For all his troubles over the past few weeks, Barack Obama continues to cut into Hillary Clinton’s lead among the superdelegates–elected and party officials–who will ultimately determine who gets the nomination. But while the Obama campaign made much yesterday of the defection of Joe Andrew, a former DNC chair who switched from Clinton to Obama, the more impressive and significant endorsement was that of Indiana Congressman Baron Hill the day before.
Andrew’s move, making an early bet on a frontrunner, and then jumping when it looks like that one wasn’t paying off, is easy to write off as political calculation. And it is difficult to see who will be swayed by the shifting of a cog within the party machinery. (Indeed, Andrew wasn’t all that influential, even back when he had the DNC job. A friend of mine was once seated next to a Democratic Senator at a dinner where Andrew was speaking. The Senator leaned over to her and asked, “Who’s that guy?” When my friend informed the Senator that the speaker was the chairman of his party, he whispered: “Don’t tell anyone I asked that.”)
For Hill, on the other hand, this has enormous implications. Few people have more on the line when it comes to the question of who will top the ticket in November. Hill has one of the toughest races in the country, and his decision is not without risk. One of them: It could alienate the most powerful Democrat in his home state, Senator Evan Bayh, who has staked a lot on Clinton and has tried to dissuade members of the state’s congressional delegation from endorsing her opponent.
Hill’s decision to endorse now is a strong indication that, whatever the bumps Obama may have hit of late, the fundamentals of this race have not changed all that much. It is a sign that Democrats down the ballot still see Obama as the stronger candidate to take on John McCain in November.