Pelosi says she will end Democratic race by June
Amid hints that Senator Hillary Clinton is seriously contemplating a showdown fight for the Democratic Presidential nomination at the party’s convention in Denver this August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that she will ‘step in’ to put an end to the Presidential race if the party does not have a nominee by the end of June.
In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in which she spoke about the possibility of a convention floor tussle for the nod this fall, Pelosi said:
“I will step in. Because we cannot take this fight to the convention… It must be over before then.”
Ending her arguably impartial stance on which candidate she personally favours, Pelosi gave the strongest suggestion yet that Barack Obama and not Hillary Clinton has earned her support.
Pelosi, who will serve as chair of the Democratic convention, had already indicated that Democratic superdelegates should not overturn the winner of the pledged delegate count.
Now Pelosi has also publicly denounced the Clinton camp’s push to have both Florida and Michigan’s delegations fully seated at the convention, despite the fact that the party stripped both states of their entire delegations last year as punishment for holding premature primaries.
As part of her strategy to bring the Democratic race to a close sooner than later, Pelosi has enlisted the support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
According to CNN, in an interview with a San Francisco radio station Reid indicated that he had indeed spoken to Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and that they were all on board with a plan to urge uncommitted superdelegates to publicly endorse a candidate in order to bring the Democratic Presidential nomination fight to a conclusion.
“We all are going to urge our folks next week to make a decision very quickly,” Reid said.
Pelosi’s tough stance is likely to ruffle the feathers of some of the Democratic party’s most influential fundraisers.
Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein, BET founder Bob Johnson, Esprit Founder Susie Tompkins Buell and entertainment magnate Haim Saban have all chastised the Speaker in the past for showing a perceived bias toward Barack Obama and intimated that they will not be so liberal with their bottomless pocketbooks in supporting Democratic causes if Pelosi intervened to cut the race short.
Senator Hillary Clinton is expected to end the race for the Democratic nomination on a high this weekend with an anticipated double-digit win in Puerto Rico.
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