The mounting pressure on Democratic superdelegates

What happened

Concerned that the bitter primary battle is doing permanent damage, Democratic Party leaders this week warned undecided superdelegates that they’d have to declare for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton well before the party’s convention starts on Aug. 25. “We really can’t have a divided convention,” party Chairman Howard Dean said. “If we do, it’s going to be very hard to heal the party afterward.” Many superdelegates—elected officials and party activists whose support will decide the contest—worry that whichever candidate they choose, they’ll alienate a key constituency. Clinton has strong support among white, working-class voters, but her rhetoric has angered Obama’s base of black voters and under-30 activists, who might sit out the general election unless Obama is the nominee.

Fresh controversy over remarks by former Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright has complicated the superdelegates’ political calculations. Wright this week reiterated his claims that U.S. “terrorism” had invited the 9/11 attacks and that the government may have developed the AIDS virus to wipe out minority communities. A visibly angry Obama said Wright’s “rants” were “appalling,” and had ended any remaining friendship between them.

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In Indiana, where Clinton needs to win to keep her candidacy alive, she and Obama sparred over the federal gas tax. Clinton sided with Republican John McCain in calling for a temporary repeal of the 18.4-cents-a-gallon tax during the summer. Obama countered that waiving the tax for three months would encourage more oil consumption, save the average family only $30, and deplete the federal Highway Trust Fund, a road-maintenance fund financed by the tax.

What the editorials said

The pandering over the gas tax “can make a person sick,” said the Los Angeles Times. McCain’s support for suspending the tax is “what one would expect from a Republican candidate,” but it’s dismaying to see Clinton stoop to such blatantly calculated appeals. Obama shows courage by “refusing to play along” despite the political cost his refusal may exact.

Obama also distinguished himself with “the most forthright repudiation of an out-of-control supporter that we can remember,” said The New York Times. But “it is an injustice” that prominent African-Americans are expected to answer for the views of other blacks, “while white candidates are rarely, if ever, handed that burden.” McCain hasn’t been called on to repudiate his supporter the Rev. John Hagee, a fundamentalist televangelist “whose bigotry matches that of Mr. Wright.” The double standard is obvious.

What the columnists said

What double standard? asked George Will in The Washington Post. Obama has maintained “a voluntary 20-year relationship” with Wright, a demagogue who hates America and spouts racist nonsense about black children having “different” learning styles than whites. Until Wright’s views imperiled his candidacy, Obama made little effort to distance himself from the pastor. Voters have a legitimate reason to ask what that says about a man who would be president.

With “manufactured issues” like this dominating the news, said E.J. Dionne, also in the Post, it’s no wonder people “are showing signs of exhaustion with what once had been an exhilarating contest.” Until a few weeks ago, this promised to be “a big election,” with voters poised to decide whether to move the country in an entirely new direction. Now the campaign has shrunk to petty squabbling over gaffes and racial and cultural resentments.

Nowhere is the campaign’s lack of seriousness more apparent than in the “shameful pandering” over the gas tax, said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. America desperately needs a tax policy that discourages our dependence on foreign oil, and promotes the development of new energy sources. Instead, McCain and Clinton both favor spending our tax money by “burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation.”

What next?

Just days before Tuesday’s Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the controversy over Wright is seriously eroding Obama’s poll numbers, said Margaret Talev in The Hartford Courant. His lead over Clinton in North Carolina has been halved to 5 percentage points, according to Survey USA, with Clinton leading by 31 points among whites. Indiana remains a dead heat, and Purdue University political science professor James McCann said Obama’s denunciations of Wright may have come too late for white, working-class voters. “The Rev. Wright is not going to help Obama’s cause,” he said.