Apparent division
The division inside the Democrat Party was apparent at a meeting of the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, in a Washington hotel Saturday.
After daylong debates, DNC's rules and bylaws committee finally reinstated all of Florida and Michigan's delegates to its party's presidential nomination convention in August, but delegate from the two states will only have half a vote at the convention because the two states held their primaries earlier than the DNC allowed.
The move leaves front-runner Obama's lead over Clinton intact and was seen as a blow to the latter.
The DNC had penalized both states for holding their primaries earlier, by excluding them from representation at the party's August convention, in which the party nominates a presidential candidate.
Clinton and Obama offered different plans to solve the issue. Clinton asked for fully restoring the two states' voting rights atthe convention, a position Obama camp aid it would never accept.
The DNC ruling last Saturday was viewed as favoring Obama and effectively ruined Clinton's last hope of catching up with Obama in delegate tally.
As a result, Clinton supporters protested throughout the meeting and threatened to carry the fight all the way to the August convention.
Some of her supporters even said they would defect from the party and vote for Republican candidate John McCain in November if Clinton couldn't get the nomination.
In the May 20 Kentucky primary, two-thirds of Clinton supporters said they would vote for Republican or not vote at all in the general election if Clinton was not the nominee.
The situation was even worse for Obama than in the West Virginia primary a week earlier, where 36 percent of the Clinton supporters said they would back Obama.
Moreover, support for Clinton is still strong among white men, blue-collar workers, women and Hispanics, and she is very influential in key "swing states" such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
If Obama wants to be better-positioned in the general election,it's obvious he needs full-hearted support from Clinton.
