Stumper

SMALLEY: The Raison D'Etre Du Jour

2008-05-09T20:42:26Z

Elise Amendola / AP

Here's my NEWSWEEK colleague (the indomitable) Suzanne Smalley with a dispatch from the Clinton roadshow in Oregon. Despite speculation to contrary, Suzanne reports, the candidate is actually "escalating her rhetoric" against Obama.

At a rally in Central Point, Ore., last night, Hillary Clinton didn't leave any doubt that she's still in it to win it. She challenged Barack Obama to a debate in Portland on Friday, where they'll both be campaigning, saying she'll meet "absolutely anytime, anywhere." She stressed her knowledge of controversial local issues, saying Obama is on the wrong side of them. And she taunted Obama for talking a good game without backing it up, not unlike, Clinton said, President George W. Bush.

"My opponent voted for legislation … which gave more tax subsidies to the oil companies, more tax subsidies to the nuclear industry, and which took away the right of states to determine whether [liquefied natural gas] terminals would be placed along their coast. So there's a lot we should be debating about," she told a raucous crowd of about 1,000 supporters. "Back in 2000 some people voted for President Bush because he went around telling people in settings like this that he was a compassionate conservative. Nobody knew what that meant, did they? But it sure did sound good."

...

The New York senator's resilience and unflinchingly broad smile belied her grim circumstances, three days after she failed to perform well enough in the North Carolina and Indiana primaries to turn the race around. Despite her strong rhetoric, it is now clear that Clinton can't win the Democratic nomination unless the superdelegates overturn the popular vote and Barack Obama's pledged delegate lead. Even if Florida and Michigan votes are fully counted, Clinton still will finish the primary race behind Obama in pledged delegates. How then does the campaign justify continuing?

To hear Clinton's chief superdelegate hunter Harold Ickes tell it, Clinton is continuing the fight because she's convinced she can beat McCain. Clinton has refused to come out and say Obama can't beat McCain (when pressed to by several debate moderators, she has demurred). But in an interview with NEWSWEEK, Ickes strongly suggested that Obama can't win come November. "We have to remember McCain is not a standard, off-the-shelf Republican," Ickes said, echoing the argument he says he's making to superdelegates, and pointing up Clinton's inarguable strength with Roman Catholics, Hispanics and elderly voters in key November battleground states such as Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. "He will have a lot of appeal for Hispanics. He'll trounce [Obama]."

The pool of uncommitted superdelegates—numbering 230 or so--being wooed by the Clinton camp are worried about Obama's general-election viability, Ickes said. He stressed that if Obama can't win Florida or Ohio—both states in which he has polled less favorably than Clinton—then states like New Mexico and Nevada will take on more importance. And Ickes suggested Obama can't win in those places either. "Big Hispanic populations," Ickes said. "If you look at the reach she has from a general-election perspective, she is a much stronger candidate. She has a much stronger base in swing or Purple States and she has a much stronger base to get to 270."

Clinton has also started mentioning race more frequently. In an article published yesterday in USA Today, Clinton said she would have a larger group of voters to draw a winning coalition from because "Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again." What happened to playing nice? Even as surrogates have called for a less bitterly fought campaign, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein publicly warned Clinton yesterday that she is concerned about the "negative dividends" of the contest. Some advisers have been quoted speaking privately about plans to keep the campaign's tone positive going forward. But the candidate only seems to be escalating her rhetoric.

READ THE REST HERE.

Obama Gives West Virginia the Cold Shoulder

2008-05-09T19:03:25Z

The next state on the Democratic primary schedule is, of course, West Virginia, which has Tuesday all to its amoeba-shaped self. Why is it, then, that Barack Obama has yet to book a single stop in, say, Shepherdstown, Charleston, Philippi, Sutton, Fayetteville, Fairlea or Bluefield--all of which have already hosted either Bill or Hillary Clinton?

Because he has no chance of winning--and no one seems to care.

Appearing on ABC's Nightline back in November 2007, Obama slipped into Bob Dole mode for this slightly overconfident assessment of his electoral chances: "Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama's been there." The Mountain State seems unlikely to confirm his analysis--to put it mildly. Rasmussen released this year's first West Virginia poll in mid-March; it gave Clinton a 29-point advantage. The next survey, taken in early April, showed her ahead by a mere 15 points. But by the time May rolled around, Clinton's numbers had more than rebounded. In the latest polls, she now leads Obama by a whopping 40 to 43 points; he doesn't even break 24 percent. If those margins hold on Tuesday, the heavily white, heavily working-class West Virginia stands to be her strongest showing to date. Obama knows that no amount of campaigning could overcome Clinton's demographic advantages in Appalachia. Faced with a place that stands no chance of becoming "Barack Obama country," then, Barack Obama is choosing not to go there. Better to keep expectations low. "She is going to do very well in West Virginia," he said today in Beaverton, Ore., 2,600 miles from West Virginia. "She will win... in all likelihood by [a] significant margin."

(For the record, Obama is still scrounging for votes--he's just not doing it in person. Since April 25, the Obama campaign has been airing ad about soaring gas prices ("Nothing's Changed") on W.V. TV. And on Wednesday, state field director Rachel Sigman urged supporters, via email, to "join us in West Virginia--just as so many of you did for North Carolina and Indiana--to go door-to-door and build our movement here." Chicago's goal, of course, is to get as many delegates as possible on Tuesday--without making it obvious that they're actually, you know, exerting any effort. Obama may stop by Monday to visit a coal mine or something, but only because he's heading from Oregon to Washington, D.C. and it's, like, on the way.)

That said, as much as any other post-Tuesday data point--Tim Russert declaring that "we now know who the Democratic nominee's going to be, and no one's going to dispute it," for example--Obama's West Virginia cold shoulder signals that his epic clash with Clinton is finally coming to an end. If the Mountain State had scheduled its primary for, say, April 29--i.e., the week after Pennsylvania--a 35-point loss in blue-collar country would've done him serious damage by amplifying the storyline du jour: namely, that Obama's Bubba Gap represented a potentially fatal flaw. But at this point, everyone knows that West Virginia's measly 28 delegates (or the 179 up for grabs afterwards) can't change the calculus of the race, meaning that they can't change the new narrative--Obama has the nomination sewn up--either. That's why the Illinois senator can get away with brushing off the entire contest. For her part, Clinton clearly wants West Virginia to count. "I think West Virginia is a test," she said Thursday in Charleston, noting that the state is rich in the "Catholic voters and Hispanic voters and blue-collar workers and seniors" that Dems will need to win in November. "It's a test for me, it's a test for Sen. Obama."

Unfortunately for Clinton, it's a test that Obama can afford to fail--and still finish first in his class.

The High/Low Campaign

2008-05-09T17:14:22Z

You'd think he was running for Toastmaster. Standing in front of a wall of glass last night with the lights of midtown Manhattan sparkling behind him, John McCain put aside the petty sniping of the campaign trail and asked the elite names gathered for the Time 100 Gala--Dan Senor, Campbell Brown, Rahm Emanuel, Paul Wolfowitz, Lance Armstrong, Brian Williams, Joe Scarborough--to raise their glasses to his Democratic opponents. "Senator Obama is a man of unusual eloquence, who has performed the very worthy service of summoning to the political arena Americans who once wrongly thought it of little benefit to them," he said. "Senator Clinton has demonstrated great tenacity and courage; two qualities I have always esteemed. I count myself among their many admirers. Please join me, then, in a toast to my opponents and compatriots, Senators Clinton and Obama, and to the noisy, contentious, striving, beautiful country we hope to lead." Somewhere, a bald eagle shed a single tear.

Kidding aside, McCain's kind words would've been almost enough to warm the cold cockles of this cynic's heart--if, a mere two hours earlier, top aide Mark Salter hadn't slammed "Obama's new brand of politics" as "hypocrisy." "First, you demand civility from your opponent, then you attack him, distort his record and send out surrogates to question his integrity," wrote an incensed Salter in a memo to reporters. "It is the oldest kind of politics there is."

Dizzy, anyone? Welcome to the High/Low campaign. For politicos salivating over the start of the general-election slugfest--or those of you simply eager to turn the page on this interminable Democratic primary contest--yesterday provided a tantalizing preview of what a McCain-Obama face-off will look like come fall. Think split-personality disorder. Politics, of course, is about competition, and every politician needs (and, in truth, wants) to throw a few elbows. McCain and Obama are no different. But both of this year's candidates have built their unusually strong political brands on the perception that they are, in some sense, "cleaner than thou": McCain is the honorable, straight-talking war hero bent on reform and eager to reach across the aisle; Obama is the vibrant, youthful catalyst of a new politics of unity rather than division. The result: a race in which each candidate burnishes his brand by constantly stressing his own civility--but instead of refraining from attacks on his rival, simply attacks his rival's every remark as evidence that said rival has broken his promise to be civil. You're a typical politician! No, you're a typical politician! First the high, then the low.

