As the primary season reaches its end, it is interesting to ponder why Hillary Clinton couldn't attract more super delegates to her campaign. At the time of Super Tuesday, February 5, Clinton led Obama by almost 100 super delegates (203-113). As I write this, realclearpolitics.com shows Obama with a current lead of 43 "supers" over Hillary (334-291). Even as Hillary has produced impressive victories in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Puerto Rico, her relative support among supers continues to decline. Since Super Tuesday, Obama has garnered 133 more supers than Clinton. So what happened? Here are my thoughts:

1) Hillary misjudged her constituency. Super delegates and average voters are two completely different breeds of cat. The Clinton campaign never quite grasped the fact that a pitch made at ordinary voters might have unintended effects on super delegates. As it turned out, many of the Clinton campaign tactics had the effect of alienating the very super delegates that she needed so desperately.

To give an example, for weeks Clinton has been making the pitch that "I'm ahead in the popular vote." The casual viewer tuning in to CNN, or the voter listening to her on the stump hears this line and is impressed by this new information. The super delegates, on the other hand, hear this claim, and understand it to be a fraud. Having followed this matter closely, they know that Hillary only leads in the popular vote if you award her every vote in Florida and Michigan--two primaries that didn't count--and award Obama no votes in Michigan, where he wasn't on the ballot, and no votes in the caucus states like Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and Washington state, where raw vote numbers were not released. Here is Clinton making this claim in her victory speech in Puerto Rico:

We are winning the popular vote. Now there can be no doubt. The people have spoken and you have chosen your candidate. So when the voting concludes on Tuesday, neither Senator Obama nor I will have the number of delegates to be the nominee. I will lead the popular vote. He will maintain a slight lead in the delegate count.

To the average voter these sound like good selling points. To a super delegate these claims come across as tortured manipulations of the data. Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post Fact Checker, put it this way:

She seems to assume that if she says something loudly enough, and repeats it often enough, it will become true. Her victory speech in Puerto Rico was a minor masterpiece in carefully parsed self-delusion....After the Puerto Rico primary, and the rules changes adopted over the weekend, most estimates now put Obama within 45 votes of the 2,118 needed to secure the nomination. Clinton, meanwhile, is 200 votes away from the magic figure. That is hardly "a slight lead" in the delegate count.

Dobbs went on to award Hillary "two Pinocchios" for her popular vote claims. Clinton's artful use of the vote count plays very poorly with Democratic politicians, in part because it conjures up the image of George W. Bush's selective use of facts during his two terms. Honesty and straight talk are the currency of the realm in the Democratic Party, and when Hillary veers off of this path, her support among supers dwindles.

This same dynamic applies to the recent battle over the disposition of the Florida and Michigan delegates. On October 11, 2007, during an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio's Laura Knoy, this exchange took place:

Laura Knoy: "So, if you value the DNC calendar, why not just pull out of Michigan? Why not just say, Hey Michigan, I'm off the ballot?"

Hillary Clinton: "Well, you know, It's clear, this election they're having is not going to count for anything."

By contrast, here is Hillary Clinton speaking to senior citizens in Florida 10 days ago:

....people go through the motions of an election only to have them discarded and disregarded.... We’re seeing that right now in Zimbabwe...Tragically, an election was held, the president lost, they refused to abide by the will of the people...So we can never take for granted our precious right to vote. It is the single most important, privilege and right any of us have, because in that ballot box we are all equal. You’re equal to a billionaire. You’re equal to the president, every single one of us.

To the elderly voters of Sunrise, Florida, this is effective campaign rhetoric. To the super delegates, who are fully aware that Clinton originally fully supported the decision that decertified the Florida and Michigan primaries, this is outrageous stuff. Once again, Hillary's rhetoric smacks of the kind of manipulations that prevailed during the Bush years. An outlandish comparison between DNC policy and the Zimbabwe elections is a good way to energize your supporters, but it is not an effective way to woo super delegates.

2. The super delegates envision Obama as the better president. In the final phase of the primary campaign, Hillary Clinton's main theme has been that she is more electable than Obama. This notion has not gained much traction with supers for several reasons: First, as the polls constantly shift, the case could be made for the electability of either candidate depending on which poll you cite. At this moment for example, the realclearpolitics.com projection of the general election shows Obama with 228 electoral votes in hand, and Hillary with 229 electoral votes. Second, the fact that the general election is five months away makes all such polls fairly meaningless. It is mind-boggling to consider that the amount of time between today and the general election--154 days--is actually more than the time between the Iowa Caucuses and today--151 days. That's an eternity in political time! And finally, the super delegates all along have been concerned less with electability than they have a more fundamental issue: Who would make the better president?

Despite the fact that the stated policy differences between Obama and Clinton are miniscule, it is likely that each candidate would be dramatically different as president. That is because one's success or failure as president depends as much on leadership style, coalition building, atmospherics, and ability to inspire, as it does on one's concrete ideas for the country. And if Barack Obama sometimes seems too cool in his personal style, Hillary's problem is just the opposite: She brings drama and confrontation wherever she goes. The super delegates remember well why the phrase "politics of personal destruction" became so prevalent during the term of Bill Clinton. The world of the Clintons is filled with both victims and victimizers.

After claiming during the 1990's that she and her husband were the victims of a "vast right-wing conspiracy," Hillary has recently suggested that she is now the victim of a left-wing conspiracy, in which the media is complicit. Further allegations of sexism, and "disrespect" toward Hillary have raised the temperature even more during the campaign. While such claims by Hillary are once again effective in mobilizing her base, they have little purchase over super delegates. While Hillary was exhorting her supporters to attend the Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting on Florida and Michigan, in the hope that they would pressure the committee into awarding Hillary a bushelful of delegates, Obama was sending out a memo to his supporters urging just the opposite, good behavior and decorum. The petulance and unruliness of the Clinton supporters in Washington did nothing to win over super delegates.

Obama and Clinton have marketed themselves with quite different brands: Since the beginning of his campaign, Obama has claimed that he would offer a new and more principled form of leadership. Clinton has claimed she is tough enough, even ruthless enough to beat the Republicans at their own game. Interestingly, both candidates have lived up to their billing. But as five members of Bill Clinton's cabinet have endorsed Obama, and as Hillary has lost the endorsements of erstwhile friends such as Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Jay Rockefeller, and Chris Dodd, it has become clear that only one of those brands represents the change that the majority of Democrats so desire.