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Obama resurgent
February 13, 2008
Obama’s impressive sweep of the latest primaries and caucuses renews and strengthens the momentum he had in the days before Super Tuesday. His support seems to be be deepening and broadening; and Hillary’s lead among women and lower-income households (two of her three most loyal constituencies: the third is Hispanics) seems to be wavering. But in case you’re thinking that Hillary is finished–as I am inclined to–see this interesting corrective from Jay Cost at RealClearPolitics. Demographics rather than momentum can explain the new results, according to this analysis. The race might still go all the way to the convention.
And though he would say this, wouldn’t he, Mark Penn, Hillary’s chief strategist, thinks that she still has a path to the nomination.
Plainly Hillary needs to win, and win big, in delegate-laden Texas and Ohio on March 4th. Even if she succeeds there, her campaign will need to lean on the party’s "superdelegates" (party officials and other grandees, whose votes are worth thousands of the ordinary kind) to support her. Would they be willing to do that, if she was behind both in the popular vote within the party and in the share of pledged delegates? If I were a superdelegate, and even if I were convinced that Hillary was the better choice, I would not be willing: it is just too blatantly undemocratic.
And what about the delegates from Michigan and Florida, which the party disqualified when the states defied the ruling over the timing of their primaries? Both voted for Hillary, but nobody campaigned in either place and in Michigan Obama wasn’t even on the ballot. Asked on CNN whether the Clinton campaign would call for some kind of rerun of those elections, one of Hillary’s helpers blandly said that there was no need: those results were in, and it was just a question of un-disenfranchising the voters. If Hillary did get the nomination thanks to the party’s uber-voters and to some kind of legal stunt involving Michigan and Florida, I would expect to hear fewer complaints from Democrats in future about Bush-Gore 2000. But I cannot see the Democratic party electorate standing for this–and, in any case, what would such squalid manoeuvrings do for the candidate’s chances in the general election?
If Hillary’s campaign collapses with defeat in Texas or Ohio, that will be the moment to concede gracefully. She could move on from this defeat with something of her reputation intact. I bet her truest friends are starting to wish for this outcome. But if those states leave her with a meaningful chance of the nomination–so long as she bends every rule and exerts every kind of pressure to get the result–we will find out just how much of her own reputation and her party’s prospects she is prepared to stake on this venture.
My guess is that Hillary will not concede gracefully.
Rabin once famously remarked, in a thinly disguised swipe at Shimon Peres, that attaining the position of prime minister was for him an option, not an obsession (In Hebrew this sounds better). I have a feeling that for Hillary the presidency is an obsession, not an option.
In any case Obama will ultimately lose to McCain. When the moment of truth arrives there will not be enough Americans willing to take the plunge and vote for an untested known unknown, no matter what heights he achieves by then with his hot air balloon.
Posted by: RCS | February 13th, 2008 at 10:38 pm | Report this commentRCS may well be right about McCain versus Obama. I would guess that it will largely depend on how bad the economy looks by then. But Americans voted for George W. Bush in 2000 - not merely untested, but virtually incapable of using words at all.
Posted by: Martin Wolf | February 14th, 2008 at 6:19 pm | Report this commentWell actually Americans voted for Al Gore in 2000 — it was the Supreme Court which invested George W. Bush. As for 2004, those elections were warped by the aftermath of 9/11: incumbents usually win in times of national crises, whether perceived or otherwise, as with Lincoln or FDR (this is not to imply that George W. Bush stands in any comparison with these figures).
Posted by: RCS | February 14th, 2008 at 7:27 pm | Report this commentMr Wolf is right that GW Bush’s electoral victory came despite his being ‘not merely untested, but virtually incapable of using words at all’.
The gentleman, though, did not expound on why it happened anyway, and RCS’s conventional-wisdom assertion fails to take into account even more significant co-existing facts:
WHY BUSH WON IN 2000:
Because Mr Gore was
1 so uninspiring that he could not get even his and his father’s home state to support him (which, if he had managed, would have made FL and the SC irrelevant);
2 ran on his record as VP during the preceding eight successful years, while all-but-denying the man who was President during the same period.
WHY BUSH WON IN 2004:
Because the alternative–from post-Vietnam, to the Senate and throughout the campaign–consistently talked and acted in a manner which made him an even more alarming prospect than the incompetent incumbent.
FACT: One can win by default.
THE QUESTION: When a hero and public servant with a record of achievements but with corresponding baggage–’not Conservative enough’, ‘not tough enough on illegal immigration’, not implacably anti-war, old, with warts and all–is pitted against one whose heroism is built upon oratorical brilliance in promising to build a record of achievements, will it happen once again?
Posted by: HKLivingston, 26, investment banker | February 15th, 2008 at 5:58 am | Report this comment[…] won big. Last week I pointed to an interesting article by Jay Cost which argued against the idea that Obama had already built […]
Posted by: FT.com | Clive Crook’s blog | The Wisconsin effect | February 20th, 2008 at 3:11 pm | Report this comment