Archive for January 28th, 2008
January 28th, 2008
With all of the attention being paid to the presidential primaries this year, some of the election jargon floating around can be confusing.
Delegates and superdelegates to the nominating conventions are becoming increasingly important as the primary season wears on. Both political parties treat delegates differently with multiple layers of rules.
One way to look at the delegates is to consider them as cash on hand.
When Democrats show up in Denver in August, the roughly 4,049 delegates will come assigned to the presidential candidates for the party. For the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn. in September, the estimated 2,380 delegates
Traditionally, delegates assigned to a specific candidate vote for that person at the convention. Therefore, just as in life, those who have the most “money” going into the convention are likely to win the nomination.
But of course, national politics is never that clean-cut.
The convention, particularly for the Democrats, always includes a number of delegates that are not bound to a candidate. For Democrats these are called superdelegates, and Republicans call them unpledged.
Many media outlets are predicting that these unattached delegates will be the key to settling a potentially open nomination process.
Here is some additional reading because this isn’t likely to go away until this fall:
- Superdelegates who haven’t endorsed a Democrat yet
- A good overview from my Gatehouse colleague
- CNN and the New York Times break it down, here and here
Even Bill Clinton gets a vote
- Dems have been wooing superdelegates since summer
- 1982 rule creating superdelegates could be boon to Dems
January 28th, 2008
Gov. Blagojevich has scheduled his annual combined State of the State/Budget Address for Feb. 20.
I hear our increasingly reclusive governor will deliver his address from a couch in the basement of his Chicago bungalow. There’s no word yet on whether press or the public will be allowed in to watch.
Just kidding. The governor will deliver his address in the Illinois House to a joint session of the General Assembly, as is traditional.
Over the next couple weeks, we’ll look at some of the challenges facing Illinois, fiscal and otherwise. For starters, here’s some background on bill pressure from a recent report by Comptroller Dan Hynes:
Through the first half of fiscal year 2008, the
state’s cash flow position continued to deteriorate.
At the end of December, the backlog of
unpaid bills in the Comptroller’s Office stood
at $1.720 billion although the office began the
year holding no bills. This time last year
payables totaled $1.336 billion. Just as significantly,
the delay in paying bills was 34 business
days as of December 31st, compared to
only 22 days at this time last year. Both the
backlog volume and the number of days
delayed represent record levels for the midpoint
of the fiscal year.
January 28th, 2008
Gov. Blago’s approval rating has bounced back to 42 percent, according to a poll commissioned by the St. Louis Post Dispatch. An associated story is here.
Forty-two percent is not pretty for the second-term Democratic chief executive of an increasingly Democratic state. Still, Blago is now nearly twice as popular as he was three months ago, when his approval rating was in the tank at 23 percent.
No doubt much of the bounce in popularity is due to Blago’s free-rides-for-seniors plan, which he inserted into a mass transit bailout plan via an amendatory veto. He and his taxpayer-funded staff practically beat this plan into the heads of Illinoisans with a full-scale promotional blitz around Illinois.
I’m guessing another factor is at play here, too: Blagojevich and lawmakers have officially left Springfield for the first in a year. Yes, there have been occasional breaks over the last year. But each of those breaks occurred amid gridlock and posturing at the Capitol. Blago spent those breaks parading in front of TV cameras and threatening to call lawmakers back into special session.
The current break, now in its second week, is truly that: A break from the acrimony. It follows closure on a significant matter — how to help Chicago-area mass transit agencies, which for the better part of a year had begged for more state money.
In short, folks appear to be much more fond of their government leaders when they actually accomplish something and then disappear.
