WEDNESDAY,  MARCH 5,  2008

A REALLY INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Pretty obnoxious that we allow ordinary people to vote.  They ruin everything.  We can't hold a decent victory party while they're still out there exercising their "rights."  Awful system:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that — in spite of his delegate lead — Senator Barack Obama was still losing to her in the big states.

Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.

Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

For Mrs. Clinton, the battle ahead is not so much against Mr. Obama as it is against a Democratic Party establishment that had once been ready to coalesce behind her but has been drifting toward Mr. Obama. The party wants a standard-bearer now to wage the war against the newly minted leader of the Republicans, Senator John McCain, who enjoys a head start with every day that the Democrats lack a nominee of their own.

Clinton advisers said her decisive victory in Ohio and her narrow one in Texas — where exit polls showed her winning the votes of women, whites and Hispanics in an extremely close race — were more than enough to argue that she should go forward to the April 22 primary in the Ohio-esque Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, even if Mr. Obama has more delegates after Tuesday night.

But there's this reality:

But for all the millions of votes Mrs. Clinton has now won, simple math is still her enemy. She needs to use Tuesday night to persuade superdelegates — the hundreds of party leaders who have a vote on the nomination — to stop abandoning her. Or, at least, stop long enough for Mrs. Clinton to damage him with a line of attack, goad him into a colossal gaffe (or watch him make one on his own) or rely on the media to unearth a campaign-altering scandal about him.

But it is not clear if Ohio and Texas were enough to give Mrs. Clinton — a politician who has been a known quantity for 16 years— a real chance for a fresh assessment by the many superdelegates who know her well.

“The great irony is, she is now the ‘hope’ candidate,” said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic strategist who backs Mr. Obama. “She can only hope to catch some breaks and catch Obama stumbling.”

The sheer amount of time until Pennsylvania votes on April 22nd gives Senator Clinton the chance to remake her campaign.  Pundit-level predictions have gone notoriously wrong in this Democratic race, and maybe it's the moment to realize that it's the voters who decide.

If I were a superdelegate, I'd worry about Obama's inability to clinch the deal.  I'd worry that, when under pressure, he's a poor closer.  I'd worry that he's shown, in too many states, limited appeal.  And I'd worry that it was Senator Clinton's national-security argument in the last days of the campaign for Ohio and Texas that appeared to turn the tide.  If Obama can't face Hillary Clinton on national security, how will he face John McCain?

IN PROPORTION - NOT

Wherever he is in Heaven, my late political science professor, the distinguished Herman Finer, must be muttering, "I told you so."  He waged a sometimes lonely crusade against proportional representation, the very system the Democrats use in their primaries, and which is preventing a decision.  Democratic candidates are awarded delegates based on their proportion of the vote in a particular state.  In the Republican primaries, the winner-take-all rule dominates:  You win the state, you win all the delegates.

Now, proportional representation, or PR as Finer always called it, sounds so fair.  Everyone's vote is counted, dearie.  We want all of you to feel good about yourselves.  It's wonderful for your self-esteem.

Yeah, but it leads to what the Dems are facing - months of protracted deadlock.  One purpose of a political party is to fight elections.  How do you fight them if you haven't chosen candidates?  Winner-take-all, which resembles our electoral college system, is decisive, clean, and tips a hat to the name of our country - the United States repeat States of America.  Each state, in effect, holds its own election.  I like it.  Senator McCain surely likes it.  He can use the upcoming months to wage war against the Democrats.  The Democratic pros might secretly love it, but how can they admit that to the Doctor Feelgoods who run the party process? 

A CLEAR WINNER

Let us celebrate and respect John McCain's accomplishment:

WASHINGTON (AP) - John McCain clinched the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday, an extraordinary comeback for a candidate whose White House hopes were dashed eight years ago and whose second bid was left for dead eight months ago.
"The most important race begins," he said in an Associated Press interview.

According to the AP count, the four-term Arizona senator surpassed the requisite 1,191 GOP delegates as voters in Ohio, Vermont, Rhode Island and Texas put him over the threshold. The triumph came one month after his Super Tuesday coast-to-coast victories gave him an insurmountable lead in the delegate hunt and forced his chief rival, Mitt Romney, to drop out of the race.

"It's a very humbling thing," McCain said of finally clinching the nomination.
McCain was heading to the White House on Wednesday for lunch with President Bush - and an endorsement. The two will make a joint statement afterward.

The Dems will try to use today's lunch to link McCain with the unpopular president.  Be careful.  It may not work.  The fact that McCain can get the endorsement of the president, while still taking independent stands, can have a powerful appeal to, well, independents.  And those are the people McCain needs to win in November.

POLITICAL SOBRIETY

One result of yesterday's voting is that it brought Senator Obama, and his screamers, into the world of political reality.  This is a political contest.  It's not the selection of a pope or the consecration of the archbishop of Canterbury.  Nor is it the final night of American Idol.  Senator Obama's momentum has been slowed.  The press, finally, is asking some tough questions.  The new reality showed in his tired face as he made the traditional post-election statement.  As I said in one of our election-night updates, Senator Clinton rivalled Senator Obama last night in eloquence, for the first time. 