Yesterday's prototypical spat started on Wednesday, when McCain appeared on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and defended his earlier characterization of Obama as Hamas's candidate of choice. ""Do you feel bad that you said that?" Stewart asked. "They think I’m their worst nightmare," McCain replied, noting that a U.S. Hamas spokesman had confessed that the group was hoping Obama would be elected president. "And I think that I’m their worst nightmare as well." McCain was trying, of course, to contrast his considerable foreign-policy cred with Obama's relative inexperience--a contrast that he hopes will define the campaign. Sure, one could make the case that McCain, who called for "civil campaign" in early April, was crossing some sort of line. After all, Obama's position on Hamas is indistinguishable from McCain's--he says it's a terrorist organization and refuses to negotiate unless they recognize Israel and renounce violence. What's more, there's something slightly unfair about suggesting that Obama is soft on terror simply because some Hamas spokesman thinks he will "lead the world community... with[out] domination and arrogance." But I'd say McCain's swipe is hardly a gross moral outrage--and it's certainly no worse than Obama constantly mischaracterizing McCain's support for a passive, South Korean-style military presence in Iraq as "100 years of war."

Predictably, Obama saw it differently--and that's when the cleaner-than-thou festivities began. Speaking to Wolf Blitzer yesterday on CNN, he reacted to McCain's remarks with a theatrical show of pity. "This is offensive," he said. "And it's disappointing, because John McCain always says he's not going to run this kind of politics, so to engage in that kind of smear is unfortunate." Oh, the sorrow of it all. But Obama wasn't done. "It's an example," he added, twisting the knife, "of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination." By "losing his bearings," Obama meant, of course, that McCain was betraying his maverick rep by pandering to his party's hawkish right-wingers for his own political gain--which is a pretty edgy attack in and of itself. But the McCain camp quickly accused him of not of straightforward nastiness but of (gasp!) subliminal ageism--the more Machiavellian charge. "Let us be clear about the nature of Senator Obama's attack today," wrote Salter. "He used the words 'losing his bearings' intentionally, a not particularly clever way of raising John McCain's age as an issue." A-ha!, he practically crowed. It's Obama who's the sketchy pol--not McCain! Team Obama's response, via spokesman Bill Burton? "It’s clear why a candidate offering a third term of George Bush’s disastrous economic policies and failed strategy in Iraq would want to distract and attack but it’s not the kind of campaign John McCain has promised the American people that he would run." Broken promises, blah, blah, blah. After which Burton added, "Nanny nanny boo boo."

The truth is, both Obama and McCain are engaging in what Salter called "the oldest kind of politics there is"--attacking their opponent, distorting his record and sending out surrogates to question his integrity. It's just that they've both premised their campaigns on civility--and thus are both relying on "incivility" (rather than, say, issues) as the prime ammunition for their attacks. On the Today show yesterday morning, McCain's wife Cindy insisted that her "husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all." "I believe we're going to see a great debate, which the American public deserves," she said. "None of this negative stuff, though, you won't see it come out of our side -- at all." Sorry, Cindy--if yesterday was any indication, we're in for plenty of negativity before November. I'm not sure a slapfest over who has the least integrity is what America wants right now. But I fully expect McCain and Obama to keep making every effort to claim the high ground--even if they have to take the low road to get there.

Cheers.

From the Department of 'Told You So'

2008-05-09T14:36:27Z

Sure, no one likes a braggart. But in this case, we couldn't help ourselves.

"Could Money Woes Eventually Force Clinton from the Race?", Stumper, April 3, 2008
"Clinton's Cash Woes Continue," Stumper, April 21, 2008
It's clear from Clinton's FEC filings that she's barely breaking even. Even though the New York senator raised more than $20 million in March, and reports having more than $30 million in cash on hand, she's only allowed to use $8 million of that war chest against Barack Obama in the Democratic primary... With more than $10 million in debt, Clinton is technically in the red, and she's spending money as fast as it comes in ($22 million disbursed in March versus $20 million raised). Meanwhile, Obama has $51 million in his vault--with a full $45 million available for the primary. Going forward, this matters... It's not that money determines electoral outcomes. Obama massively outspent Clinton in Texas and Ohio and still lost the primaries; Clinton will likely win Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and Puerto Rico despite the dinero differential. But pecuniary perceptions are important... "If Clinton is perceived to be in financial peril, she becomes a much less attractive investment for donors deciding where to give their money"... As the clock ticks down, Clinton will have fewer chances to gain delegates and votes, and Obama will appear more and more inevitable. Wins in Indiana and North Carolina on May 6--hardly a sure thing, but possible--would only accelerate that process. All of which is to say that if Obama "looks like the nominee" at some point before the convention, Clinton's financial intake may flatline. In that case, she probably won't have the rainy-day money necessary to keep fighting (unless it's more of her own).

"Short of Cash, Clinton is Forced to Cut Spending," New York Times, May 9, 2008
Mrs. Clinton’s diminished political momentum, following Tuesday’s loss in the North Carolina primary and her narrow victory in Indiana, appears to have had a dampening effect on her fund-raising, aides said, increasing the likelihood that Mrs. Clinton will lend her campaign more of her own money beyond the $11 million she has already provided. Clinton advisers said Mrs. Clinton was committed to spending more of her own cash on the campaign if necessary... Mrs. Clinton had been increasingly relying on Internet donations this spring from new and small-amount contributors; the day after she won the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, the campaign brought in a record $10 million online. But Hassan Nemazee, one of Mrs. Clinton’s national finance chairmen, put the amount she collected online in the 24 hours after the Indiana and North Carolina primaries at only “$1 million-plus" ... Top fund-raisers working for Mrs. Clinton said that enthusiasm among donors had fallen sharply and that they had little confidence there would be a financial turnaround. They said that some donors had questioned why they should give more money when another set of numbers — the calculus to win enough delegates for the nomination — seemed so against Mrs. Clinton at this point.

In other words, the "rainy day" has finally arrived--and for Clinton, the only money left is "more of her own."

The Filter: May 9, 2008

2008-05-09T12:29:35Z

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

THINKING ABOUT NOVEMBER
(Paul Krugman, New York Times)
What can be done to heal the party’s current divisions? More tirades from Obama supporters against Mrs. Clinton are not the answer — they will only further alienate her grass-roots supporters, many of whom feel that she received a raw deal. Nor is it helpful to insult the groups that supported Mrs. Clinton, either by suggesting that racism was their only motivation or by minimizing their importance. After the Pennsylvania primary, David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, airily dismissed concerns about working-class whites, saying that they have “gone to the Republican nominee for many elections.” On Tuesday night, Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist, declared that “we don’t have to just rely on white blue-collar voters and Hispanics.” That sort of thing has to stop. One thing the Democrats definitely need to do is give delegates from Florida and Michigan — representatives of citizens who voted in good faith, and whose support the party may well need this November — seats at the convention. And to the extent that campaigning matters, Mr. Obama should center his campaign on economic issues that matter to working-class families, whatever their race. The point is that Mr. Obama has an extraordinary opportunity in this year’s election. He should do everything possible to avoid squandering it.

OBAMA SEEKS TO UNIFY PARTY FOR NOVEMBER
(Shailagh Murray and Perry Bacon, Jr., Washington Post)
Returning to Washington yesterday, Obama was mobbed by well-wishers as he walked onto the House floor. But behind the scenes, his campaign worked with a light touch to win over uncommitted superdelegates and allies of Clinton, mindful of not appearing overconfident and of the fact that they would need the backing of the candidate, her husband and their supporters in the fall. With numerous prominent Democrats believed to be waiting in the wings to endorse his candidacy, Obama appears poised to win the pledged delegates and superdelegates he will need to claim the Democratic nomination as early as May 20, when Kentucky and Oregon vote.

CLINTON ASKS SUPERS TO COMMIT IN PRIVATE
(Ben Smith and Amie Parnes, Politico)
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's visit to Capitol Hill this week may have been more about weighing her support than it was about wooing superdelegates. According to a senior Democratic aide, Clinton asked some uncommitted superdelegates if they could commit to her privately--without the political risks of a public endorsement--so that she could gauge whether she has the support she feels she needs to remain a viable candidate... One Clinton supporter familiar with the meetings described the senator's "ask" as "vague" ...Obama, by contrast, took the Hill by storm Thursday. In the morning, he met with a large group of uncommitted Blue Dog Democrats [the House moderate and conservative coalition] at a townhouse owned by UPS. Then he walked over to the House and spent half an hour working the left side of the chamber, shaking hands, signing autographs and posing for pictures. In the afternoon, he spent nearly three hours at the Democratic National Committee, where he met with a number of superdelegates, including four North Carolina congressmen. “We seem to be making progress,” Obama told reporters after his meetings ended on Thursday.

MORE: Obamamania Sweeps the Hill (Ryan Grim, Politico)
As Obama made his way slowly through the House mob, reporters piled up outside the nearest door to the House floor, craning their necks to get a look. Security guards pressed through the media crowd, repeatedly asking the Fourth Estate to keep a lane open for lawmakers. Supporters and opponents alike maneuvered to get face time, whether it was 73-year-old Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.) patiently waiting his turn or Rep. Alcee L. Hastings (D-Fla.), a Clinton supporter, giving Obama a big hug. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.) had the man autograph today's copy of the NY Daily News. (Cover: "It's his Party.") Reps. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.), a Clinton backer, and Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) gave him bear hugs on the floor, as well. Even Republicans were star-struck. Rep. Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.) said she was escorting a group of elementary school students onto the House floor when Obama made his entrance.

