The Long and Winding Road
I was somewhat bleary-eyed yesterday--not all the synapses were firing--when it occurred to me in the wake of another long primary night: Hey, wasn't this thing supposed to be over by now?
It's a great race, but everyone I know is dog-tired, except for those who scheduled vacations because they thought the contest would be history by Feb. 5. Heck, there were people on MSNBC Tuesday who thought Hillary would be history within hours. So I decided to make some calls, and here's my report:
After weeks of when-will-she-drop-out chatter, some journalists were anxiously awaiting Tuesday's showdown in Ohio and Texas as a chance to bid farewell to Hillary Clinton and return to something resembling normal life.
"This was it, finally," National Review columnist Jim Geraghty recalls thinking. "She's going to crack open like a pi¿ata and we'll all get to celebrate and take some time off."
But in a rerun of a very familiar movie, the media establishment was too quick to crank out the obituaries for a former first lady who keeps bouncing back against Barack Obama.
"I have an irrational hatred of Ohio," says a weary Ana Marie Cox, the Time reporter and blogger, reached while shopping for a vitamin booster at Trader Joe's. "They didn't do anything but prolong the agony.
"Of course it's historic, it's amazing, I feel lucky to be covering it. But how many more stories do I have to read, or be forced to write, about when Hillary will drop out?"
This is hardly the first time that media prognosticators have forecast a Clinton exit. After her third-place finish in Iowa, many predicted that Clinton would lose New Hampshire and be forced to withdraw. With the approach of early February's Super Tuesday -- the day everyone just knew would settle the race -- Clinton's slippage in key state polls prompted suggestions that the end was near. And after Clinton lost 10 straight states to Obama in the past month, much of the media either feasted on tales of discord in her campaign or ignored her in sizing up a fall confrontation between Obama and John McCain.
"The surest sign she's coming back is when we all say she's going over a cliff," says Slate writer John Dickerson, who wrote a piece headlined "The Conventional Wisdom Says Clinton Is Doomed. Don't Believe It" back on Feb. 11.
While some commentators are not exactly Hillary fans or have been dazzled by Obama, most say the race is now simply a matter of math -- that Clinton, after getting blown out in states from South Carolina to Wisconsin, faces an insurmountable gap in pledged delegates. "I don't think it's only because of what her supporters see as Hillary-bashing," Dickerson says. "All the sniping between her aides is a telltale sign of a campaign in distress. We're not making this up."
Many voters have tuned in only recently, but campaign reporters and analysts have been on the beat since before Clinton and Obama kicked off their candidacies back in January 2007. They originally had to chase 18 presidential candidates, and by now have covered or commented on 20 Democratic debates.
"Everyone is toasted," says NBC anchor Brian Williams, "but they just keep waking up the next morning and doing it again." Sometimes, as the correspondents and pundits ricochet from late-night coverage to early-morning duty, the fatigue starts to show.
Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron says he spent part of 42 weeks on the road last year.
"I'm a sick junkie," says Cameron, reached after flying back from Texas but before boarding an evening flight to cover McCain in Florida. "Here's something pathetic. . . . It's kind of hard to reenter the real world. You're used to living out of a suitcase. When you come home and see a five-pound stack of mail, it can be intimidating. It's easier to run away to the road."
On the seemingly endless road trips, reporters and campaign aides commiserate about the lack of clean clothes and missing children's birthdays. One journalistic joke was that Tuesday's results were like Groundhog Day -- "if Hillary didn't see the shadow of defeat, we'd have six more weeks of campaigning," as Geraghty put it. The next big contest, Pennsylvania, is April 22. But could the race drag on until the previously obscure Puerto Rico primary on June 7? Or even later, if Florida and Michigan, whose delegates aren't being counted because the states flouted party rules, get to vote again?
Obama's losses followed a week in which journalists -- some of whom may have been embarrassed by the "Saturday Night Live" skits portraying them as swooning over the Illinois senator -- gave him rough treatment for the first time in this campaign. Obama even grumbled to reporters: "This whole spin of how the press has just been so tough on them and not tough on us, I didn't expect that you guys would bite on that."
But the Obama-is-inevitable spin proved as ephemeral as last year's near-coronation of Clinton. In an era of erratic polls, Cameron says, "we should listen to the voters instead of listening to ourselves offer up hollowed-out, burned-out punditry that just doesn't apply anymore."
