Following up on my previous post about those Florida delegates...
I can't help but wonder if the Clinton campaign's attempt back in late January to force the Florida contest back into play was related to their fundraising problems. By that point it was becoming increasingly clear Super Tuesday wasn't going to knock Obama out of the race, and as a result people were beginning to accept that things would likely go on for several more months. Rather than a race for states it was turning into a contest for delegates, and if the Florida delegates could somehow be seated, it would provide her campaign with a significant boost.
But even so the decision to make an issue out of Florida seemed strange. The optics of it just seemed all wrong. Hillary was essentially breaking a promise she had made to her own party, and I couldn't figure out why she would embrace such a high risk strategy so early on in the campaign. Why pick that fight then? Why not wait until it really mattered?
The answer, I think we now know, was money. Her campaign was spending more than it was bringing in, so much so that she was forced to offer it a fairly sizable loan. No matter how you spin it that's a bad story, and my guess is they wanted to do everything possible to gain an advantage over Obama before the story broke. If they could somehow put Florida back into play and pick up a few surprises on Super Tuesday, they just might be able to knock Obama back far enough that they'd once again be able to claim inevitability. And at that point, money problems wouldn't much matter because they would have survived.
My guess is that when the dust settles, we'll find out that the decision to self-fund and the effort to reverse course on Florida were made within 48 hours of one another.
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