FOR HILLARY CLINTON, NO 'CLEAR PATH TO VICTORY'--NOR TO AN EXIT
(Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times)
She's darting around the country like a full-fledged presidential candidate, but within Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's circle of advisors and donors, the conversation has turned to how she can make a dignified exit from the race. But for all the signs of normalcy, much of the infrastructure that keeps the New York senator's campaign going -- the aides, donors and political allies -- is resigned to the hard reality that the Democratic nomination now appears out of reach. One Clinton aide said Thursday: "There is a profound sadness" among the staff. "I don't think anyone sees that there's a clear path to victory here."... Ultimately, an aide said, Clinton will decide with her husband what to do; staff won't be consulted on so momentous a decision... Some members of Clinton's circle are thinking through the conditions under which she might concede the race. One supporter familiar with the campaign's operations said that Clinton wanted to go out on a positive note -- say, after winning in West Virginia and Kentucky, whose primaries are May 13 and 20, respectively.

MCCAIN SETS STAGE FOR FALL RUN
(Laura Meckler and Elizabeth Holmes, Wall Street Journal)
Sen. McCain received the gift of time to lay the groundwork for his fall campaign, as Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought each other for the Democratic nomination. Now that the Democratic fight appears to be nearing an end, the Arizona senator will soon find out how effectively he used the time. Sen. Obama already has begun pivoting toward the general election. Soon, he is likely to unleash attack ads aimed at defining Sen. McCain. With vastly more money, Sen. Obama will be able to flood the airwaves as voters are forming impressions.

MORE: GOP Voters Still Dissing McCain (Jonathan Martin, Politico)
Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee got a combined 27 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania last month, long after the GOP nomination had been settled in McCain's favor. On Tuesday, Paul, Huckabee and Mitt Romney received a combined 23 percent in Indiana. Alan Keyes, Huckabee, Paul and "No Preference" took 26 percent in North Carolina... Aides to McCain and other observers say the results are less than meets the eye. They argue that the lingering votes for Paul and Huckabee—who together won about one-fifth of the vote in Indiana and North Carolina—represent vestigial passion for two candidates who developed a fervent, if narrow, grassroots following. Still, for a candidate viewed with suspicion by some in his party’s base, the dissenting votes are a nuisance he could do without.

LET THEM EAT ARUGULA
(Jonathan Chait, New Republic)
The dying days of the Hillary Clinton campaign have brought the breathtaking spectacle of a candidate lashing out at every element of public life that has nourished her career. The über-wonk has disparaged economists and expertise. The staunch ally of black America has attacked her opponent for lacking support of "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans." People who thought they knew Hillary Clinton have gazed in astonishment: What has she become? The answer is, a conservative populist... Liberal populism posits that the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest... Conservative populism prefers to divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans. Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg, West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of the little guy.

TEN 'WHAT IFS' ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON'S CAMPAIGN
(John Heilemann, New York)
9. What if Clinton had gone magnanimous on Obama and the Reverend Wright?
The GOP strategist Alex Castellanos offers an intriguing theory about how Hillary might have reacted differently, and more effectively, to the issue that threatened to swallow Obama. “After the Reverend Wright controversy, Obama was suffering the worst press month of his campaign,” he says. “Hillary had a choice. She could have gotten bigger, more presidential, less political; she could have risen to defend Obama, saying, ‘This is outrageous and has no place in politics.’ Instead, she chose to become smaller, more political, less presidential. She diminished the value of the attacks on him by making them hers. Her instincts betrayed her. What if she had chosen to soar above a weakened Obama? That was her moment. And I believe she missed her last great opportunity to win this race.”

MCCAIN PUSHED LAND SWAP THAT BENEFITS BACKER
(Matthew Mosk, Washington Post)
Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers. Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.

Why Florida and Michigan Won't Matter in the End

2008-05-08T22:09:52Z

At 3:15 p.m. this afternoon, "Hillary Clinton" sent a "letter" to "Barack Obama"--and hundreds of reporters--asking that he "join [her] in working with representatives from Florida and Michigan and the Democratic National Committee to arrive at a solution that honors the votes of the millions of people who went to the polls" in those disputed primaries. The point? To force her foe to agree that the January votes in the Great Lakes and Sunshine States were legitimate and that their delegates should be apportioned accordingly--which, since she "won" both contests, would undoubtedly benefit her. Anything less, she implied, would be undemocratic.

Seeing as "Barack Obama" has yet to give "Hillary Clinton" his answer, I thought I'd supply one for him:

"Why not?"

Of course, the Obama campaign has its fair share of objections. For starters, there's that pesky, old-fashioned, admittedly absurd notion known as "following the rules." The Democratic Party prohibits any state other than Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina from holding its primary before Feb. 5. So when Florida and Michigan threatened in late 2007 to pull the trigger on Jan. 15 and Jan. 29, respectively, the DNC gave them a choice: reschedule--or lose your delegates. They refused, hence their current no-delegate status. According to critics, reinstating those delegates now would undermine the DNC's authority over the nominating process; who will stop Guam, they say, when it schedules its primary for Thanksgiving 2012?

The second reason: last winter, both Clinton and Obama deferred to the DNC and agreed not to "campaign or participate" in either election; Obama even removed his name from the Michigan slate. So while Clinton "beat" her rival 50-33 in Florida and trounced "uncommitted" 55-40 in the Great Lakes State, one can't help but suspect that not campaigning and/or not appearing on the ballot somewhat affected Obama's showing--not to mention that turnout has a way of declining when voters are told that the election doesn't matter.

Finally, there's the stubborn little fact that Clinton completely opposed recognizing Michigan and Florida until after the primaries--i.e., when she realized she might need their delegates to win the nomination. "It's clear that this election they're having [in Michigan] is not going to count for anything," she said during an interview with New Hampshire Public Radio in October 2007. She wasn't alone. Two months earlier, Clinton adviser Harold Ickes actually voted to strip the rogue states of their delegates as a member of the DNC's Rules and Bylaws committee--"to prevent the gaming of the system," he said. Later than fall, Patti Solis Doyle, then Clinton's campaign manager, pledged not to compete in either contest--and was unequivocal as well. "We believe Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina play a unique and special role in the nominating process... and the DNC's rules and its calendar provide the necessary structure to respect and honor that role," she said. "Thus, we will... adhere to the DNC-approved nominating calendar." And when Michigan pushed for an early vote in 2004, then-DNC chairman--and current Clinton aide--Terry McAuliffe put his foot down. "If I allow you to do that, the whole system collapses," McAuliffe said (at least according to his memoir)."The closest [Michigan's delegates will] get to Boston will be watching it on television. I will not let you break this entire nominating process for one state. The rules are the rules." But when Clinton "won" Michigan on Jan. 15--and presumably caught a glimpse of the polling that showed her well ahead in Florida--she quickly changed her tune. "I believe our nominee will need the enthusiastic support of Democrats in these states to win the general election," she said on Jan. 25. "And so I will ask my Democratic convention delegates to support seating the delegations from Florida and Michigan." Ickes, Solis Doyle and McAuliffe immediately fell in line.

So I'd say it's understandable if the Obama campaign doesn't seem particularly eager to dole out Florida and Michigan's 300 pledged delegates in accordance with each state's illegitimate popular vote--after all, Clinton would be gaining far more delegates than she deserves (and enough, her campaign seems to think, to keep her candidacy alive). But a little logic--and back-of-the-envelope math--shows that Obama has nothing to lose by giving Clinton what she wants.

Here goes. In Florida, the former First Lady "won" 105 delegates to Obama's 67, while in Michigan Clinton "won" 73 to uncommitted's 55. For the sake of argument, let's award all those uncommitted votes to Obama. That brings his two-state total to 122; Clinton gains 178. Has she caught up in the current pledged-delegate count? Nope. Obama led 1589 to 1424 before, according to RealClear Politics; he now leads 1711 to 1602. What's more, it's impossible for Clinton to close the gap by June 3--even with Florida and Michigan in her column. Assuming she wins 60 percent of the remaining primary delegates--a very generous assumption, considering that Obama is heavily favored in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana--she'd still trail by 55 (2059-2004) at the end of regulation.

In other words, close but no cigar. With Florida and Michigan in the mix--and the new magic number set at 2,209--both candidates would still need some superdelegate support to cross the finish line. In this case, Obama would wind up 150 short of a majority, a setback from the 88 he'd need if the rogue states weren't included in the count. But the news for Clinton is worse. Believe it or not, in my Florida/Michigan/60-40 fantasy scenario she'd wake up on June 4 further from the nomination than if we'd just given her 60 percent of the remaining primary delegates and left Florida and Michigan alone. That is, 205 superdels short vs. 199.

