On Tuesday night, CNN’s Jeff Toobin got it right. The result of Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, Toobin opined, was for the Democrats “the worst of all possible worlds”: an expected Hillary win, big enough to energize her going forward (indeed, the cash-strapped Clinton campaign soon announced it had raked in $10 million in the 24 hours after Pennsylvania), yet nowhere big enough to give her a chance of overtaking Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote.
Last Sunday, this column estimated Tuesday’s break-even or ‘default’ result as a Hillary 10-point win—her margin of victory in Ohio. She won by 9.
The expectations’ game was important, given that all the Clinton campaign really had going for it was spin. (Granted, it’s been spin with the enthusiastic connivance of the US television media. On successive broadcast days, eg, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews predicted a Hillary win “by 15 to 17 points,” and then downsized that to “10 points or upward,” before getting with the programme and calling 8 as the break-even point—just in time for him to announce on Tuesday night that Hillary had “exceeded expectations.”)In fact Obama did as well as he could have hoped. Pennsylvania is even more like Ohio than Ohio: a rust belt state with many more seniors and blue-collars workers, a higher proportion of women to men voters, and substantially fewer African-Americans, than Ohio; all demographics that heavily favoured Hillary. Instead, Obama cut his loss of the male white vote from 19 points in Ohio to 9 points in Pennsylvania, and narrowly lowered the margin by which he lost the state.
That he managed to actually improve slightly on his Ohio showing, even though the six weeks since then had been largely filled by anti-Obama ‘scandals’—the Reverend Wright hysteria, the flag pin nonsense, the William Ayers guilt-by-later-acquaintanceship attacks, the (widely indicted) Pennsylvania debate moderators’ blatant attempt to take him down—as well as Obama’s own ‘bitter-cling’ gaffe and lacklustre debate performance—showed remarkable resilience.
He came out of Pennsylvania with a net loss of 210,000 voters and between 8 and 12 delegates. He’s likely to recoup most or even all of these in North Carolina, where polls currently show him with a comfortable double digit lead—this, of course, assuming that the Clinton-Republican attacks on him there prove as impotent as they did in Pennsylvania.
(A new Republican Party of North Carolina ad cuts from a photo of Obama-and-Wright to a clip of Wright’s ‘God damn America!’ rant, and warns viewers that Obama is “too extreme.” Pro-Obama bloggers quickly pointed out the obvious: that if Republicans thought Obama would be a weaker opponent of McCain’s than Clinton, they wouldn’t be campaigning so fervently for Hillary.)
The Clinton campaign’s latest spin is to downplay North Carolina, while framing the much smaller Indiana as ‘the next Pennsylvania.’
FirstRead.com’s Chuck Todd, however, called North Carolina “a potential sinkhole [for Clinton]…a big state [where] the gains Clinton made in the popular vote…could be wiped away completely.” North Carolina, concluded Todd, “is actually more make-or-break [for Hillary] than Indiana.”
(Todd also remarked that, in 42 of 45 contests to date, the candidate who received the biggest political endorsements in a state has ended up winning it. Clinton is supported in Indiana by Governor Evan Bayh, but in North Carolina “almost every notable state politico” is backing Obama.)
Curiously, a sudden sharp disconnect appears to have arisen between the US television and print media over the Democratic race. While, after Pennsylvania, the TV talking heads almost unanimously fell to analyzing both those results and upcoming contests exclusively in terms of Where The Black Vote Is—thus ratifying the racist perspective first planted by Bill Clinton in South Carolina, when he implied that Obama was merely the Black/s’ candidate—the NYT editorialised thunderously on Wednesday:
“The Pennsylvania campaign… was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the… contests that preceded it. Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process… It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.”
The paper noted that “On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden.”
And the Times ended with a reality check and a warning that it might yet withdraw its endorsement of Clinton. “Mrs Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her.
Mrs Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race.”
The morning after Pennsylvania, the Associated Press also went with a reality check. “Hillary Clinton,” the AP advised, “should savour the moment before she has to face the reality of time running out on her once-invincible campaign… the dynamics of the race are the same as they’ve been for more than two months.”
The mood among Democrats was darkening. Adam Nagourney noted in theNYT : “For better or worse — and many Democrats fear it is for worse — the race goes on,” and reported the Democratic governor of Tennessee lamenting: “This is exactly what I was afraid was going to happen. They are going to just keep standing there and pounding each other and bloodying each other…”
Finally, the Times’ senior female correspondents weighed in. Gail Collins observed tartly: “Ever since Barack Obama’s campaign took fire with his call for a politics that was bipartisan and sensible and uplifting, Hillary has been telling her party that this was a pipe dream… And if old politics are all we’re going to get, why not hire Hillary? Forget about another Morning in America. Clinton’s on the move, and it’s a dark and stormy night.”
Added Maureen Dowd: “The Democrats watch in horror as Hillary continues to scratch up the once silvery sheen on Obama.” Dowd advised the Democrats—“before they devour themselves once more”—to take a cue from Dr Seuss’s ‘Marvin K. Mooney, Will You Please Go Now!’ and tell Hillary to “Go, now!”
But they won’t, of course. And she wouldn’t, even if they did.
And so Obama’s Golgotha-trek continues…
…while John McCain—a sitting-duck candidate, if there ever was one—thunders to Americans, in a comically irrelevant new ad that irresistibly recalls Dr Strangelove: “Stick together! Be brave! Have faith! Never surrender!”…as though he, McCain, were Winston Churchill, and the world comprised wholly of Nazi panzer divisions, all intent on bringing war, war, war to America’s peaceably fruited plains and spacious skies.
(We regret that we were unable to bring you Wayne Browne’s column on the race for the White House in our edition yesterday. Here it is below.)
