Hillary Clinton may yet win Texas and Pennsylvania, but it's clear that there is a coalescing happening around Barack Obama, who according to CNN exit polls yesterday in Virginia won:
- 90% of black voters
- 75% of those under age 30
- 67% of those under age 45
- 52% of those over age 60 (so much for the oldsters keeping the nomination away from him, eh?)
- 50% of white voters
- 59% of women
- 61% of union households
- 65% of those making less than $50,000/year
We're seeing something truly extraordinary here. CNN didn't poll enough Latino voters to be able to draw any trend there, but right now a majority of every major sub-group in the Democratic Party is starting to coalesce around Barack Obama. This may not be as much a cause for celebration yet among his supporters as they might think:
But the latest results suggest that the race might be tilting back to a more normal form, where the goal is achieving a series of splashing victories and thus momentum. That has provided Mr. Obama with the opportunity, which he plans to seize in a more full-throated way starting on Wednesday, to argue that voters across a wide cross-section of the country have embraced his candidacy, and that the time has come for the group that could hold the balance of power, those 796 unpledged superdelegates — party leaders and elected officials who have an automatic seat at the national convention — to follow suit.
“We are in a momentum phase of the process now,” said Tad Devine, a Democratic consultant.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers dispute that, noting that his victories have come in relatively small states and that she has invested most of her attention in two big contests coming up on March 4: Ohio and Texas. Her aides have long argued that by the end of the voting, the difference between the two candidates in delegate count would be minimal, leaving the final decision to superdelegates, who in their view would favor Mrs. Clinton.
But if party leaders begin to think this is no longer simply a mathematical race to the 2,025-delegate line, that could have big consequences for Mrs. Clinton.
For one thing, if this is an election where a candidate wins by virtue of being seen as winning — a definition of momentum — that would mean that voters in coming states would be influenced by the outcome of earlier races. And Mr. Obama might then be in a position to encroach on Mrs. Clinton’s firewall of Texas and Ohio.
Perhaps most problematically, the delegate selection process — in which delegates are allocated to the candidates in proportion to how many votes they win — could now begin to work against Mrs. Clinton. Both candidates get a share of the delegates, even if one wins by a margin of 20 points. That is a reason Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama had stayed so close on delegate numbers, and why it becomes harder for her to reclaim a lead.
But whatever challenges Mrs. Clinton faces, she has repeatedly proved to be a resourceful candidate with a sharp campaign organization and a passionate base of supporters. Should she win in Ohio and Texas, she could halt Mr. Obama’s claim to momentum and keep the race for pledged delegates from breaking against her. And there has been a history in this campaign of Mr. Obama winning, only to have Mrs. Clinton return and win.
“You can’t make a judgment until Ohio and Texas,” said Jonathan Prince, who was a senior adviser to John Edwards of North Carolina, who quit the race two weeks ago. “In this campaign, every time he has surged ahead, voters take a pause. If momentum keeps slamming into a wall, than you do have to come down to the numbers.”
What all this means is that so far 2008 looks an awful lot like 1984, only with a candidate less likely to put his foot in his mouth the way Gary Hart did in 1984 when he dissed New Jersey. The problem is that while 1984 featured a popular incumbent in Ronald Reagan, it also meant that "the party candidate" ended up with the nomination under the very rules that created the superdelegates -- and we all know how the 1984 election ended up. After all, no one remembers "President Mondale."
But I wouldn't necessarily start dancing in the streets yet. Hillary Clinton and her husband are a street fighters, which when combined with a strong economy and the worst kind of hypocrites in the Republican Party having the vapors over Bill's personal conduct, enabled them to survive eight years of mudslinging and an impeachment trial. If this thing comes down to the superdelegates, Hillary Clinton is the one, I suspect, who'll end up with this nomination, only to find, as Walter Mondale did in 1984 as a far less polarizing candidate, that sometimes the nomination is a pyrrhic victory. The other reason for caution is that it's starting to look as if Barack Obama really believes all that crap about reaching across the aisle...and this is just a sample of what's to come:
“John McCain is an American hero,” Mr. Obama said before a huge, cheering crowd. “We honor his service to our nation. But his priorities don’t address the real problems of the American people, because they are bound to the failed policies of the past.”
Mr. McCain picked up the challenge. While not mentioning Mr. Obama by name, he offered an unmistakable put-down of the theme that has become so closely identified with Mr. Obama.
“To encourage a country with only rhetoric rather than sound and proven ideas that trust in the strength and courage of free people is not a promise of hope,” he said. “It is a platitude.”
You know how the blurbs in movie ads always separate review sections with ellipses to make a pan sound like a glowing review, so that a review which says "That edge-of-your-seat excitement you feel isn't from this thuddingly dull movie, it's from your bladder, screaming for relief after the first two hours of a three-and-a-half marathon that's going nowhere" becomes "...edge of your seat excitement!" by the time it makes it into the ad? Well, can't you just see the ad for John McCain this fall that shows the glowing things people have said about him against a backdrop of flags and military guys, and one of those quotes is:
"...an American hero" -- Barack Obama
Senator, you just can't be DOING that in a campaign. I don't care how much Republicans are screeching right now about this notion that John McCain is a liberal or how much Chris Matthews wants to believe he's still the "maverick" of the late 1990s. He's still a hard-right conservative, and the Republican sheeple will dutifully line up behind him this fall -- and they will take every conciliatory word you ever said and use it against you.
All that reaching across the aisle and new style of politics and end to divisiveness sounds great. But for better or worse, we now live in a divisive society, in which millions of dollars are made by thousands of people whose livelihood depends on fostering that very divisiveness. And you aren't going to change that alone. So while I know you'd like to stride manfully across the battlefield to meet with your opponent mano-a-mano, you'd better have a couple thousand war-hardened soldiers right behind you over the crest of the hill, ready for when things get ugly.
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