And if it was difficult to imagine the superdelegates choosing Clinton over Obama before he conceded Florida and Michigan--he's outpaced her five to one among them since Super Tuesday--just imagine how inconceivable it would seem afterward. Obama will have taken the highest possible road. He will have allayed any lingering fears about alienating local voters in the fall. In an unprecedented (and unwarranted) show of magnanimity, he will have awarded Clinton every disputed delegate she could ever want--even the ones from a primary where his name didn't appear on the ballot. He will have offered a big, fat olive branch to all of her supporters. And he will have eliminated her last rationale for staying in the race. If you think the superdelegates will side with Clinton after that, think again. As Bob Buckhorn, a pro-Clinton consultant in Tampa, told the St. Petersburg Times today, such a move "could potentially open the floodgates for superdelegates to come on board, if he was that gracious and that comfortable in his inevitability."

Again, Obama has nothing to lose. I'm not saying he has to give in to Clinton, or even that he should. For Florida, his campaign is pushing a 50-50 delegate split instead, and Clinton has already refused to honor the Michigan state party's proposed 69-59 compromise--which shows that she, for one, has no intention of meeting anyone halfway. My point is simply this: Obama will win the nomination no matter what happens with Florida and Michigan--and may win it sooner, and in better political shape, if he lets Clinton have her way.

So why not?

McCain: Not Feeling Like a Million Bucks

2008-05-08T18:20:48Z

Of the many differences between John McCain and Barack Obama, here's the one that may prove most consequential come November: McCain has to come to the money; with Obama, the money comes to him.

Case in point. Last night, the Arizona senator came to the Sheraton in midtown Manhattan--not exactly swing-vote central--for one of the biggest fundraisers in New York political history. And by "big," we mean "most expensive." Scoring tickets to the main cocktail reception? $2,300. Getting into the VIP pre-party for a photo with McCain? $25,000. Having the honor of serving as one of 19 "co-hosts"? $100,000. Hearing Rudy Giuliani speak? Priceless.

By the time Henry Kissinger, Al D'Amato, Donald Trump, insurance titan Hank Greenberg, Blockbuster founder Wayne Huizenga, corporate raider Carl Icahn and former Democrat Joe Lieberman (along with 800 other supporters) left the building--the $100,000 crew also attended an afterparty at the home of Jets owner Woody Johnson--McCain had reportedly pocketed a cool $7 million.

The problem?

Well, setting aside the fact that the official McCain campaign can only accept a fraction of that total--anything over $2,300 per person goes to a hybrid "Victory" committee that redirects individual contributions of up to $70,000 through various McCain-centric funds--it's all, like, totally 1996. For comparison's sake, consider Obama's February fundraising haul: $55 million. That's $2 million a day, every day of the month. Because the vast majority of the moolah ($45 million, to be exact) came from hundreds of thousands of online donations of less than $200 each, Obama didn't have to waste valuable campaign time pleading with money men. Instead, he was out on the stump, winning over voters. Not only is McCain frittering away his credibility as a campaign-finance reformer by relying on a combined fund designed to skirt the very limits he himself put in place, but he's spending far more time and energy fundraising than Obama ever will—and still raising far less cash (as in, $40 million less each month). Unless his staff can somehow organize two $7-million galas per week for the remainder of the race, that disparity will continue through Election Day.

I wouldn't put my money on it.

With Friends Like These...

2008-05-08T15:35:52Z

Jennifer McClellan had her head under a beauty-salon hairdryer when the call came. A Virginia state House member--and Democratic superdelegate--McClellan had endorsed Hillary Clinton for president the day after January's Iowa caucuses. But now it was April. Over the past three months, Barack Obama had amassed an insurmountable pledged-delegate lead in a series of primary wins--including one in her home state. So McClellan was wavering. ""This is the most stressful thing I've been through in my whole life," she told the Washington Post. "It was never supposed to be like this." Luckily, when McClellan picked up the phone, it was Clinton herself on the other end of the line. After congratulating McClellan on her recent engagement, reports the Politico, the former First Lady "thank[ed] me for my past support and [said] that she thinks when the primaries are over, she will have the popular vote." McClellan was "touched."

Apparently she wasn't touched enough. On Wednesday morning, McClellan announced that she had switched her allegiance to Obama. "I think the time has come to support Senator Obama as the likely nominee," she said in a conference call with reporters. "Given what happened last night, it's very unlikely we will have a different result, and it is time to come together as a party and prepare for victory against John McCain in November."

She's not alone. In the 36 hours since Clinton lost the popular vote in North Carolina--and the expectations game in Indiana--a growing number of her supporters haven't been particularly, um, supportive. As McClellan told the Politico, "there are many of us who believe--regardless of who we endorsed--that if Sen. Obama goes into the convention with the most pledged delegates and the popular vote, and doesn't get the nomination, that could cause problems." On Wednesday, George McGovern--a former South Dakota senator and Democratic presidential nominee--jumped ship for Obama, and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Clinton superdelegate, told the Los Angeles Times that although "I have great fondness and great respect for Sen. Clinton and I'm very loyal to her... I'd like to talk with her and get her view on the rest of the race and what the strategy is." Feinstein's reason? "I think the race is reaching the point now where there are negative dividends from it, in terms of strife within the party." When asked yesterday whether Clinton should stay in the race, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, another vocal Clinton backer, sounded equally glum. "It's her decision to make and I'll accept what decision she makes," he said.

And the hits keep coming today, with two additional pro-Clinton pols adding their voices to the chorus. In an interview with The Hill, Rep. Dale Kildee, a Clinton supporter from Michigan, said the New York senator should halt her campaign and carefully consider whether it makes sense to keep going. “I urge her to take the day off and think very seriously about doing what’s best for the country and best for the party,” said Kildee. “I got straight A’s in math." His Congressional colleague from Florida, Rep. Alcee Hastings, agreed--“It’s improbable to suggest she’d be at the top of the ticket"--and gave Obama "a big hug" this morning on the House floor. (Another Clinton superdelegate, Rep. Yvette Clarke of New York, asked him to sign the cover of today's New York Daily News, according to the Politico. Headline: "It's His Party.") Even some of Clinton's advisers are now "resigned to their candidate’s likely loss," according to the Wall Street Journal. "They have turned in favor of her bowing out for party unity, according to several who asked not to be named.”

Could this sudden flurry of high-profile supporters-turned-skeptics force Clinton from the race? Don't count on it. As we've already written, she's made something of a moral cause of letting the remaining states vote and finding a solution to the Florida and Michigan dispute--and she isn't exactly the type to let the naysayers get under her skin. One possible reason: her supporters may "find it easier to accept Obama as their nominee if they were satisfied that Clinton was not pressured to drop out and had exhausted every conceivable opportunity to make her case." So barring the biggest (and most inconceivable) superdelegate switcheroo of all--that is, Bubba, her hubby, the former president--we're still betting that Hillary will continue to campaign at least until the end of the month.

How "touched" she is by the current show of support is another story.

Obama's Down-Ticket Effect

2008-05-08T14:50:34Z

Here's my colleague Sarah Kliff on whether Obama will help or hurt Democrats in local races.

Mississippi's 1st Congressional District is an unlikely political hotbed. Reliably Democratic territory for a century, the northeastern corner of the Magnolia State went Republican in 1994 and has stayed that way. In the last decade, incumbent Roger Wicker has routinely cruised to victory with margins of 30 percent. But when Gov. Haley Barbour appointed Wicker to fill out the unexpired term of retiring GOP Sen. Trent Lott last December, things got competitive. In a special election held late last month, conservative Democrat Travis Childers and Republican Greg Davis were the top vote-getters, but neither captured the majority needed to clinch a victory. So the two are headed into a May 13 run-off that suddenly has both national congressional campaign committees focusing on Columbus, Tupelo and the surrounding counties.

The seat hasn't drawn such scrutiny simply because it might flip from red to blue. It's also attracting attention because the Davis campaign and the National Republican Congressional Committee have run ads linking Childers, who touts his pro-life, pro-gun credentials, to Barack Obama. "[Childers] took Obama's endorsement over our conservative values," a Davis ad claims, pointing out that "when Obama's pastor cursed America, blaming us for 9/11, Childers said nothing." An NRCC ad calls Obama's voting record "the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate."

"I see the kind of issue differences you want, experience differences you want" with an Obama candidacy, says NRCC Chairman Tom Cole, a representative from Oklahoma, about his organization's ad. "I think that will hurt Democrats down ballot."

It wasn't supposed to be this way. At the outset of the campaign, Hillary Clinton was thought to be more of a liability in down-ticket races; she would presumably ignite deep-seated Republican distaste for the former First Lady. Obama was supposed to be the fresh-faced newcomer without any baggage. As one former senior aide to President Bush told NEWSWEEK in January 2006, "He's scarier than she is because nobody says a bad word about him." But after hitting a rough patch in recent weeks, Obama's campaign seemed less scary--and the GOP started trying to tie congressional Democratic candidates to him, in hopes of dragging them down. "There's no question he's an extremely attractive personality and is a very articulate person," says Cole. "But there's not much experience there and there's a decided bent to the left."

