Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had just declared victory in the Nevada caucuses when most campaign reporters heard Jeffrey Berman’s voice for the first and only time.
Berman, Sen. Barack Obama’s director of delegate selection, chimed in during a conference call with the media to make an unexpected case: Despite Clinton’s popular vote victory in Nevada and an authoritative Associated Press count giving Clinton the edge in the Nevada delegate count, Obama had actually won the state by the only measure that mattered.
“Obama had a majority in the district that had an odd number of delegates, so he won an extra seat,” Berman told the puzzled press; the Associated Press delegate expert, on the call, promised to revise his count.
Obama’s Nevada delegate victory was widely viewed at the time as a curiosity, an asterisk to Clinton’s win. But in February, as Obama amassed delegates despite losing big states, the shape of the race became clear: The name of the game was delegates.
It was the game Berman and a friend, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, had been playing all along. And as Clinton’s staff scrambled after Super Tuesday to remake her strategy to meet that reality, it began to become clear that Berman had helped build Obama a lead too big to surmount.
“He is the unsung hero of the Obama effort,” said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic consultant who supports Clinton.
The bearded, no-profile 50-year-old lawyer’s central role in Obama’s likely nomination is emblematic of the depth of Obama’s preparation for the 2008 campaign.
Clinton’s delegate chief is the much-heralded, oft-profiled, tough-talking past master of the party’s rules, Harold Ickes. But Ickes had a broad portfolio that included fundraising and politicking, a lobbying and consulting business, and a sideline in bitter infighting — all conducted while Berman was concentrating solely on tasks such as hashing out the details of the mixed Texas primary system and arranging obscure Puerto Rican political deals.
Berman’s counterpart on the staff level in the Clinton campaign, meanwhile, is a former New York State Democratic Party official new to the delegate hunt.
Berman, by contrast, 25 years ago joined the very small fraternity of Democratic operatives steeped in the obscure — and typically unrewarding — subfield of delegate selection. It’s a job description that begins with getting the candidate on the ballot with full delegate slates in 50 states and extends through building a whip operation for a possible floor fight at the convention.
In the middle is the crucial process of setting a campaign’s strategy for amassing the maximum number of delegates — a mind-numbing blend of math and politics that will focus a candidate’s energies on congressional districts in which the math of proportional representation gives him or her a chance to pick up an extra delegate or run up a big margin.
Since Gary Hart and Walter Mondale battled toward the nomination, this particular political skill also has been a waste of time: Democratic contests have been decided early.