Clinton's Superdelegate Hunter

Harold Ickes has toiled for insurgent Democrats since Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Now he's working for Hillary Clinton

Michael Edwards for TIME

Harold Ickes must win over party officials to keep Clinton in the race.

Harold M. Ickes was midway through a typical profanity-laced cell-phone call on the inch-by-inch battle for the Democratic presidential nomination recently, when he peered over his glasses and demanded, "This call is off the record, O.K.?"

Would anyone want to pick a fight with Ickes, the famously ill-tempered bad boy of the Democratic Party who once bit a rival political operative on the leg? Who once got so mad at having to remove his shoes at an airport security line that he marched off to his plane, yelling "Keep them!" over his shoulder, and flew home in his socks? Who sometimes...

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