The ads were cut prior to Obama's triumphant Tuesday night, when he won handily in North Carolina and nearly upset Clinton in Indiana. Those showings ratcheted up pressure on Clinton to exit the race--and could conceivably alter the local dynamics of his campaign. Cole's spokesperson, who was contacted anew Wednesday morning, declined an opportunity for the NRCC chair to amend the comments he made in an interview prior to the primaries. And in some ways, Obama's fresh burst of momentum may only stoke the GOP's determination to yoke down-ticket Democrats to a presidential contender they see as excessively liberal--and weak among the kinds of white, blue-collar voters who could be key to the outcome of the general election this fall.

Cole's group used the same tactic this past weekend in Louisiana's 6th District, where there was a special election between Democrat Don Cazayoux and Republican Woody Jenkins (Cazayoux won the race by 3 percent). The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee says the ads failed. "I think their strategy fell on its face," says DCCC Chairman Chris Van Hollen, a representative from Maryland. "What they did was try to test-drive this idea of nationalizing the races behind national political figures and that crashed and burned." The NRCC points to polling showing that Cazayoux's lead dropped significantly in the days leading up to the vote. In a press release following Cazayoux's win, the NRCC characterized their numbers as a harbinger of the "potential toxicity of an Obama candidacy and the possible drag he could have down-ballot this fall." Both national campaigns emphasize that special congressional elections do not pivot around these ads, which are one element in a campaign centered on local politics.

Now that Obama's campaign has regained its mojo after Tuesday's primaries, how much of a drag will he be in Mississippi's 1st District?

READ THE REST HERE.

The Filter: May 8, 2008

2008-05-08T11:45:05Z

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

SUPPORT FOR CLINTON WANES AS OBAMA SEES FINISH LINE
(Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times)
As adamant as Mrs. Clinton appeared on Wednesday, several advisers said that how long she would stay in the race was an open question. Some top Clinton fund-raisers said that the campaign was all but over and suggested that she was simply buying time on Wednesday to determine if she could raise enough money and still win over superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who could essentially hand Mr. Obama the nomination... Other advisers said in interviews that her campaign was nearly out of cash, raising questions about what kind of campaign she can continue to run... Clinton advisers said they were concerned that the candidate’s online fund-raising, which boomed after her victory in the Ohio primary in March and in Pennsylvania in April, had slowed by comparison on Tuesday night and Wednesday, and that her donor base was either tightening somewhat or playing wait-and-see, despite her public appeal for money on Tuesday night... One Clinton adviser said the campaign was struggling to arrange meetings with large numbers of uncommitted superdelegates. This adviser said that at least a few superdelegates might not want to meet with Mrs. Clinton because they did not want to hear another pitch or because they had all but decided to go with Mr. Obama.

MORE: Democrats Seek Graceful Exit for Hillary Clinton (Los Angeles Times)
Dogged by defections and signs of financial trouble, Hillary Rodham Clinton faced a significant shift Wednesday even among supporters as talk turned from how she might win to how she can end her presidential campaign gracefully.

EVEN MORE: Hillary's Strategy of Last Resort (Los Angeles Times)
Unable to revive her presidential campaign at the polls, Hillary Rodham Clinton now envisions a road to the nomination built on disputes over Democratic Party rules and fights over delegate selections. But on Wednesday even that route looked unattainable, with some key party officials warning that they would not cooperate with Clinton's strategy.

THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM: Clinton Spurns Calls to Quit Race (Washington Post)
Another Clinton adviser said that there is at best a 10 percent chance that she will end her candidacy before the last primaries, on June 3. Privately, however, several advisers acknowledged that her route to the nomination has become far more difficult as a result of Tuesday's voting. "It's narrowed," said one adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid. This adviser said the fundamentals of the race had not changed as much as perceptions of Obama's prospects for winning. "It's just that the atmosphere shifted, as it shifted in her favor coming out of Ohio and again after Pennsylvania," the adviser said. "It's shifted back. Not to where it was pre-Ohio, but there's been a substantial shift back." Garin said the real change is in the commentary about the race. "I think that there are pundits who think she should get out," he said. "She has faced those calls before and has continued onward."

OBAMA'S GOT A CONFIDENT NEW STRATEGY
(Peter Nicholas, Los Angeles Times)
Barack Obama hasn't managed after months of political combat to force Hillary Rodham Clinton out of the presidential race, so he's about to try another approach: ignoring her. Confident that he has built a near-impregnable lead, his campaign aides said Wednesday that Obama would begin shifting his focus toward the general election. Obama still plans to campaign in states that remain on the primary calendar -- he is to appear in Oregon over the weekend -- but he may also start showing up in states that are considered important in the November contest: Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. (All three have held their Democratic primaries.) With Clinton's hopes of capturing the Democratic nomination dimming, Obama needs to prepare for the prospect of a general election matchup with the presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, aides said. "Everyone is eager to get on with this," said David Axelrod, the Obama campaign's lead strategist. "We've got to multi-task here . . . Sen. McCain has basically run free for some time now."

A TRAIN WRECK IS COMING ON MAY 20
(David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
Not long after the polls close in the May 20 Kentucky and Oregon primaries, Barack Obama plans to declare victory in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. And, until at least May 31 and perhaps longer, Hillary Clinton’s campaign plans to dispute it. It’s a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it, all predicated on an argument over what exactly constitutes the finish line of the primary race.

OBAMA'S SHOWING RESHAPES DISPUTE OVER DELEGATES
(June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal)
Tuesday's primaries may not have settled the Democratic nomination, but they may have settled the problem of whether to seat delegates from Michigan and Florida at this summer's convention. With a procedural clock ticking, the Democratic Party's rules committee will hear challenges on May 31 to its decision to strip Florida and Michigan of their convention votes as punishment for holding out-of-sequence primaries last winter. A rules-committee decision that returned the two states' 338 convention seats could swing the nomination to Hillary Clinton, and is one of the few remaining scenarios by which the New York senator could beat rival Barack Obama. But Sen. Clinton's inability to derail Sen. Obama's campaign Tuesday may have strengthened the Illinois senator's hand with the rules committee, some committee members say. The likelier outcome now, they predict, is a decision to seat enough Florida and Michigan delegates to confirm Sen. Obama's nomination, but not so many that they could swing the nomination to Sen. Clinton.

MORE: Michigan Dems Settle on How to Split Delegates (Detroit Free Press)
Clinton won the Jan. 15 Michigan primary and was to get 73 pledged delegates under state party rules, while Obama was to get 55. The state also has 29 superdelegates. The state party’s executive committee voted today to ask the national party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee to approve the 69-59 delegate split when it meets May 31. The plan would shrink Clinton’s delegate edge in Michigan from 18 to 10 and allow the state’s 157 delegates and superdelegates to be seated at the convention.

OBAMA'S GAME CHANGING
(Joe Klein, Time)
Clinton's paste-on populism changed absolutely nothing. The demographic blocs that had determined the shape of this remarkable campaign remained stolidly in place. Blacks, young people and those with college educations voted for Obama; Clinton won women, the elderly, whites without college educations. Clinton's slim margin of victory in Indiana was provided, appropriately enough, by Republicans, who were 10% of the Democratic-primary electorate and whose votes she carried 54% to 46% — some, perhaps, at the behest of the merry prankster Rush Limbaugh, who had counseled his ditto heads to bring "chaos" to the Democratic electoral process by voting for their favorite whipping girl. Clinton's new glow, her newfound stump proficiency, her symbiosis with Limbaugh, seemed an eerily Faustian narrative. But, as we know, those sorts of bargains tend to end badly. In this case, the upper-crust liberals who seemed ready to flee Obama in Pennsylvania — the sort of people who would run out and buy a hybrid before they'd support a reduction in the gasoline tax — decided to vote their faith that Obama was running an honorable campaign rather than their fear that his membership in Jeremiah Wright's church would render him radioactive.

DID RUSH LIMBAUGH TILT RESULT IN INDIANA?
(Alec MacGillis and Peter Slevin, Washington Post)
In Indiana, six in 10 Republicans who supported Clinton on Tuesday said they would vote for presumptive GOP nominee John McCain over Clinton in the fall, if that were the matchup. By contrast, most Republicans who voted for Obama said they would back him against McCain. And a slight majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton in Indiana told pollsters that she does not share their values, raising further questions about why they supported her. But at least as much data suggested that many Republicans voted for Clinton because the Democratic primary was the more meaningful one and because they simply preferred her to Obama. In Indiana, about nine in 10 GOP Clinton voters said she would make a better commander in chief, and more than six in 10 said she would have a better shot at beating McCain... Edward Carmines, a political scientist at Indiana University, said that he concluded from the data that while Operation Chaos "existed to some extent, I don't think it was a major factor."

