White House spokesman Josh Earnest hinted Monday that President Obama could be close to endorsing a successor, and that his official announcement could be just days away.
Obama intimated last week that he could get off the fence and endorse a preferred successor after Tuesday’s primaries if those contests put either former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., over the delegate threshold for securing the nomination. That’s expected to happen on Tuesday, when Clinton will clinch the nomination with delegates from New Jersey and California.
Earnest didn’t commit Obama to a decision but said come Wednesday, “we may have a better sense of where the race is headed.”
“We’ll hold on the hypotheticals,” Earnest said.
The decision whether to endorse “is rooted largely in his own judgment,” Earnest said, referring to the answer Obama gave a resident of Elkhart, Ind., during a town hall there last week.
“I think we’ll probably have a pretty good sense next week of who the nominee will end up being,” Obama said then, adding that he preferred to let voters in California, New Jersey and in the other states heading to the polls tomorrow have their say rather than him “big-footing the situation.”
In the meantime, Earnest said Obama is enjoying events such as the ones in Elkhart last week and Friday’s party fundraisers he headlined in Miami.
“There’s no denying that the president relishes the opportunity that he has to spend time traveling across the country making a forceful case for the values that he’s dedicated his career to fighting for,” Earnest said.
Earnest implied that the emergence of a clear victor on Tuesday, as Clinton is expected to do, will make it harder for the loser to press on.
“We’re going to give Democratic voters the opportunity to weigh in,” Earnest said about Tuesday’s primaries. “But certainly somebody who claims a majority of the pledged [delegates] and super-delegates, you know, has a strong case to make.”
Whether party leaders will feel compelled to sideline Sanders if he insists on contesting Clinton’s nomination depends on where he stands and how he comports himself after Tuesday, Earnest indicated.
What “kind of support each candidate is taking to the convention and how they conduct themselves in the weeks leading up to the convention, and once they arrive in Philadelphia… those kinds of details matter,” he said.
