{"id":812,"date":"2008-02-09T10:14:14","date_gmt":"2008-02-09T09:14:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=812"},"modified":"2008-02-09T10:14:14","modified_gmt":"2008-02-09T09:14:14","slug":"the-american-presidential-election-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=812","title":{"rendered":"The American presidential election (14)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hillary Clinton&#8217;s camp is now bracing its supporters for the time when in the next few weeks Barack Obama will overtake her in the delegate count. This is clever &#8211; it seeks to minimise the psychological boost that this will give to the Obama team. However, in a crucial sense, Obama is already in the lead.<br \/>\nThe figures are changing all the time but right now, according to the <a href=\"http:\/\/demconwatch.blogspot.com\/\">2008 Democratic Convention Watch<\/a> web site, Clinton has 1,063 delegates and Obama has 984. But about a third of the delegates who will go to the convention are what are called super delegates. They are not chosen through caucuses or primaries; they have an automatic right to attend the convention and vote because they are state governors or members of Congress and the like.<br \/>\nIf you take away the super delegate votes so far declared, then Clinton has 842 elected delegates and Obama beats her with 859.<br \/>\nIf we reach the Convention with one candidate having more elected delegates and another having more total delegates, there will be an almighty row about the nature of democracy.<br \/>\nIf you&#8217;re finding the American presidential election complicated, don&#8217;t worry. In a a few weeks, the Russians will have a presidential election which will be much simpler and quicker and cheaper &#8211; although less exciting and democratic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hillary Clinton&#8217;s camp is now bracing its supporters for the time when in the next few weeks Barack Obama will overtake her in the delegate count. This is clever &#8211; it seeks to minimise the psychological boost that this will give to the Obama team. However, in a crucial sense, Obama is already in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}