IT'S OBAMA, WARTS AND ALL
(Karl Rove, Wall Street Journal)
My analysis of individual state polls shows that today Mr. McCain would win 241 Electoral College votes to Mr. Obama's 217, with 80 votes in toss-up states where neither candidate has more than a 3% lead. Ironically, Mrs. Clinton now leads Mr. McCain with 251 electoral votes to his 203 with 84 in toss-up states. This is the first time she's led Mr. McCain since I began tracking state-by-state results in early March. Mr. McCain is realistic enough to know he will fall behind Mr. Obama once the Democratic nomination is settled. He's steeled himself and his team for that moment. And he's comforted by a belief that there will be plenty of time to recapture the lead. Mr. McCain saw Gerald Ford come from 30 points down to lose narrowly to Jimmy Carter in 1976, and watched George H.W. Bush overcome a 17-point deficit in the summer to hammer Michael Dukakis in the fall of 1988.

MCCAIN PUSHES PRIORITIES THAT RESONATE ON THE RIGHT
(Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times)
Senator John McCain appealed to religious conservatives on Wednesday with pledges to prosecute sex traffickers, fight Internet child pornography and make religious freedom a priority in American diplomacy. In a speech followed by tough questions from the audience about the war in Iraq and his temper, Mr. McCain said that those issues, particularly the fight against sex trafficking, would be important in his White House... In part because of the concerns of the right, President Bush has devoted more money and attention to the issue than his predecessors did. Conservatives, who are distrustful of Mr. McCain on a number of fronts, are pushing him to follow Mr. Bush’s lead.

KEY SUPERDELEGATES KEEPING PREFERENCES STRICTLY UNDER WRAPS
(Sasha Issenberg, Boston Globe)
Scores of officially uncommitted superdelegates have voted in the Democratic presidential race, including such subjects of ongoing speculation as Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi. While some say that additional factors will affect how they vote at the party's convention, others are just staying silent about their preference. For them, what happens in the voting booth will stay in the voting booth - for now, at least.

CAMPAIGNS THROW OUT TRADITIONAL POLITICAL MAP
(Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal)
Barack Obama celebrated his win in North Carolina with a promise to return to a state no Democrat has carried in a presidential race since 1976. North Carolina, he said, is a swing state "where we will compete to win if I am the Democratic nominee for president." This year, both sides are setting their sights on distant targets. The result may be a scrambled battleground map that mixes traditional swing states with those long thought to be in one camp or the other long before November.

REPUBLICANS FOCUS ON OBAMA AS FALL OPPONENT
(Michael Cooper, New York Times)
At least one political party is acting like it knows who the Democratic nominee will be: the Republicans, who have greatly stepped up their criticisms of Senator Barack Obama in recent weeks while practically ignoring Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton... Some of the issues that Republicans are beginning to raise paint a picture of what the fall election strategy against Mr. Obama might look like. Some are traditional, using Mr. Obama’s support for withdrawing the troops from Iraq to portray him as weak on national security and his opposition to suspending the federal gas tax this summer to show him as a tax-and-spend Democrat... Another line of attack seems to be squarely directed at independent and swing voters, whom both the McCain and Obama campaigns have been courting. The McCain campaign has argued that Mr. Obama lacks a record of bipartisan achievement to back up his calls for healing partisan rifts in Washington and getting things done.

The Bill Factor

2008-05-07T21:13:07Z

Remember the old saying, "'tis better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all"?

It doesn't apply to presidential politics.

In yesterday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the burden of proof was on Hillary Clinton. To counteract Barack Obama's indestructible lead in the pledged-delegate count, she needed to give superdelegates fresh evidence that Obama had a fatal flaw--namely by showing that the good voters of North Carolina suddenly favored her after initially favoring him.

The Clinton campaign clearly recognized this--and gave North Carolina their best shot. In the wake of Clinton's April 22 win in Pennsylvania, they dispatched top field operative Averell "Ace" Smith--the architect of her triumphs in the Texas and California primaries--to run the Tar Heel State show. Known in political circles as a guy who "always brings a gun to a knife fight," he immediately predicted that N.C. would be the "upset of the century" and launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign. Soon, Clinton herself was hyping the looming primary as "a game-changer," and polls showed that Obama's once-commanding lead had shrunk to single digits. With the state seemingly in her grasp, the former First Lady sent her secret weapon--husband and former president Bill--on his Barbecue Tour: a frenzy of old-fashioned front-porch rallies in the tiny, mostly-white hamlets of rural North Carolina, where his patented Southern charm could presumably scare up the votes needed to surprise Obama on Primary Day. "Let the commentariat lament, or laugh, about Bill being sent out into the sticks," wrote Byron York in the National Review. "For Hillary, the sticks are where the votes are."

Yesterday, I caught up with the president at Durham's North Carolina School of Math and Science for his final stop. Red in the face, with saggy eyes and a halo of mussed, overgrown white hair, he clearly "look[ed] exhausted," as one schoolteacher put it. And with good reason: in recent weeks, Bill had made 56 appearances in North Carolina, including 19 in the last three days alone. "Even when I was younger," he told a supporter on the rope line, "that would've been a lot." Still, he was in fine form. Approached by a pregnant woman, he touched her bulging belly and asked when the baby was due. Shaking hands with a young student of Indian origin, he was desperate to connect. "Me and India are big partners," he said. "My foundation, you know, we've helped 1.4 million people in 70 counties. I'm doing work in Delhi and Mumbai on a big global warming project." And he was sure to tell everyone within earshot that "Hillary would be a better president than I ever was," adding "I really believe that" for emphasis.

But as Bill made his way through the throng--it took him over an hour to pose for every picture, sign every book and shake every hand--cries of "o-BAM-a!" overwhelmed the calls of "Yes, She Can!" And that underlined the problem: there were as many protesting Obamaniacs in attendance as Clintonistas. In the end, Obama edged Clinton by seven points among North Carolina's rural voters, who made up a full 47 percent of the primary electorate, and won the state by nearly 15 points. Neither stat was surprising on its face; Obama was originally expected to beat Clinton there by at least 15. But because the Clintons--and especially Bill--had campaigned so hard, and fallen so short, the chatterati treated the results as a surprise. "The decision of Clinton to contest North Carolina and give Obama an expectations victory was costly," wrote Marc Ambinder. Ultimately, the Bill Factor worked against Hillary. In electoral terms, he was irrelevant. But in terms of expectations, his effort made N.C. look like more of a loss than it might otherwise have been.

In retrospect, Indiana may have been a better target. There, Clinton trounced Obama 66-34 among rural voters. But because they made up a mere 17 percent of electorate, she could only manage a 14,000-vote victory--which wasn't nearly enough offset Obama's Tar Heel landslide. Who knows what a little more lovin' from Bubba might have done...

UPDATE, May 8: According to Carrie Dann at MSNBC, Bill hit a whopping 41 of the state's 100 counties, but only 18 of them went for Hillary. Meanwhile, in Indiana, the former president visited 35 counties--and his wife won all but eight. So there you go.

Will She Stay or Will She Go?

2008-05-07T17:37:45Z

And by "she," we don't mean Syesha Mercado.

After Barack Obama's sizable win in North Carolina and virtual tie in Indiana, it's the question on the tip of every political tongue this morning: will Hillary Clinton continue her campaign--and, if so, for how long? Last night, the Clinton camp had two goals: either a) make massive gains in the delegate and/or popular-vote tallies, where Obama holds solid advantages or b) perform well enough--perhaps with a win on Obama's home turf in North Carolina--to sow further doubts about his electability among the remaining superdelegates. Clinton accomplished neither. In Indiana and North Carolina, Obama racked up a net gain of 15 pledged delegates and about 210,000 votes, enough to pretty much erase Clinton's Pennsylvania advances (12 delegates, about 214,000 votes). And the climb only gets steeper from here. The remaining six primaries--West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon, South Dakota, Montana and Puerto Rico--award a total of 217 delegates. Assuming that Clinton wins 60 percent of those delegates and Obama only 40 percent--a very generous assumption, given that the Illinois senator is heavily favored in Oregon, South Dakota and Montana--Clinton will close out regulation with 1,823 delegates to Obama's 1,932. That means that he'll need 93 (or 35 percent) of the remaining superdelegates to reach 2,025 and clinch the nomination; she'll need 202, or 76 percent. The problem? Despite Rev. Wright, Bittergate and three ~~consecutive~~ major primary losses, Obama has picked up 100 superdelegates since Super Tuesday--and Clinton has swayed fewer than 15. Robbed of any momentum she had going into last night--and with Obama arguing that his strong showing demonstrates his durability--it's almost impossible to imagine her reversing that trend now.

