I forgot to post my column on Hillary’s wins in Ohio and Texas. For the many readers of this page (I know there are dozens of you) who get to the column through my portal, apologies. Here it is, in full, to save you any further clicking around.

Tenacity and hard work check Obama momentum
By Clive Crook
Published: March 5 2008 19:41 | Last updated: March 5 2008 19:41
Barack Obama remains favourite to win the Democratic nomination, but his advantage over Hillary Clinton has diminished.

Thanks to Texas and especially Ohio, there is a gleam in Mrs Clinton’s teeth once more. Just as in New Hampshire, just as on Super Tuesday, she has checked his supposedly irresistible momentum. Will commentators now stop saying that anything about this race is “inevitable”? The answer, inevitably, is no: we are as slow to learn as Mrs Clinton is to know when she is beat.

Mr Obama is still the favourite because he continues to lead in pledged delegates, allocated by the primaries and caucuses. Overturning this lead appears, as a matter of arithmetic, to be beyond Mrs Clinton. However, this by no means assures Mr Obama the nomination. The winner is going to be chosen, in effect, by the party’s unelected “superdelegates”, who can vote as they like.

The two campaigns will bring every pressure to bear. Mr Obama will say his lead in elected delegates obliges them to vote his way. Mrs Clinton will strive to neuter – I mean neutralise – that position. She will call for the disqualified delegates of Florida and Michigan (which broke the rules on the timing of their primaries) to be reinstated; she will call for Mr Obama’s caucus victories to be given less weight (arguing that the caucuses are not proper elections); above all, if she leads in the popular vote, she will say that this trumps Mr Obama’s delegate lead. This last seems especially important and it is now within her reach.

If you include Florida and Michigan (where Mr Obama was not even on the ballot, but so what?) then she already leads in the popular vote. Excluding Michigan but not Florida, she is within 300,000 votes of catching Mr Obama. Without either of those states, she is within 600,000 votes, out of a total cast of nearly 25m. Pennsylvania and the other remaining states give her a reasonable shot at closing that gap. If she does, watch the zeal with which she adopts upholding “the will of the people” as her watchword, elected delegates be damned. If she does not, her chances are less, but there will be other angles to work.

What went wrong for Mr Obama this week? The main answer must be Mrs Clinton’s remarkable tenacity. For once, her posture and her strategy have fully conformed to each other: she has been fighting hard, while making the case that the country needs a fighter in charge. She has also talked up her supposed advantage on national security, using an advertisement that asks voters who they want picking up the White House phone at 3am to deal with some emergency. John McCain also approves of that message, but this fight can wait.

And pity Austan Goolsbee, Mr Obama’s brilliant economic adviser, who dropped his boss in it by apparently assuring Canadian diplomats that Mr Obama’s tough talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement was political positioning and no cause for alarm. The timing could not have been worse, since no state is more sensitive to the supposed hurricane of destruction unleashed by imports than Ohio. Unfortunately, Mr Goolsbee’s steer was probably wishful thinking on his part. In any event, Mr Obama will now need to toughen up his anti-Nafta line even more, if that were possible.

Months more of vicious intra-party strife, and a tainted winner at the end. Of course, John McCain, as of Tuesday the anointed Republican nominee, is still favourite to lose in November. Many commentators regard it as inevitable.

In the spirit of my previous post, I’m not much interested for now in the elected-delegate count. I’m trying to keep tabs on the popular vote, on the theory that this will carry great weight with the superdelegates. As I write, only two-thirds of the Texas votes are in, but it looks as though Obama might eke out a narrow win there, to set against Hillary’s comfortable–though not crushing–win in Ohio. In terms of the popular vote, Vermont and Rhode Island will roughly cancel out. My back of the envelope (please don’t hold me to this) says that Hillary is on course to win a little over 53 percent of the votes cast on Tuesday, trimming Obama’s overall lead on that measure from roughly 900,000 to around 600,000. If she performs this well in the remaining primaries taken together, she would just fail to win a majority of the popular vote–excluding Florida. Add Florida back in, and she is almost exactly on schedule to tie the popular vote.

Whatever happens, she is not going to have a majority of elected delegates by the convention. But if she does as well as she did tonight or better for the rest of the nomination race, and if you count Florida (but not Michigan), she will have a case to put to the superdelegates. So the race goes on–and without a doubt it will be an increasingly bitter one.

All in all, a good night for Republicans.

Update:

Hillary is projected to win Texas narrowly. Let’s say 53.5 percent of the popular vote, reducing Obama’s lead to a little under 600,000. A further boost to morale and momentum, of course. But I think the rest of what I said stands.

