Clinton Adds Superdelegates. Plural. No, Seriously.

Hillary Clinton has added three superdelegates to The Count today.

One, as per earlier, is Sophie Masloff, the former mayor of Pittsburgh.

The other two, are Rep. Jackie Speier of California, who replaced the late Rep. Tom Lantos.

And then Bill Burga of Ohio, an AFL-CIO poobah.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama added one: the chair of the Utah Democratic Party,
Wayne Holland

Comments

How much of the $2.5 million Elton John raised was spent acquiring 2 super delegates?

Posted by D | April 10, 2008 1:48 PM

Marc, Speier has said she will decide who will get her vote after the primaries.

Posted by john m | April 10, 2008 2:00 PM

Unlike Clinton, Speier has actually faced gunfire on a tarmac:
Speier served as a congressional staffer for Congressman Leo Ryan. Speier was part of the November 1978, fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of human rights abuses by the Reverend Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple followers in Jonestown.[4] While the investigative team was boarding the plane to leave on November 18, they were fired at by Jones' followers. Five people died, including Ryan. Speier was shot five times, waited for 22 hours for help to arrive and survived.

Posted by Steve | April 10, 2008 2:02 PM

For those of you who wish to follow the super delegate saga more closely, you can do so here and scroll down to the section just before the comments. It does a day by day report of who they feel should be added or removed for which candidate.

Since the start of April, Obama has picked up a net of 8 super delegates. Hillary is at (-1) due to replacements and people moving back to uncommitted, unless you count Speier and Burga. From john m's comment is sounds like Speier, at least, is still uncommitted.

Obama did much better than her in March, too.

Posted by LFC | April 10, 2008 2:19 PM

Hadn't Tom Lantos been a Clinton Superdelegate before he died? If so, that doesn't qualify as a net gain for Clinton, it just means she lost one less than she previously had.

Posted by Kim | April 10, 2008 2:27 PM

From the PlainDealer website:

For having just endorsed a presidential candidate, Burga doesn't sound too enthusiastic. It fact, he didn't even want to talk about her.

"You not going to make a story out of this?" he asked.

When pressed, he added, "I just don't need to make any public statements on this."

Posted by Deborah | April 10, 2008 2:38 PM

So is she in the positive now, in relation to Super Tuesday?

As a side note - former mayor of a second-rate town like Pittsburgh gets you a slot as a super-delegate? AFL-CIO poobah?

If you're going to have super-delegates, which is probably a dumb idea in the first place, but if you're going to have them, do you really care about the opinion of a union guy or the former mayor of a town like Pittsburgh? Won't the union guy's opinion be reflected in the opinion of an elected super-delegate, anyway? What relevance does a former mayor have?

I looked at the super-delegate list some months ago; it's ridiculous. Relative nobodies like "assistant secretary of the treasury of the Rhode Island Democratic Party" are super-delegates. I exaggerate, but not by much.

Posted by socctty | April 10, 2008 5:01 PM