Still, the senator from New York looks likely to soldier on. As I flew from Raleigh to New York this morning, Team Clinton worked diligently to regain its footing. Confirming rumors about the campaign's flagging financial health, Clinton aide Howard Wolfson admitted during a media conference call that Clinton had given herself a series of new loans that (unlike her first $5 million bail out back in February) were probably drawn from her joint assets with Bill--$5 million on April 11, $1 million on May 1 and $425,000 on May 5, for a grand total of $11.4 million. Meanwhile, at least one high-profile Clinton ~~superdelegate~~ supporter--former presidential candidate George McGovern--switched his allegiance to Obama and called on her to drop out. But the Clintonites seemed undaunted. On the call, chief strategist Geoff Garin called Indiana "a close outcome, but an outcome about which we feel very, very good"; suggested that Clinton had made "progress" in North Carolina; and continued to stress the candidate's strength among blue-collar voters, which he now explicitly called the "white electorate." A half-hour later, Obama's staff and supporters made sure to remind reporters on a conference call of their own that Clinton has no "legitimate" mathematical path to the nomination; that Obama's performance among working-class voters actually improved in yesterday's primaries; and even that the much-discussed "Limbaugh Effect" may have accounted for Clinton's narrow, 18,000-vote margin in the Hoosier State. But not one of them was willing to say she should quit. "It would be inappropriate and awkward and wrong for any of us to tell Senator Clinton when it is time for the race to be over," said Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a prominent Obama supporter. "This is her decision and it is only her decision... What we don't want to do right now is be disrespectful."

And that's as it should be. At a stop this afternoon in Shepherdstown, W.Va.--hastily scheduled at 3:00 a.m. last night to quiet speculation that her withdrawal is imminent--Clinton told the crowd that she will run "until there's a nominee." But her stump speech had changed since Indiana and North Carolina. Gone were the gas-tax broadsides--and the hard contrasts with Obama. This was her straightforward economic pitch, plain and simple. In his forward-looking address last night at Raleigh's Reynolds Coliseum, Obama focused most of his fire on John McCain--and seemed to offer Clinton something of a truce. "This has been one of the longest, most closely fought contests in history," he said. "And that's partly because we have such a formidable opponent in Senator Hillary Clinton. Tonight, many of the pundits have suggested that this party is inalterably divided--that Senator Clinton's supporters will not support me, and that my supporters will not support her. Well, I'm here tonight to tell you that I don't believe it... This primary season may not be over, but when it is... we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party, united by a common vision for this country." Unable "to sustain a full-out, combative campaign -- to stay on offense, and to raise the money it takes to do so," as Ben Smith puts it--Clinton seems to have accepted his offer. As she said last night, apropos of nothing, "No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic Party." The harsh attacks may well be over.

For the remainder of the month, then, expect Clinton to continue her twilight campaign. She's promised to run until every state votes, and until the question of Florida and Michigan is resolved, which won't happen until the DNC's Rules Committee meets on May 31. I imagine she'll keep those promises. Until then, let's all relax. With more votes and more delegates than any Democratic or Republican runner-up in American history, Clinton has every right to reach the finish line. And as long as she continues to make her own case, as she did today in Shepherdstown--and doesn't attempt to destroy Obama--it probably behooves the 51 percent of the party that supports her rival to respect the 49 percent that doesn't.

UPDATE, 3:34 p.m.: The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder has "seven reasons why Clinton should stay in the race"--and "seven reasons why Clinton should quit, now." All 14 of them are smart, so you should definitely take a look.

Two excerpts:

Stay # 4. The Ask. Does Clinton want to be Obama's vice president? Who knows? But does Clinton want to be asked whether she wants to be his vice president and thus be in a position to decline it? Surely. The more Obama is reminded that Clinton cannot not be dispensed with, the more pressure he will feel to at least solicit her views on the subject of the vice presidency.

Go # 1. It's over. Forget the sideshows and the hypotheticals. Once the party has its nominee, and only then, can the process of healing begin. The longer Clinton stays in the race, the more she postpones the point at which the party comes together.

Obama Battles Back

2008-05-07T13:00:07Z

Here's the wrap-up story I co-authored with Michael Hirsh and Suzanne Smalley:

Asked whether he thought the race was over, Axelrod avoided answering—but made it clear that he's not exactly perched on the edge of his seat. "The math is the math," he said. Gibbs chimed in: "The fact is, there are fewer delegates left to win in the primaries than superdelegates still up for grabs," he said. "From this point on, Sen. Clinton would have to win 70 percent of all the remaining delegates, both superdelegates and pledged delegates, to reach a majority. And as far as superdelegates go, just looked at what we've rolled out since Feb. 5. That's a tall order."

Indeed. Over at Clinton headquarters in Indianapolis, as the returns rolled into the Murat Centre, a crowd of supporters chanted "Madame President!" while Hillary's essential anthem played in the background: the Journey song "Don't Stop Believing." Hillary, by all appearances, has never stopped. But with her disappointing split decision, the woman who had been confidently comparing herself to a never-say-die fighter in recent weeks is sounding desperate once again. True, in her victory speech, Clinton brazenly declared that "it's full speed onto the White House." But she also pleaded for more funds against "a candidate who spends massively."

And now, even more than money, Hillary badly needs a new campaign narrative, a new way to persuade undecided superdelegates to back her. Utterly gone with the wind—blown somewhere off the coast of North Carolina—was the hopeful Clinton scenario heard in recent weeks. This was the idea put forward by the Hillary camp that Obama was fatally damaged by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy and other campaign mishaps: that he had become all but unelectable against John McCain.

Obama's decisive win Tuesday in North Carolina—all the sweeter for his supporters coming after Bill Clinton campaigned doggedly in small N.C. towns—destroyed that Clinton conceit. Despite exit polling that suggested Obama had been seriously damaged by the unpopular remarks of his former pastor—even after his sharp remarks last week distancing himself from Wright—the Illinois senator appears to have contained the crisis and resumed his march to the nomination.

In fact Obama probably emerges from Tuesday night even further ahead in the delegate count than he was when the voting began. Now the Obama camp is arguing that he can secure the nomination, perhaps as early as May 20, the day of the Oregon and Kentucky primaries. They hope that by that date Obama will finally have an insurmountable majority of pledged delegates from the primaries and caucuses, and that this will trigger a stampede of undecided superdelegates in his direction, giving him the 2,025 total delegates needed for nomination.

In response, the Clinton campaign has been once again, changing the parameters. In recent days they have newly emphasized the number of delegates they believe are needed for nomination: 2,209. This includes the currently barred Florida and Michigan vote totals (as her supporters chanted during her Indiana speech, "count the votes! Count the votes!"). But with the National Democratic Committee rules committee in charge of the decision whether to sanction those primaries, which were disqualified because they held their votes in violation of party rules, it's questionable whether that argument will persuade undecided superdelegates.

The Clintonites could take the battle to the convention floor by appealing to the DNC credentials committee, which gets named eight weeks or so before the convention. Clinton's team could ask the credentials committee to take up the issue of the Florida and Michigan delegates and make a recommendation to the convention floor. If she is close enough to Obama after all the contests end that Florida and Michigan votes could make a difference, she could choose to take her fight all the way to the convention floor.

Now the Clintonites are simply begging the superdelegates not to "short circuit" the process, as strategist Harold Ickes puts it. And they continue to make the argument that Obama is still so unknown and untested that, just as the controversial comments of Wright haunted him late in the primary season, new unsavory facts could come out if he runs against McCain in the fall. "We don't need an October surprise," Ickes said. "We know a great deal about Hillary. There is no October surprise with her and the last five or six weeks speak for themselves not only through momentum, but a number of other issues have arisen."

Yet even as Obama contemplates his long-awaited victory, he must question whether it will prove to be Pyrrhic. One disturbing result out of Tuesday's election was how divided the traditional Democratic base has become after three months of negative campaigning since Super Tuesday. In North Carolina, a stunning 92 percent of African-Americans went for Obama, while white non-college-educated workers went decisively for Clinton. Either candidate will need the full support of the other part of the base to win in November. The question is whether feelings have become so bitter that either candidate can rouse them.

Obama, in his victory speech, insisted that would not happen despite the "bruised feelings" on both sides. "This fall we intend to march forward as one Democratic Party," he said, because "we can't afford to give John McCain a chance to serve out George Bush's third term." It was, perhaps, the beginning of his general election campaign. And it was appropriate, perhaps, that at Hillary's rally a broken confetti machine failed to spew shredded paper and instead just sputtered smoke, which quickly disappeared.

READ THE REST HERE.

ALTER: Taking a Punch

2008-05-07T11:15:34Z

Here's my NEWSWEEK colleague Jonathan Alter's take on the meaning of the May 6 primary results:

Last week, not a soul in politics would have predicted that Obama would win North Carolina by 14 points and virtually tie in Indiana. But through a combination of luck and smarts, the campaign ended on the theme that Obama ran on: Old politics vs. new politics.

By conventional standards, Clinton was in the groove, focusing on bread-and-butter issues and pummeling Obama for being out-of-touch with angry motorists. Many pundits reported that "the working girl" was "on fire" and on the move.

Traveling around North Carolina and Indiana, I wasn't sure. But two things struck me as encouraging for Obama. First, I went to a big Clinton event in Indianapolis on Saturday night and noticed there were no more than a handful of African-Americans in a crowd of several thousand. For all the talk about white blue-collar workers (a group that gave only 41 percent of its votes to Bill Clinton in 1992), the most important demographic group this year was unquestionably black women, who were expected when the campaign began to split 50-50--but have been going 90-10 for Obama. That boded well in North Carolina. A woman candidate cannot win the Democratic nomination without at least some African-American women. Period.