Things will be different now.  We're in for some real political combat, old style, between now and Pennsylvania's April 22nd showdown.  This is more fun than it's been in years.  I mean, we used to have to deal with Dukakis.

OBAMA'S DILEMMA

Did you think a week ago that we'd be writing that?  While the math still favors him, Senator Obama must battle some new challenges arising from his failure to close the deal.  Nicholas Wapshott in the excellent New York Sun provides a sound and complete analysis:

The Clintons' game plan is now becoming clear. Few who have studied the couple's methods imagined that Mrs. Clinton would abandon her life's ambition until the evidence against her was inarguable. And argue they will. It is evident they will advance simultaneously on a number of fronts.

So far Mr. Obama's surrogates have argued that only elected delegates should count. Yet the Democratic system allows for superdelegates, made up of ex officio party members and elected officials, which the Obama camp suggests should echo the popular will. If only it were as simple as that.

Superdelegates were invented and given considerable power in order to calm the runaway enthusiasm of temporary, extreme, callow primary voters who might elevate an unelectable general election candidate. Mrs. Clinton's supporters can argue that the Democratic party constitution should not be tampered with. If the party had wanted a one person one vote system of picking a candidate, that is what would have been chosen.

This is important when assessing who exactly has been voting for Mr. Obama. While Mrs. Clinton has relied almost entirely upon long-standing Democratic party members, Mr. Obama has enjoyed enormous support from independent and even Republican voters. As many as 10% of those who voted in Democratic primaries formerly billed themselves as Republicans, and exit polling suggested that they mostly voted for Mr. Obama.

When debating which candidate has democratic legitimacy, the vast numbers taking part in the Democratic race in open primaries who are not necessarily Democratic supporters — and may not vote Democratic in November — might become a liability for Mr. Obama.

Mrs. Clinton has been carefully keeping in reserve, too, her wins in Michigan and Florida, two primaries the Democratic leadership deemed void. No Democratic candidate campaigned in either state, and in Michigan only Mrs. Clinton and Senator Dodd were on the ballot, but Mrs. Clinton won both. In Florida, 1.7 million voted in the Democratic primary, which is a large number of voters for the Democratic leadership to ignore.

Although Florida's Republican Governor Charles Crist has joined Mrs. Clinton in demanding that his state's votes be counted in the Democratic contest, and has even hinted he would fund a rerun, it is not clear how practical it would be to mount late primary races. If the contest were to reach Denver in August, as seems increasingly likely, the lost voters of Florida and Michigan are sure to play their part.

To put last night in perspective, it has been just two months since Mr. Obama trounced Mrs. Clinton in Iowa, but there are six full months before the Denver convention. Wyoming votes on Saturday, and Pennsylvania, a state much like Ohio, boasting 188 delegates, looms large on the horizon on April 22. Each day the race continues will give Mrs. Clinton time to continue to alter the notion that Mr. Obama's victory is inevitable. Last night she showed Mr. Obama is vulnerable; she must now show she is a sure winner.

As a little known quantity, Mr. Obama's claim to be untainted by politics as usual went unquestioned. But since he became the Democratic favorite a number of ugly issues have arisen which puts that assertion in doubt.

He has been endorsed by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, an embarrassment he has shrugged off. But combine that with the beliefs of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his church pastor who sails close to advocating a separate America for African Americans, and the embarrassment is compounded.

The fraud trial in Chicago of Tony Rezko, a friend, supporter, and generous donor of Mr. Obama's, is getting under way. The Illinois senator's judgment has been put in doubt by a property deal made with Mrs. Rezko from which he profited, even while Mr. Rezko was being scrutinized by federal agents. At best, Mr. Obama's dealings with Mr. Rezko shows profound naiveté.

It also shows naiveté when you think Hillary Clinton will quit because some guys ask her to.

A WORD FROM THE MOTHER COUNTRY

As I've written in this space, the Brits have done some of the best reporting on the Democratic race.  They've been free of the hangups that seemed to afflict a number of American reporters in covering Obama.  So, here is a late British view of what's happened.  Tough and direct.  From The Telegraph:

The word “decisive” should now be banned from coverage of the Democratic primary race over the coming weeks. At every turn it has been expected that either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama will emerge as the overwhelming favourite to secure the nomination.

But after the former First Lady's comeback, the race will now almost certainly not be decided until June 7, when Puerto Rico holds the last primary election, or more likely August, when the party holds its nominating convention in Denver, Colorado.

Mrs Clinton proved that she is at her best when she is down. She needed to win Ohio and Texas and did so by throwing every conceivable punch at her opponent, including a couple below the belt.

Hillary?  Below the belt?  Oh, how could anyone think...?

Yeah, yeah.  Below.

And I'll be back later.  There may be some electoral developments during the day.  If events warrant, I might do an afternoon update.

Posted on March 4, 2008.