Most days on the campaign trail have a main theme -- "Michigan/Florida," "Reverend Wright," "bluecollar voters hate Obama," etc. The theme of the day is important, because in the absence of truly remarkable breaking news, news editors generally use what they perceive as "what today's about" in deciding how to allocate their reporters, which stories to run, etc. Before the advent of MSM blogs, the theme of the day often was stated succinctly in the first sentences, or "lede", written by the AP and UPI wire service reporters, whose short dispatches throughout the day showed up on press tickers in newsrooms around the country several hours earlier than the fuller stories written by various campaign reporters. Many editors began planning their page layouts and headlines based on these wire service ledes, expecting their own reporters to file stories that expanded on that theme.
Now, many reporters are expected to file their own opening dispatches to outlet blogs, like the Chicago Tribune's "The Swamp," and then follow up with full-blown pieces on the day's events. And, of course, both broadcast and print media can file stories, change page layouts, etc. much more quickly than they could in the days of hand-laid lead type. But the theme of the day is still relatively common -- and the campaigns do their best to take control of each day's coverage by pushing the theme that's helpful to them, using press releases, press conference calls, private talks with reporters, interviews on TV news shows, and new words inserted into the candidates' standard speeches.
Yesterday, the Clinton campaign tried to pre-spin the results of today's Oregon and Kentucky primaries, which by all accounts will finally give Barack Obama the majority of democratically chosen "pledged" delegates and strengthen his argument to superdelegates that a decent respect for democracy requires them to ratify the choice of Democratic voters. The theme Clinton tried to plant is that the race isn't over, and that an overeager Obama presumptuously and insultingly intended to "declare victory" immediately after the Oregon and Kentucky contests even though he technically will not yet have earned a majority of all delegates (pledged and super combined).
The problem is, the Clinton camp's pre-spin was based on a week-old blog post, and ignored repeated statements by both Obama and his representatives that they had no intention of "declaring victory" or calling the campaign over until the combined delegate count clinched the nomination.
In a post on May 8 titled "Obama plans to declare victory May 20," Politico's David Paul Kuhn cited an unnamed Obama insider for the news that "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... It's a train wreck waiting to happen, with one candidate claiming to be the nominee while the other vigorously denies it."
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton reiterated that claim, telling supporters at a campaign event in Kentucky that "None of us is going to have the number of delegates we're going to need to get to the nomination, although I understand my opponent and his supporters are going to claim that." And yesterday morning, Clinton's Communications Director, Howard Wolfson, issued a press release that cited the Politico post and accused Obama of having a "plan to declare himself the Democratic nominee tomorrow night in Iowa."
The Clinton camp's declarations went beyond a plea to the media not to declare the race over. The focus was directly on Obama, and not in the kinder, gentler terms that have characterized her campaign in the last week or two. Wolfson's press release yesterday amped up the tension between the campaigns and risked driving an even deeper wedge between Obama and the Clinton supporters he needs to beat McCain in November, by calling Obama's supposed plan "a slap in the face to the millions of voters in the remaining primary states and to Senator Clinton's 17 million supporters." Wolfson even compared Obama to George W. Bush, titling his press release "Mission Accomplished? Not so fast" and writing, "Premature victory laps and false declarations of victory are unwarranted. Declaring mission accomplished does not make it so."
All of which might be fair -- merely tough campaigning -- if there actually were evidence that Obama intended to "declare victory" tonight. But there's not. If anything, the Obama campaign has gone out of its way to make clear that while it considers today's contests a milestone, it adamantly is not declaring victory yet.
Signs that Obama might not actually have intended to declare outright "victory" can be seen in the very post the Clinton campaign cited in yesterday's press release, where Kuhn qualified his news with the observation that " the nature of that declaration of victory is 'still developing,' in the [unnamed] advisor's words."
And in fact the Obama camp has made it clear since then that it has no intention of declaring "Mission Accomplished" tonight:
For example, in a press conference call on May 12 to announce the endorsement of former DNC Chair Roy Romer, which I reported here on OffTheBus, a reporter directly asked Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, whether the campaign would "declare victory" tonight. Plouffe couldn't have been clearer: while winning the majority of elected delegates would be "an important moment" that would reflect "the will of the voters," he added definitively that "we're definitely not going to declare victory... we still have three contests after that." He went on to say that the campaign was focused on the total delegate count, not just the pledged delegate count: "Our focus is on getting to that 2,025 number as quickly as we can."