The sheer length of the contest has led to a role reversal. "Usually the press overplays comeback stories so they can keep the race alive," Cox says. "This is a really strange phenomenon in that you're seeing people who can't wait for it to be over. There's only so many stories you can write, and we're running out of them."
If some are sick of the campaign, others are just sick. Dickerson was forced off the road after a nasty cold and constant flying led to a burst eardrum. But he says he remained fixated because the story line keeps changing and mutating.
"I could also be a geek," Dickerson says. "My family would certainly feel that way."
Furthermore . . .
The morning papers, meanwhile, seem to regard the prolonged race as a bad thing:
"Leading Democrats scrambled Wednesday to prevent the closest, most riveting presidential contest in decades from tearing the party apart, as the odds rose that neither Hillary Rodham Clinton nor Barack Obama could clinch the nomination without angering large blocs of voters," says the L.A. Times.
"After 44 contests, 28 million votes, and at least $275 million spent, the race for the Democratic presidential nomination grinds on as an increasingly brutal struggle for the soul of a party riven along the lines of race, class, gender, and generations," says the Boston Globe.
"Seeking to rebound from defeats Tuesday night in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island," the NYT reports, "Senator Barack Obama's campaign signaled on Wednesday that it was preparing to sharpen its critique of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, challenging her contention that she has been more thoroughly scrutinized than her opponent . . .
"Mr. Obama's campaign put out a sharply worded memo criticizing Mrs. Clinton for not releasing her income tax returns; Mr. Obama has made his returns public.
"Howard Wolfson, Mrs. Clinton's communications director, fired back with a statement raising the issue of Mr. Obama's ties to the developer Antoin Rezko, who is now on trial in Chicago. Instead of answering questions about Mr. Rezko, Mr. Obama said, Mr. Obama had chosen to 'lash out.'
"Mr. Wolfson said the Clintons' tax returns since they left the White House would be available on or around April 15."
Let me mark that unforgettable date on my calendar.
The Politico gang sees a contest that is nasty, brutish and long:
"The up-with-people phase of this contest is over. The clear-the-benches phase has begun -- a brawl that now is more likely than not to continue until the Democratic nomination in late August.
"Obama's failure to win Ohio and Texas and lock down the nomination -- combined with Clinton's newly defensible decision to press on despite a deficit in delegates -- virtually guarantees Democrats a draining contest that will give Republicans a months-long head-start on the general election.
"It will heighten racial, ethnic, gender, and class divisions already on stark display, raise awkward questions about the legitimacy of the nominating process, and inflict potentially lasting wounds on the eventual winner."
How did Hillary pull it off? The left and right are fairly united on this question. National Review's Rick Lowry:
"What was widely panned as her 'desperation' and 'fear-mongering' of the final days worked. In Ohio, 57 percent of voters said she was more qualified to be commander-in-chief and in Texas, 54 percent said she was more qualified . . .
The Nation's John Nichols:
"If the Clinton campaign has learned anything from the two-week campaign that preceded the Ohio and Texas votes, it is that Hillary Clinton will not win unless Barack Obama loses. The senator from Illinois must be damaged, badly, or so the theory goes, in order for the senator from New York to grab the Democratic nomination from his clutches.
"Make no mistake: The candidate and her Clintonistas have sought to inflict that damage . . . .
"Since Clinton lost Wisconsin's February 19 primary, the hits really have kept coming. There was 'Barack stole lines from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick' hit. There was the 'Barack stole a page from Karl Rove when he sent out negative mailings' hit. There was the 'Barack dresses like a Muslim' hit. There was the 'Barack's campaign told the Canadians one thing about trade and Ohio another thing' hit. There was the 'Barack's not the guy you want answering the phone in the White House' hit. There was even the 'Barack's defiling the memory of Ann Richards because she would have wanted Hillary to have a clean shot at the nomination' hit . . .
"Now, the strategy has been sufficiently-if-not-completely validated. So Clinton will go on, and chances are that she will go on rough."
Josh Marshall: "The Clinton campaign got rough and nasty over the last week-plus. And they got results. That may disgust you or it may inspire you with confidence in Hillary's abilities as a fighter. But wherever you come down on that question is secondary to the fact that that's how campaign's work. Opponents get nasty. And what we've seen over the last week is nothing compared to what Barack Obama would face this fall if he hangs on and wins the nomination.
