’ favored candidate.

A calculated move, and ultimately, a risk-averse one.

Now just two Minnesota superdelegates remain uncommitted, including Rep. Collin Peterson. Peterson represents an interesting challenge for the presidential contenders: he is essentially a red-state Democrat, representing a district that has delivered 54 and 55 percent of its vote for President Bush in his two White House races. That would seem to favor Obama, who has fared well among red-state Democrats across the country. However, Peterson has made quite a career out of opposing his party’s base on a variety of issues. Despite the fact that Obama won most of the counties in Peterson’s northwestern Minnesota district just as he did across the state, it is likely that few other than Peterson himself know which way Peterson is leaning. Having won his most recent reelection bid with a shade over 70 percent of the vote, Peterson is a bit more insulated from the political risks swirling around presidential endorsements than many of his colleagues.

Still — political risks, ever-present, cannot be eliminated. Only managed.