On Sunday, the day before Wolfson's and Clinton's "Mission Accomplished" smear, the Chicago Tribune's Jim Tankersley reported that Obama told donors at Portland's University Club the race wouldn't be over tonight:
Obama predicted a victory in Oregon, and said he believed the resulting delegate haul would "put us over the top," adding: "We will be able to say we have won a majority. But we have a lot of work to do ahead of us."
He said to win in November would require a unified Democratic Party, adding: "That means all of you have to be nice to Clinton supporters."
And in the wee hours of yesterday morning -- 4:37 a.m. Eastern time, to be precise, before Clinton delivered her speech accusing Obama of planning to declare victory and before Wolfson clicked "send" on his emailed press release accusing Obama of declaring "Mission Accomplished" -- Politico itself confirmed that its original story no longer held true. Under the bold headline "Obama: No victory declaration Tuesday," Carrie Budoff Brown wrote:
Concerned about appearing presumptuous or antagonistic towards Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama will not declare victory in the Democratic nomination fight Tuesday in the event he wins enough pledged delegates to claim a majority.
Rather, he'll tiptoe right up to the line, without explicitly asserting the race is over.
While it may sound like an exercise in hair-splitting, the conscious decision not to declare victory is a revealing measure of the sensitivity surrounding overtures that appear to disrespect Clinton and her supporters.
So for a week and a half the Obama campaign has been saying, clearly and publicly, that while tonight's milestone will be significant it won't be the end of the race and that they don't intend to declare victory yet. And despite all those disclaimers, both Clinton and her top advisor shotgunned every political reporter in the nation yesterday with a claim -- based on an eleven-day-old, now-disproved blog post -- that Obama was about to insult Clinton's supporters by declaring victory.
Either no one in the Clinton campaign is paying even halfhearted attention to the news media or to their opponent's official statements -- which would suggest that they're skipping the front page these days and flipping straight to the employment classifieds -- or that Clinton's media managers are so desperate that they're issuing press releases datelined "land of make-believe" and hoping, just hoping, that no one in the entire mainstream press or blogosphere is actually paying them enough attention to catch their mistakes. Neither explanation augurs well for Clinton.
She's dressed up a straw Obama in George Bush's flight suit, stuck an old newspaper under its arm, pointed to a fading article, sounded the rebel yell -- and still lost.
It's bad enough for her that she's been unable to defeat Obama. Now it seems she can't even beat his scarecrow. And perhaps worse, it's yet another mistake in a cascading series of errors her campaign has been making, that suggests how badly things are spinning out of control.
The truth is that winning the majority of democratically elected delegates is victory. Obama has won the election, which in a democracy means winning the nomination. This isn't a case where three candidates have split the vote so that none has a majority (in which case the superdelegates would play an indispensable role in breaking the deadlock and giving the nominee an apparent majority to carry him into the general election). It's a two-candidate race, and Obama won.
Are there still undeclared superdelegates? Doesn't matter, because the superdelegates will, in the end, simply ratify the candidate the voters chose. They'll do this for any of several dozen good reasons -- ranging from a sincere love of democracy, to the self-interested calculation that they'll be run out of office on a rail if they presume to override the voters' choice and their candidate loses to McCain -- but they'll do it. Everyone understands that, except for a few dead-enders who confuse feminism with chauvinism and fault Obama for failing to open Clinton's door for her and lay his jacket over the political mud so she can walk cleanly ahead of him to the nomination without mussing her oh-so-blue-collar Ferragamos.
Clinton should have learned enough about Obama's nature by now to realize his campaign has too much tactical wisdom and that he has too much class to rub her face in a reality she should be able to see for herself. If nothing else, Clinton should have realized this about Obama's nature by this point. He will declare tonight, correctly, that he passed a significant democratic milestone; but he's not going to declare he's won the nomination. He doesn't need to. He'll show courtesy to Clinton -- and everyone with a belief in small-d democracy, or able to do simple math with a pencil stub on the back of an envelope, will declare his victory on his behalf.