MINNEAPOLIS — Hillary Clinton delivered a show of force on Friday meant to make one thing abundantly clear to Democratic leaders, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden: She is the boss.

Coming off two weeks of breathless speculation about the vice president’s ambitions, Clinton now looks like she’s nearly locked up the support of party elites, something she critically failed to accomplish in 2008.


A phalanx of Clinton’s top aides — including campaign manager Robby Mook, political director Amanda Renteria, and top organizing official Marlon Marshall — worked party influencers at the Democrats’ candidate cattle-call here and at a private happy hour at the W Hotel bar on Thursday night, while trying to calm those with questions about the email controversy. Clinton too met with supporters privately on Thursday night.

And party officials gathered in the hotel’s hallways, conference rooms, and suites responded, delivering a level of enthusiasm for their wounded front-runner that demonstrated to would-be challengers how little space they have to pursue the Democratic establishment.

“This is really about how you put the numbers together to secure the nomination,” Clinton said Friday. “In 2008 I got a lot of votes, but I didn’t get enough delegates. So I think it’s understandable that my focus is going to be on delegates as well as votes this time.”

In a leak coinciding neatly with Clinton’s appearance in Minneapolis, Brooklyn told Bloomberg it has already secured commitments from more than 60 percent of the party’s superdelegates -- those officials and leaders whose support is not tied to primary or caucus tallies. The campaign also says it is briefing the unpledged delegates to firm up support.

It’s not a field-clearing advantage; superdelegates can change allegiances and Clinton was ahead in the delegate count early in the 2008 race too. But it’s significant if it holds.

Underscoring Clinton’s commanding position — and perhaps highlighting the disconnect between party officials and disaffected voters — the Sanders campaign appeared nearly an afterthought through the first two days of the DNC meeting, his supporters’ handwritten signs heavily outnumbered by Clinton t-shirts and bumper stickers until the candidate took the stage to loud cheers on Friday afternoon. Even the senator himself was received coolly at a reception of DNC members the previous night, according to people in the room.

“The DNC meeting in Minneapolis is Clinton country at the moment,” said Kate Gallego, a committee member from Arizona who said even her flight to Minnesota was overrun with Clinton buttons.

Evidence of her support was clear as her standard stump speech was treated by the fired-up audience as if it were a swing-state, general-election rally, interrupted by extended standing ovations.

This, even in the face of polling that’s going from bad to worse and hand-wringing from donors and supporters who’ve been urging the Brooklyn headquarters to find a new approach on the email controversy.

Certainly, Sanders and Biden had their supporters on site. The Vermonter’s senior staff met with delegates and his backers in “join the political revolution” t-shirts worked up a rousing applause when he was first mentioned in front of the Democratic party’s membership on Friday.

Meanwhile the Draft Biden group working to gin up support for the vice president held a handful of meetings with party officials — attracting a few dozen curious members at a time, according to attendees — without registering much of a physical presence. Few were ready to commit to Biden, said Bert Marley, a committeeman from Idaho who went to one of the meetings on Thursday evening, though party members were happy to listen to the presentation.

But many DNC members, who provide the support and infrastructure that can prove critical to a campaign, were outright dismissive of the idea that either challenger could seriously compete as primary season approaches.

“Reality has set in on Biden,” said Texas Democratic Party chairman Gilberto Hinojosa. “It’s just too hard."

And it’s not just a question of electoral math for some Democrats, who bristle at the idea that the vice president could reshape the race the second he chose to get in.

“[Biden] doesn’t reach out to me for seven f---ing years and then he wants me to help him out? I don’t think so,” said Florida committeeman and Clinton backer Jon M. Ausman, lamenting the vice president's lack of party activity compared to Bill Clinton, who invited him to the Lincoln Bedroom as president. “I don’t really give a shit. I don’t care if he gets into the race or not."

Clinton’s full-court press came at the end of a week when her campaign also rolled out an endorsement from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack — an influential Iowan and colleague of Clinton’s and Biden’s in the cabinet — her main supportive super PAC unveiled its first ad, the political operation invited top fundraisers to Brooklyn headquarters for a briefing with senior staffers, and it told that same group it would start getting regular conference calls with Clinton’s top policy staffer.

“There are a lot of Democrats who worry about this. And you gotta do everything you can to reassure them. The problem is you can do what you did this week, and then the Quinnipiac poll comes out and everyone worries about it,” said veteran party strategist Bob Shrum, who helped lead the presidential campaigns of John Kerry and Al Gore.

So ending a stretch of two weeks when much of the party’s talk was about Biden’s presidential calculations and the opening that Clinton’s email controversy could create for the vice president, the campaign’s dominating presence in Minneapolis was welcomed by her backers, many of whom told POLITICO they were reassured by the campaign’s performance.

“She certainly has a huge presence here. They are working the meeting as they should — really hard,” said Florida Democratic Party executive director Scott Arceneaux.

That charm offensive spells trouble for the scattered Biden factions that showed up in Minneapolis. The chatter about the vice president’s candidacy slowed to a trickle on Friday, DNC members said, as Clinton forces worked to circle the wagons.

“The Biden talk is not what it used to be. I don’t see the concern out there that you saw a few weeks ago,” said Hinojosa. “Not in Minneapolis. And not among the leadership in Texas. Hillary remains pretty much locked up among a huge portion of the Democratic leadership that I’m aware of.”

Members grumbled that if Biden wanted to build a real campaign, he should have started sending queries to state parties months ago.

“Texas is the second-largest state in terms of delegates in the country. It is physically impossible for Vice President Biden to have a significant impact in this primary election,” said Hinojosa.

And others, like Joni Gutierrez, a committewoman from New Mexico who committed to Clinton last week and called her speech here “the best ever,” were even more fed up with the speculation amid Clinton’s own delegate-counting:

“Hillary does not need this,” Gutierrez said.

Theodoric Meyer, Daniel Strauss and Glenn Thrush contributed to this report.