Further update:

As I retire for the night I notice that the popular vote tally now puts Hillary ahead of Obama, so long as you add both Florida and Michigan (where, you recall, Obama was not on the ballot). Including Florida but not Michigan, Obama is about 300,000 votes ahead. Excluding both Florida and Michigan, he is a little less than 600,000 votes ahead.

The first Super Tuesday checked Obama’s momentum—but then he recovered with 11 straight wins in the following contests. That second remarkable surge had his campaign hoping for a knockout blow today—and even had many commentators calling for Hillary to withdraw. The Clinton campaign, playing the expectations game with some success, is now getting ready to deem anything but a clean sweep by Obama in the second Super Tuesday a setback for him. On the face of it, that seems absurd, but if Hillary wins comfortably in Ohio, and holds Obama to a draw in Texas—which is what the late polls are pointing to—the momentum will be back with her going into Pennsylvania, and this thing is by no means over.

Note that what follows is laid out in much more detail by the excellent Jay Cost at Real Clear Politics. This is just an abridged version of his analysis here and here. His line seems dead right to me.

The ceaseless focus on the elected delegates exaggerates the difficulty Hillary faces in turning this around. Unless Obama buries Hillary today—and the polls say that won’t happen—this race will go on, and it will turn in the end not on the ordinary delegates, but on the superdelegates. The question is, how will they decide which candidate to back? There are several scenarios, but the most likely is that they will be swayed by the popular vote. If Hillary can get ahead of Obama in the popular vote, she will have a strong moral claim to the support of the superdelegates. With the race for ordinary delegates inconclusive whatever happens in the remaining primaries, competition for the popular vote is the race that matters.

As of this morning, Hillary was behind roughly 52-48 in the popular vote. With the states remaining, she can still turn that around. Essentially she needs big winning margins—but not huge winning margins—in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined. That might not put her ahead in the elected-delegate count, but if she ends up ahead in the popular vote she can hope to get the superdelegates on side. The necessary winning thresholds for a lead in the popular vote depend on whether you take Michigan and Florida into account. Without those states (disqualified, for now, from the elected-delegate count) Hillary needs to win more than 55 percent of the popular vote, starting today, in all the remaining states taken together. If you include Florida (where Obama was at least on the ballot, unlike in Michigan) she needs to win more than 53 percent. If you include both Florida and Michigan (which would seem indefensible, though that will not trouble Hillary) the requirement shrinks to 52 percent. Reaching even the most demanding of those thresholds is hardly impossible.

Obama is still the favourite—and will remain the favourite unless Hillary crushes him today (in absolute terms, not relative to expectations). But if she does enough to stop the Obama momentum again, she will have a fighting chance of emerging the eventual winner. And, as Hillary never tires of saying, she is nothing if not a fighter.

Update:

This piece by Jonathan Alter goes through the delegate arithmetic. On the assumptions he describes–which are indeed quite favourable to Hillary–she can’t catch Obama on the elected-delegate count. But consider this paragraph:

So no matter how you cut it, Obama will almost certainly end the primaries with a pledged-delegate lead, courtesy of all those landslides in February. Hillary would then have to convince the uncommitted superdelegates to reverse the will of the people. Even coming off a big Hillary winning streak, few if any superdelegates will be inclined to do so. For politicians to upend what the voters have decided might be a tad, well, suicidal.

“Reverse the will of the people.” But what if these assumptions put Hillary ahead in the popular vote? I can’t run those numbers, and they depend in any case on further assumptions about turn-out. (Jay, help me.) But I’m guessing that the scenario Alter describes could be enough to put Hillary in front on the popular vote (especially if you include Florida). In which case, it would be Obama, not her, who could be accused of using the superdelegates to reverse the will of the people.

This is still unlikely, because Alter’s assumptions do, as he says, lean heavily in Hillary’s favour. But the point is, she can lose the elected-delegate count and win the popular vote–and that, in the end, may be the vote that matters most.

When Texas and Ohio vote in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries, they may bring Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the presidency to an end. If she loses either of those states, her bid is over barring the formalities. This is a position few expected her to be in. Not long ago, success in the primaries and victory in the general election were regarded as almost inevitable. What went wrong?

For the answer, one should turn (as always) to the teachings of Marx. “The secret of success in life is sincerity,” Groucho once famously observed. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

This truth about the human condition applies with particular force to politics. Mrs Clinton tries hard to fake sincerity – so hard it is painful to watch. Sometimes, in fact, I suspect that she really is sincere and only looks as though she is faking. Barack Obama, on the other hand, may actually be sincere – and if he is not, he fakes it so well it makes no difference. Elections are won and lost formany reasons, but if I had to point to just one in the present case, this would be it. (more…)

Gideon Rachman has posted a response to my post on his column about Obama’s speeches. I’ll offer a last brief word, and then leave the verdict on Obama’s speeches to history. First of all, though, on a personal note, let me say how stunned I am to be accused of (in my previous life at The Economist) “remorseless logic, fierce invective, and a total lack of sentimentality”. Gideon, you wound me, I bleed. Surely not. I was universally regarded as a complete softy–or so it seemed to me, at least. Don’t tell me that wasn’t so.

