Now That He's the Winner, Obama Decides to Change the Rules of the Game

Summary

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It was a mere two years ago on Jan. 8 the Democratic primaries got interesting. Obama enjoyed a 13-point lead heading into the New Hampshire primary after trouncing Hillary Clinton in Iowa and showing the world that maybe this junior senator from Chicago had some fight in him. Oh yeah, and he was Black too! Then Hillary pulled off the upset, cried crocodile tears on CNN about how much she wanted to win, and took New Hampshire by 3 points, splitting the state's delegates 9 to 9 with [Barack Obama]. At this point Clinton began a strategy of winning not only a state's popular vote, but winning the superdelegates as well, in the hopes of cutting off the oxygen to Obama's nascent campaign.

Obama is flirting with disaster by cutting these power brokers out of the process. They'll still be pulling the strings, but now they'll be harder to influence and less amendable to working with newcomers to the political stage.

These changes won't go into effect until the presidential election of 2016, since barring some monumental collapse Obama is going to be running for re-election in 2012. However it does tell us more about how Obama chooses to operate now that he's the president. The man who claimed to be the ultimate outsider by race, class, is changing the rules in a way that will make it harder for the next "Obama" to travel the same road he did.

[...] why should they even bother meeting with "the new guy" since he won't be offering anything for their "vote"?

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Now That He's the Winner, Obama Decides to Change the Rules of the Game

One of the best things about being the winner is you often get to rewrite the rules of the game. Mind you, when you are rewriting the rules the temptation is the make sure they work in your favor, and not necessari...

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