Mayor John Hickenlooper has pulled his name from the ballot to be Colorado’s last superdelegate to the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a spokesman for the Colorado Democrats said today.
Hickenlooper was facing former Denver mayor and Clinton administration Cabinet member Federico Peña for a contest that was to be decided Saturday at the Colorado Democratic Party’s state convention in Colorado Springs.
Hickenlooper has pledged to remain neutral in the Democratic presidential primary race while he works to help raise $55 million in privately donated cash and services for the city’s convention host committee.
Because Peña is a national campaign co-chairman for Barack Obama, the Obama camp has been quietly stumping for him.
Hickenlooper exited the race today, said Matt Sugar, a spokesman for the Colorado Democratic Party.
Hickenlooper “absolutely deserves to be” at the national convention, J.W. Postal, a Colorado superdelegate who supports Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton, said in an interview last week. “And he absolutely deserves to be at the head of the table. But this thing could come down to every single vote, and we need to make sure we get every single vote we can for our candidate.”
On Saturday, the state’s 5,000 pledged delegates were to vote on whether Peña or the mayor wins the slot. Colorado will send 70 delegates to the national convention, 15 of whom are superdelegates.
Almost 67 percent of Coloradans at Democratic caucuses in February picked Obama. That 67 percent translates to more than 3,300 pledged state convention delegates for Obama, and all of them recently were sent an e-mail from the Obama campaign reminding them that Peña was on the ballot.
Chuck Plunkett: 303-954-1333 or cplunkett@denverpost.com