Though he still stops short of saying it outright, in his response Gideon relies more explicitly than before on the “Obama’s fans are all idiots” explanation of the candidate’s appeal. Obama, he suggests, is the Barbara Cartland of American politics. (I have to wonder how many people have been inspired by Barbara Cartland, but let that pass.) Gideon’s tastes are more refined than that–as are mine, needless to say. But Obama’s speeches impress a surprisingly wide demographic, if this point is correct. In fact, Obama seems especially liked by the kind of metropolitan intellectuals who share Gideon’s and my disdain for brainless romantic fiction. Something about him, whatever it is, clicks with poor urban blacks and with Harvard academics. As I pointed out, many of his political enemies–smart ones and stupid ones alike–think he gives a great speech.

If somebody is unmoved by a speech, there is nothing anyone can say to change his mind. It is a personal thing, no doubt. But the “Obama’s fans are all idiots” theory that underlies Gideon’s view seems to me just a case of poor observation. It simply isn’t true. (more…)

I’ve been giving some thought to last week’s column by Gideon Rachman on the “lousy, empty speeches” of Barack Obama. Gideon is a brilliant fellow and, it so happens, an old friend. It has troubled me that he could be so wrong about this, and I feel I owe it to him to set him straight.

Surely the simplest test of a speaker is the effect he has on his audience. It is indisputable that Obama has moved and even inspired hundreds of thousands of listeners. This is something that even his political enemies concede. His speeches might be “empty”—I’ll come back to that—but how can a political speech be “lousy” if it does exactly what a great political speech is supposed to?

One answer of course might be that the people Obama impresses are all idiots, or more than usually susceptible to mass hysteria. Since I myself find his speeches moving, this argument does not much appeal to me—but that might be how Gideon accounts for Obama’s success. Some of the adulation is exaggerated enough, I admit, to lend this view credence. But it isn’t just Obamaniacs, or Democrats, or wavering independents such as myself who admire the man’s way with a speech. People who would never dream of voting for him agree that he is a fabulous speaker. Has the whole country lost its mind over Obama’s oratory? I think I would rather say, “He is a great speaker. Just look at the results.”

Gideon is on firmer ground when he calls the speeches vacuous. The problem here, though, is that the best political speeches are almost always vacuous, at least in the sense that Gideon invokes—namely, failing to get “stuck into the detail”. (more…)

I filed a column yesterday that the FT will run on Monday (it will be posted on the blog Sunday night), asking what went wrong with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The answer of course is many things, not least Barack Obama, but the thing I focus on is Hillary’s difficulty with seeming genuine—such a contrast with Barack’s seemingly effortless authenticity. So much about her, so much of what she says, seems plotted, rehearsed, and false.

But I wish I had read this excellent article by Gloria Borger in US News first (thanks to Real Clear Politics for the link), because it might have made me tweak my argument somewhat. She concentrates on something very important which I think has been too little commented on–the fact, which is both obvious and astonishing when you think about it, that Hillary evidently does not care for politics.

William Jefferson Clinton, AKA the “Comeback Kid,” survived Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, impeachment, and open-heart surgery. He became a money-raising proposition for conservatives who hated him; a magnet for Democrats who loved his ideas and energy. During campaigns, the incorrigible candidate shook every hand and lingered in every crowd, as if he himself had been waiting hours in line to hear his own speech. Even in the darkest moments, a former staffer recalls, he always believed the sunny leader survives. “Hillary’s husband taught us all that the optimistic, positive candidate is the one who wins,” says a former Bill Clinton aide who supports Hillary Clinton. “He would tell us that constantly. And he was right.”

But there is no joy in Hillaryville. In its place are anger (at the press, for being soft on Barack Obama), angst (at losing 11 straight contests), and apoplexy (at Obama, for daring to challenge a nomination that was supposed to have been wrapped up by now). In an aside at last week’s Ohio debate, Clinton herself noted she hasn’t found much happiness lately. “It’s hard to find time to have fun on the campaign trail,” she said, by way of explaining an anti-Obama screed she had delivered a few days earlier. Translation: This should have been over with already. This wasn’t the plan. I don’t like it.

Yes. Exactly right. Can you imagine Bill ever saying, “It’s hard to find time to have fun on the campaign trail”? (more…)