The Trail, WaPo's political blog: As the Democratic presidential primary heads into its third month of voting, party officials said Monday that Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean privately warned last week about the potential fallout from a protracted battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Dean sat down last Tuesday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) in a scheduled meeting at DNC headquarters. He told the congressional leaders of his concerns that an extended contest could pose potential long-term harm to the party's presidential ticket, according to several strategists familiar with the closed-door meeting.
The sources stressed that Dean was expressing a long-held view that a lengthy primary only hurts the eventual nominee's chances against the Republican Party's candidate -- this year, almost surely Sen. John McCain. But each of the party leaders has become increasingly worried about the consequences of the Clinton-Obama race.
All three have remained neutral in the race -- aides say Dean will vote uncommitted in Tuesday's Vermont primary -- and no position was taken on the matter by Dean, Pelosi and Reid, the sources said.
While some may look to the three party leaders for direction to avoid an increasingly tough primary campaign, their relations have been cold and at times openly hostile the past three years.
Dean has talked about post-primary unity, while Pelosi -- whose closest allies are backing Obama -- has said that whichever candidate has the most votes and delegates at the end of the campaign would gain the support of most superdelegates to secure the nomination. Reid's son and other key political allies in Nevada backed Clinton, while he has ducked for several weeks questions about how to bring the campaign to a close and what role superdelegates should play.
Barack Obama
No comments:
Post a Comment