John Lewis's announcement that he's going to switch his support, as a superdelegate, to Barack Obama, is a huge deal for a couple of reasons. The first is simply symbolic. Lewis is one of the greatest civil rights heroes still living. His defection from Clinton to Obama carries tremendous narrative weight. More important than that, however, is that Lewis's high profile defection provides cover to all who may come after him. By publicly stating that his responsibilities as a superdelegate outweigh the commitments implied by his earlier support of Clinton, and, as such, he will be voting with his district rather than with his endorsement, he eases the path for those who would do the same. And there look to be many. There's been a very odd argument raging in recent weeks as the Clinton campaign upheld that superdelegates should vote for "who they think would be the strongest candidate for the party," not who their constituents favored. So they've been sending out e-mails linking to instants like this one, where Axelrod said superdelegates are "supposed to exercise their judgment as to what would be best for the party." At face value, it's not obvious that Clinton is the party's stronger candidate, and so the appeal made fairly little sense. But what the campaign was actually trying to do was codify the principle that superdelegates weren't morally obligated to follow their districts and states, and should be expected to make autonomous choices, which could then be influenced. Foreseeing that they would end behind in delegates, they wanted to be able to campaign for superdelegates, rather than watch them deliver an automatic endorsement of the voters' choice. Lewis, however, is going against them on both levels: He's saying, on the one hand, that he will be bound by his district. And he's saying, on the other, that Obama's campaign now has the "sense of movement and sense of spirit," making it the "stronger" choice as well. That's very dangerous of Clinton: It attacks both her abstract argument about electoral strength and her technical argument about the proper behavior of superdelegates. Indeed, predicting anything before Ohio and Texas would be foolish, but if Clinton's superdelegate support collapses, it will be Lewis's defection that laid the groundwork, that made it safe for others to desert her.
