by Karen Ocamb

Somewhere a Democratic Bette Davis fan is chuckling, remembering the star’s signature line in All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

Perhaps the comparison between the fictional Hollywood power struggle and the race for the Democratic presidential nomination is a bit of a stretch—after all, insurgent Barack Obama is inspirational, while Eve was downright diabolical.

But after losing Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in the Potomac Primaries Feb. 12, including erosion among her base of women and working class voters, Hillary Clinton is looking more and more like Davis’ character, Margo Channing—the star fighting to stay on top.

In fact, after eight straight losses, Clinton is officially behind Obama in popular votes and the pledged delegate count; as of Feb. 14, CNN estimates Obama has 1,297 delegates to Clinton’s 1,245. Those are not hard numbers, however, since CNN also included their analysis of superdelegate endorsements, which can change.

The next big showdown is March 4 in delegate-rich Ohio and Texas, where the Clinton campaign has declared a “firewall.” But the shell-shocked campaign, which the Wall Street Journal reported had so haughtily believed in the inevitability of her nomination they did not plan beyond Super Tuesday, pulled a page from the Obama playbook and mounted new ground game, contesting all the remaining states, including Obama’s birthplace, Hawaii.

But no matter how many popular votes or delegates the campaigns might accrue, neither candidate will win enough delegates to make the magic number of 2,025 by the Democratic Party’s convention in August in Denver, according to CNN’s John King and other pundits.

The focus now is on the party’s 796 superdelegates—members of the Democratic National Committee, governors, members of Congress and other party activists who, unlike each state’s elected or selected pledged delegates, can determine or switch their choice at the last minute. The question is whether they will go along with or overturn the will of the voters if the contest comes down to a brokered convention.

“I do not think that superdelegates will be the deciding factor in this election,” superdelegate Jeremy Bernard, an openly gay financial consultant for the Obama campaign, told IN Los Angeles magazine. “I believe the ‘possibility’ that this goes to the convention in the hands of the [superdelegates] has been hyped out of control. It reminds people, understandably, of the 2000 election.”

The reference is to the 2000 presidential election when Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote but George W. Bush won the Electoral College and thus the election. Many Democratic Party pundits believe that a decision rendered by superdelegates that goes against the national will of the voters would irredeemably fracture the party.

According to National Stonewall Democrats, as of Feb. 14, there are 21 openly gay super delegates, 12 of whom have endorsed Clinton, two of whom have endorsed Obama and seven are undeclared, including 21-year-old Marquette University junior Jason Rae of Wisconsin, the youngest superdelegate. (Stonewall Democrats posted an explanation of the superdelegate process and a list of the LGBT superdelegates on their website, www.stonewalldemocrats.org).

But the LGBT vote is hard to measure. In the national exit poll used by CNN and others for Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, the “gay” question was only asked in California and New York. In New York, gays and lesbians registered as 7 percent of the Democratic vote, with 59 percent going for Clinton, 36 percent going for Obama and 3 percent going for former candidate John Edwards. In California, the poll registered gays and lesbians at only 4 percent of the vote—63 percent for Clinton and 29 percent for Obama, with 1 percent for Edwards.

Considering the enthusiasm generated by the race, many California gays were stunned at the low voter count. “I am surprised by the 4 percent exit poll number but caution that many of the exit polls were, once again, way off in projecting outcome,” Bernard said. “My belief is that if the exit polls are so far off with the outcome, how reliable is any of the information?”

The Windy City Times in Chicago measured the Super Tuesday LGBT vote in wards with heavy known gay populations and concluded that Obama won by a two-to-one margin. The Washington Blade also determined that Obama swept the gay precincts in the Washington, D.C., primary despite a last-minute interview with Clinton in the paper.

But with Obama’s new frontrunner status comes intense scrutiny. In advance of the Maryland primary, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, a Clinton supporter and a one-time darling of progressive anti-war activists, wrote a withering commentary for the Baltimore Sun (adapted Feb. 13 for the Huffington Post) that raised questions about Obama’s fortitude in a race against presumptive Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain.

Referring to an exchange between Obama and McCain over ethics reform, Wilson wrote: “Mr. McCain was insultingly dismissive but successful in intimidating his inexperienced colleague. Thus, in his one face-to-face encounter with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama failed to stand his ground. What gives us confidence Mr. Obama will be stronger the next time he faces Mr. McCain, a seasoned political fighter with extensive national security credentials?”

Apparently no one paid attention and Obama won the Potomac Primaries decisively.

But just as Obama seems unstoppable, another cinematic reference is cropping up.

“Obama resembles the handsome, well-spoken Robert Redford character, Bill McKay, of the 1972 movie The Candidate, but updated for the new millennium: brighter, more charismatic and multicultural. In these divisive times of war and economic anxiety, a tired public apparently wants someone hip, upbeat, reassuring in talk and fresh in spirit, but not too specific in prescribing any painful remedies for our various maladies,” historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 14. “If Obama can translate all that into true leadership and effective policy, that would be real change. If not, we’ll be asking the same question posed by Robert Redford’s character, Bill McKay, [on election night, following his victory] to end The Candidate: ‘What do we do now?’”