Hillary Clinton's Poltical Goon

Harold Ickes is that SOB in every campaign that orchestrates that sausage making in politics. This might be the reason Hillary eeks out the delegates she needs in that Icky way.

Here are some excerpts from the NYTimes:

'Mr. Ickes, who has typically been a behind-the-scenes player, is stepping out front to make the public case for Mrs. Clinton, at a time when campaign advisers have pressed to lower the profile of her chief strategist, Mark J. Penn.

But most of all, he is serving as the campaign’s general in the fight for superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who may well determine whether Mrs. Clinton can grasp the nomination from Senator Barack Obama of Illinois. In doing so, Mr. Ickes is drawing on his intimate knowledge of the Clintons and their political networks — as well as delegate selection rules he helped write at the Democratic National Committee.

Legalistic and argumentative, Mr. Ickes is a man of tough manner and tough tactics with a notoriously dramatic temper, though one he orchestrates to calculated effect. “Harold isn’t Mr. Charm,” said Herman D. Farrell, a superdelegate from New York. “But he is Mr. Mechanic. He’s good at the nuts and bolts and doing the counting, less so at the persuading.”

For the Clinton campaign, Mr. Ickes went to great lengths assembling data on all the superdelegates — their friends, supporters, contributors, history with the Clintons and interactions over the years. He sits at a desk with an old-fashioned Rolodex.

Every day, he and aides churn through the list of the superdelegates, and he sends a list of names to Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Clinton of Democrats to call.'