Howard Dean, Chairman of the Democrat Party, has the job that no other Democrat wants at the moment. I really do not think that there is a Democrat alive who envies his position. As chairman, he is supposed to help heal the Party after the most rancorous primary the party has seen in the past few decades.

While Senator Clinton is looking into the future and attempting to reconcile differences with Senator Obama, he is confident of his almost total victory over Clinton. He jokingly stated that "is the first time that someone running second, offers the second place to the one in first" or something to that effect. It looks like Obama will go to the Democrat Convention in Denver holding the majority of the pledged delegates.

Now, the problem is that Senator Clinton "thinks" that she has a chance. On a Newsweek interview, when asked about her chances, since the math looks so bleak, she answered: "I have a very close race with Senator Obama. There are elected delegates, caucus delegates, and superdelegates, all for different reasons, and they're all equal in their ability to cast their vote for whomever they choose. Even elected and caucus delegates are not required to stay with whomever they are pledged to. This is a very carefully constructed process that goes back years, and we're going to follow the process."

As we all can see, it looks like Senator Clinton is either looking at something that the rest of the country is not seeing, or someone is planning to ask the super delegates to switch their votes. This is very much the situation that happened in Chicago in 1968 when a candidate won the popular vote, and the party elected the loosing candidate. While most reports talk about the racial riots in the streets of Chicago after the assassination of Martin Luther King, not too many talk about the riots in the Convention Center's floor to the extent that some delegates were thrown out of the floor by security.

Some talk show hosts have predicted this kind of debacle if any one Democrat leader attempts to force the delegates to switch their vote. So what usually is an opportunity to fire up the troops with speeches and rewriting the party's platform, looks like will end up being a loose-loose situation for the party. If Clinton is given the candidacy, Obama's supporters will be disenfranchised. And if the super delegates vote according to the results of their own primaries, Senator Clinton will be forced to accept the hard reality that she will either be a VP candidate if Obama throws her a bone, or be out of the race entirely.

Either way, Howard Dean will have a lot of hurt feelings to mend and in the event that Senator Clinton "wins", a lot to explaining to do, to their constituents. This year's Democrat convention looks bleak and troublesome. While the Republican candidate has being picked and is ready to go campaigning, it seams that the Democrat candidate will have to start campaigning without the benefit of rest and a well defined strategy.

Learn more about this author, Jose A. Colon Rivera.
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