The second encouraging sign for Obama was the candidate himself. His press conference denouncing Wright didn't end the issue for good, but it did put enough distance between himself and Wright to help neutralize the damage. More important, Obama's decision to push back on the gas tax actually worked. Refusing to pander reminded his base among college-educated voters of the reasons they liked him in the first place.

It also helped Obama recover his rhythm. After watching him sink some baskets on Sunday, I had a few words with him. "I feel really good about that [the gas tax position]," he said. "We had veered into the conventional, and now we're back." This was a huge gamble and it paid off.

In the end Obama showed the kind of resilience that was supposed to apply only to the Clintons. Between May and November, Obama will have other low moments. But now he has some experience surviving them.

READ THE REST HERE.

The Filter: May 7, 2008

2008-05-07T10:43:13Z

A round-up of this morning's must-read stories.

OPTIONS DWINDLING FOR CLINTON
(Adam Nagourney, New York Times)
In this case, a split was not a draw... In short, Mrs. Clinton could not have asked for a better second chance to turn this campaign around and to make her central case to superdelegates: that Mr. Obama was a damaged general election candidate who would get swallowed up by the Republican Party. Yet she was unable on Tuesday to build her base of support substantially beyond the white, working-class voters who had sustained her for the last month. That will not be lost on the superdelegates, the elected Democrats and party leaders who will ultimately decide this fight. And the superdelegates are where the fight is moving: after 50 nominating contests, there are only 6 left, with just 217 pledged delegates left to be elected, not enough to get either of them over the 2,025 threshold necessary to win the nomination. Mr. Obama’s aides said Mrs. Clinton would have to win close to 70 percent of the remaining pledged delegates and superdelegates to win the nomination, a shift in the campaign’s trajectory that would seem possible only if some big development came along to hurt Mr. Obama.

MORE: Clinton Fails to Get Needed Game-Changer (Beth Fouhy, AP)
Her aides insist she will press anew for a resolution to the disputed contests in Michigan and Florida, both of which she won, but whose results were voided because the primaries were moved in violation of Democratic Party rules. Anticipating those efforts, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe sent a memo to superdelegates reminding them of the math. He said Clinton would need to win 68 percent of the remaining delegates to win the nomination -- an extremely unlikely scenario, made harder by her poor performance Tuesday. "With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, the are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or millions of supporters, volunteers and donors."

OBAMA TAKES DECISIVE STEP TOWARD NOMINATION
(Ben Smith, Politico)
Sen. Barack Obama took a large and potentially decisive step toward the Democratic nomination Tuesday night, making dramatic symbolic and numerical gains in North Carolina and Indiana. Obama’s emphatic North Carolina victory, and a narrow loss in Indiana, extended his lead in the count of delegates to the Democratic National Convention, and in most counts of the combined popular vote. As important, they diminished Clinton’s rationale for urging Democratic superdelegates to override his delegate lead and give the nomination to her. Her case to party elders — that Obama was a flawed, flagging candidate — lost much of its altitude despite a nail-biting and narrow victory in Indiana. Her bread-and-butter pitch to voters fell prey to the doubts Obama’s television campaign raised about her sincerity. What had been, in the best of scenarios an up hill climb, became far steeper.

MORE: What Happened in Indiana and N.C. (David Paul Kuhn, Politico)
There were unique findings in the two states that separated these voters from past contests — particularly the power of the issue of economic anxiety. Nearly seven in 10 Indiana voters said the economy was the most important issue, as did six in 10 North Carolinians. That degree of economic concern in Indiana was above financial angst in Pennsylvania or even Ohio, a state hit especially hard by unemployment. But unlike in Pennsylvania, the voters most anxious about the economy were not handily carried by Clinton. In Indiana, she won only a slim majority of these voters and in North Carolina, Obama won a majority. Also on the economic front, it appears Clinton’s gas tax proposal, which was heavily debated this past week, likely did not move votes to her side.

CLINTON AIDES DOUBTFUL ABOUT FUTURE
(Perry Bacon, Jr. and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post)
The outcome caused the candidate and her campaign to intensify their efforts to persuade party leaders to include the results of disqualified contests in Michigan and Florida, both of which she won. The Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws committee is scheduled to meet on May 31 to consider two challenges pending on whether, and how, to seat delegates from those states. "Absent some sort of miracle on May 31st, it's going to be tough for us," said a senior Clinton official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to be frank. "We lost this thing in February. We're doing everything we can now . . . but it's just an uphill battle."

HOW DOES CLINTON LOSE?
(Marc Ambinder, The Atlantic)
MAY 20 -- THAT'S the date when the campaign unofficially expects to "clinch" the nomination -- when they'll officially have a majority of pledged delegates, which triggers, in their view, the standard for superdelegate decision-making set by party leaders like Nancy Pelosi. I expect -- and the Obama campaign expects -- to see the pace of his superdelegate pick-ups increase. They expect a few superdelegate defections from Clinton as well. Within the next few weeks, Obama might well pass Clinton in the number of superdelegate endorsements. Remember, though: the superdelegates are followers. They're politically wimpy... and they like to be wooed. EXPECT OBAMA in the next few days to prize unity above all else -- and to turn his attention away from Clinton and towards the notion of a unified Democratic Party and the race against McCain. The Clinton campaign will limp to West Virginia with just enough energy and barely any money. The campaign will point to the DNC rules committee meeting on 5/31, but DNC officials tell me that the staff recommendation provided to the committee -- a recommendation that has so far been kept secret -- is not unambiguously favorable to Clinton's interpretation of the rules.

'YES WE CAN' VS. 'NO WE CAN'T'
(Jonathan Cohn, New Republic)
If Obama's slogan is "yes we can," McCain's is "no we can't." Obama wants to invest heavily in better schools and public infrastructure? McCain says it will cost too much money. Obama wants to make sure every American has health insurance? McCain says it's socialized medicine. Obama wants to make free trade more humane? McCain's says no, no, no--that's messing with the free market. Even Obama's calls to change political discourse for the better--the most familiar and, at times, most empty part of his pitch--play into this dynamic. When Obama says he wants to end the politics of division, McCain dismisses it as just a slogan. Whether you think Obama is right or wrong about these ideas--and, yes, I mostly think he's right--he's setting up the fall as a debate between ambition and timidty, between hope and cynicism, between optimism and pessimism. The last two presidential elections that framed the choice this starkly were in 1992, when Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush, and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter. For all of their ideological divisions, the two shared a fundamentally positive vision: Clinton believed in a "place called hope"; Reagan believed it was "morning in America." Those phrases sound a lot more like Obama's rhetoric than McCain's. And while it's just one factor in the general election, it helps explain why, for the first time in a while, I too am becoming more optimistic--about Democratic prospects for November.

IT'S ALL OVER NOW, BABY BLUE
(John Judis, New Republic)
he Democratic primary is over. Hillary Clinton might still run in West Virginia and Kentucky, which she'll win handily, but by failing to win Indiana decisively and by losing North Carolina decisively, she lost the argument for her own candidacy. She can't surpass Barack Obama's delegate or popular vote count. The question is no longer who will be the Democratic nominee, but whether Obama can defeat Republican John McCain in November. And the answer to that is still unclear. During the last two months, Obama has faltered as a candidate. He has seen his political base narrow rather than widen, and some of his strengths turn into weaknesses. Of course, he has had to deal with the scandal surrounding Reverend Jeremiah Wright, but even so, he needs to remedy certain flaws in his political approach if he wants to defeat McCain in the fall.

THE NOMINEES EMERGE, HOBBLED
(David Brooks, New York Times)
Obama has a much more liberal profile than he did several weeks ago. Moderate, independent voters are now less sure that Obama shares their values. Hillary Clinton voters are much, much more hostile toward him. His supporters look more and more like the McGovern-Dukakis constituency, and the walls between that constituency and the rest of the country are higher than they were weeks ago. Obama is going to have to work hard to tear down those walls over the coming months. He is going to have to work hard first to win over the Clinton voters, who are more economically populist and socially conservative than his supporters. He is also going to have to work hard to win over suburban independents, who are less economically populist than his current supporters. He’s going to have to break conspicuously with orthodox liberalism to re-establish that values connection with people in Ohio and Missouri.

CLINTON DESPERATE FOR A SUPER TURNAROUND
(Roger Simon, Politico)
There is a lot at stake for her that goes beyond the Democratic convention. First, if she doesn’t get the nomination this time, she has to exit in such a way as to not damage her political future. If Obama loses the general election this year, he is unlikely to get a second chance in 2012. (The Democrats don’t like to renominate losers; the last time they did it was with Adlai Stevenson in 1956, and he lost again.) Clinton could try for the nomination again, but even if she does not run for president in 2012, she is up for reelection to the Senate that year. Or she could run for governor of New York in 2010. Or she might want to become majority leader of the Senate. She has options, but only if she manages her endgame carefully. If she becomes known as the candidate who was willing to destroy her party in order to gain the nomination, she is likely to lose not just the nomination but also her political future.