"So I think the big question is, can he fight back? Can he take this back to Hillary Clinton, demonstrate his ability to take punches and punch back?"
Of course, what journalists describe as "rough" and "negative" is the fairly standard political tactic of highlighting an opponent's weaknesses. And as long as the charges aren't inaccurate or unduly personal, aren't they fair game?
Atlantic's Marc Ambinder cautions that "a Clinton 'recovery' and nomination is not impossible. It just isn't likely. In the gut of many Clinton advisers 48 hours from now may be the sense that the confetti is ephemeral."
Ambinder also votes for a dream ticket, with Obama on top:
"That's because the longer Hillary Clinton stays in this race, the more inevitable it is that she, by force of will, earns a spot on the ticket. Obama cannot ignore her demographic coalition, her breadth and depth of the support, the energy that she generates, just as Hillary surely cannot ignore -- would not ignore -- everything that Obama has come to stand for and has accomplished."
"Did Rush Limbaugh put Hillary over the top in Texas? Some quick, back-of-the-envelope math based on the exits shows:
"Republicans represented 9% of the electorate in Texas. Out of a total of 2.857 million votes cast, that's roughly 257,000 votes. Obama won Republicans more narrowly than usual, 52-47. In vote terms, that translates to roughly 134,000 to 123,000. Overall, Clinton won Texas by just under 100,000 votes.
"It's a close call, but unless the vast majority of Republicans who voted for Clinton (more than 80%) did so at Rush's suggestion, they probably didn't put Clinton over the top."
Despite his 10 straight victories, did Tuesday's losses expose some real vulnerabilities for Obama? The New Republic's John Judis says yes:
"Obama has to worry about the Reagan or Bush Democrats, white working class voters who used to be Democrats, but often back Republican presidential candidates. Bill Clinton won many of these voters back; but Al Gore lost them in 2000 and John Kerry lost them in 2004. Many of these voters are not participating in the Democratic or Republicans primaries--and they'll make the difference in November in states like Ohio and Missouri. But of the voters that are participating, Clinton did much better among them, winning over 60 percent of them in Ohio.
"Could Obama win these voters in the fall? There is no precise way to tell from the polls, but one rough measure is to look at how racial factors affect voters. Many white working class voters abandoned the Democrats in the '80s because of the complex of issues that surround race--including crime, education, and welfare. Obama could have a problem among these voters because he is an African American."
HuffPost's Marc Coopersays Hillary can't win "democratically"--although the superdelegates are part of the party's process and everyone agreed to play by those rules. But Cooper says "the more steely-eyed amongst us . . . would do well to psychologically prepare for the nomination going, somehow or another, to Hillary Clinton. Which means, in turn, that Democrats ought to simultaneously prepare to be beaten by John McCain."
One flaw in that argument: McCain is trailing Obama by 12 and Hillary by 6 in hypothetical fall matchups, a WP/ABC poll says. A good talking point for Obama, but it has less resonance if Hillary's ahead, too.
If you saw McCain at the White House yesterday, it was interesting how he kept mentioning President Bush's busy schedule in saying he'd be happy to have the president stump for him:
"President Bush lavished praise on Sen. John McCain, the newly minted Republican presidential nominee, at a carefully choreographed Rose Garden event Wednesday aimed at GOP loyalists," says the Chicago Tribune, "but McCain will face a serious challenge in deciding how much to campaign with the deeply unpopular president at a time when skittish voters are demanding change."
No sooner does McCain clinch the nomination than Fred Barnes offers him some advice:
"The most important is to bring Barack Obama down to earth from his pedestal in the heavens. He's still the likely Democratic nominee, after all, despite Hillary Clinton's primary wins yesterday. And he's mostly gotten away with campaigning as if he's on a mission to purify America, not merely running to capture the presidency.
"McCain must also organize a turnout effort to match President Bush's in 2004--or exceed what Bush put together. This is necessary because it's clear the Democratic turnout is going to be larger and more enthusiastic than it was four years ago.
"And he must gear his campaign to attract independents while not antagonizing conservatives, who constitute the Republican base . . .
"Unless McCain deflates the Obama balloon, he hasn't got a chance of winning the general election. Hillary Clinton has done a bit of this, and the press has finally decided to ask Obama a few tough questions (though not many)."
Hey, it's only March.
By Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, March 6, 2008
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