Bernie: Oh, yeah, Dems are having a contested convention

Yep. It looks like we're going to get a contested convention all right. Ted Cruz is going to march right into Cleveland and try to deny Donald Trump his delegates so as to force multiple ballots and . . . oh, wait. Sorry. Wrong party. Wrong convention. At least if we can believe Bernie Sanders, we're getting a contested convention, but it will be the Democrat convention. Sanders's play is pretty simple: He plans to go after Hillary's superdelegates - the elected and party officials who are unbound by primary and caucus results and can vote for any candidate they choose. On the Dem side you need 2,383 to clinch the nomination. Hillary now stands at 2,313, but only 1,769 of those are pledged as a result of the primaries and caucuses. She's got 544 superdelegates who have said they would back her, and that is what's got her on the cusp of taking the prize. She needs to take 70 of California's 192 delegates to do it on Tuesday, and it's very possible she could lose the state but still get the 70 because the state is winner-take-all on a congressional district-by-district basis.

But not so fast, Bernie says. He is correct that the superdelegates are free to change their minds up until the convention, and he thinks he's got a persuasive case for why they should:

Clinton currently has 2,313 total delegates -- 1,769 of which are pledged and 544 of which are superdelegates -- and she is expected to cross the 2,383-delgate threshold in the next few days to clinch the nomination. But Sanders, who has 1,501 pledged delegates and only 46 superdelegates, says he can still woo enough of her superdelegates between now and the Democratic convention in July to swing the nomination his way. It's a tall order. Pledged delegates emerge from primaries and caucuses, while superdelegates are party leaders -- elected officials and former ones who have individually committed to a candidate. It would be unprecedented for the number of superdelegates Sanders needs to switch allegiances, and, like Clinton this year, then-Sen. Barack Obama entered the 2008 convention without a majority of pledged delegates. Sanders is making this pledge to keep his fight alive in the closing days of the California primary campaign, sending a signal to his supporters that the race isn't finished. "The media is in error when they lump superdelegates with pledged delegates. Pledged delegates are real," Sanders said. "Hillary Clinton will not have the requisite number of pledged delegates to win the Democratic nomination at the end of the nominating process on June 14. Won't happen. She will be dependent on superdelegates." He vowed, "The Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention."

He's right on the math, at least in a sense. Hillary is not going to have 2,383 pledged delegates because there aren't enough remaining to get in the primaries alone. And he's right that the superdelegates would be free to abandon her at the convention if they wanted to. But would they?

If the dynamics of the race stay exactly as they are right now, I don't think so. She's a terrible candidate and she'd be an even worse president, but Democrats only care about winning and at the moment she seems to be in a strong position to be competitive with Donald Trump. They seem confident they can make the case that she's "experienced and steady" or whatever, even though her experience disqualifies her and she's about as steady as a drumbeat played by a chimpanzee. They think that provides a strong enough argument to put her over the top against Trump. What could change that is if things happen during the course of the campaign that continue to expose her weaknesses. Trump will pound away at the e-mail scandal, of course (as he should), and the rest of her lies and criminality. But he also needs to convince voters, many of whom seem not to have noticed, just how horrendous the Obama economic record is - because she's vowing to continue it. A real game-changer, of course, would be a Justice Department decision to indict her, or failing that if Loretta Lynch decides to cover for her, an FBI release of the investigation details with all the evidence she is guilty of at least one and probably multiple felonies. The report last week from the State Department inspector general was exceedingly bad for her because it destroyed every lie she's been telling all along about this whole thing. If the FBI piles on with more of that, the Democrats are going to have a real problem on their hands because it will be obvious that a non-indictment is strictly a political coverup. At that point, Bernie's attempt to peel away superdelegates at the convention could be very fun to watch, even if it's ultimately unsuccessful, as I think it would be. Fun, I say, not because there's anything all that entertaining about political conventions but because if Hillary escapes such a convention by the skin of her teeth, she could emerge for the general election campaign one of the weakest major party nominees we've ever seen - much more flawed and compromised than Trump. So you go, Bernie! Unlike your admirers, I think you'd be a disastrous president, but like your admirers, I'm behind you all the way. For now.

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