Clinton Camp: “There Are No Rules”

Anyone who thought Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) might reconsider her presidential bid after her big loss in North Carolina and narrow victory in Indiana on Tuesday are mistaken.

In fact, in a conference call with the national media on Wednesday morning, the campaign’s top strategist, Geoff Garin, and top spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said the fight would almost surely last past the final primaries and be taken up by the Democratic National Committee’s standing committees, starting with the Rules and Bylaws Committee on May 31.

“There really are no rules,” Garin said, when asked about the seating of delegates from Michigan and Florida – two states stripped of delegates for holding early primaries – and about any scenario where the campaign is behind in the delegate count won in the primaries and caucuses, or the popular vote total. “You make a conscious decision of what is in the interest of the country.”

“The DNC will engage in an adjudicary process to seat the delegates,” Wolfson said, referring to the DNC’s Rules and Bylaws Committee (RBC), and then the Credentials Committee, which under the DNC rules hears appeals of RBC decisions.

Wolfson also said the number of delegates needed to win the nomination was not 2,025, as both the Clinton camp and campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) have said in previous conference calls with the media earlier in 2008.

“That is not the operative number,” Wolfson said. “The number is 2,209.”