Hillary: Super Delegates Don't Matter

After threatening to pursue Super Delegates as a way of catching up with the freight train that is the Obama campaign, Hillary has reversed course and has called for both candidates to not pursue Super Delegates now.  The reason is pretty clear: at the beginning of the month, Hillary had a 71 Super Delegate lead.  That has been reduced to 59, including 3 who have switched from Hillary to Obama.

The Huffington Post has an article that gives the tale of the tape from Thomas B. Edsall.  My analysis follows.

The article starts off with a set of new talking points from the Clinton campaign:

A set of talking points emailed to Clinton supporters within organized labor describes the arguments to use on uncommitted super delegates. In the email, the Clinton campaign suggests telling the uncommitted delegates that "it would be unfair and unjust to cut off the nominating process now. There might come a time when the process needs to come to a close, but that time is not now."

In language that could have been lifted from the Obama playbook just a few weeks ago, the email says Clinton backers should make the case to super delegates that: "If House, Senate and DNC members try to end this process now, it would be very damaging to those institutions, the Democratic Party and our chances in November."

So, where as before, the pursuit of Super Delegates was 'fair game' and 'part of the nomination process', it is now 'unfair and unjust'.  Why is that?  Is it because the strategy has back-fired and forced more Super Delegates to align behind Barack Obama purhaps?  Perish the thought!

The article goes on to some earlier quotes from the Obama campaign that state that they believe they will be ahead in the pledged delegate count and that the super delegates should not ursurp the will of the people.

There is also an interesting tid-bit about who the Super Delegates are:

The entire DNC, members of Congress, governors, labor leaders and other key interest group leaders make up the 842 "automatic" or "super" delegates to the convention who are free to cast ballots for the candidate of their choice, regardless of how their state voted.

The interesting part is that the author decides to use the Hillary camp spin of 'automatic' delegates.  I don't know if he is doing that as a nod to Hillary or as a sort of joke.

This is yet another example of the Hillary camp being in total disarray.  Like the press conference yesterday, they are entering a phase in their campaign where they have no strategy other than 'let's through everything we got at it and hopefully something will stick.'  As a Senator from New York and a respected member of the Democratic Party, this is really embarrassing for her.

Update:  As poster zic points out below, Hillary just launched a website (won't give the link) that is supposed to help convince super delegates to endorse her.  And another poster states that there may be some internals that show the super delegate dam is about to break big time - for her opponent.