Perception of Electability At Stake For Obama In Coming Primaries

Two small but significant events happened over Easter weekend in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. First, not only Clinton but also Obama sent out invitations to big donor fundraisers in California the first week of April. (They're rattling tin cups in New York, as well.) Since the O-kitty is nearly three times bigger than hers, Clinton's hitting the money trail isn't surprising. The nooks and crannies in which the campaigns expect to find these $2300 checks is more of a mystery, since Californians who both can and want to give have long since done so. California is beginning to appreciate how Carthage felt squeezed by the Roman Imperium. Obama's dragging himself to fundraisers, however, is more surprising--and revealing. Despite what various pundits say about the race--that Clinton has almost no chance to win--the Obama Campaign must be looking down the road through a different scope. Obama must be estimating that his 30-plus million in the bank is not going to be enough. Internet fundraising from small donors is not going to re-supply him for a coming fight of the magnitude for which his campaign is bracing.

The second significant event, related to the first, is that Clinton has signaled her intention to fight Obama hard for North Carolina on May 6 by sending in Ace Young, who crafted her victories in California and Texas. The conventional wisdom has been that North Carolina, because of its large black population, is Obama's. A month ago, Obama led Clinton there in the polls by 14 points. By last Friday, however, his lead had dropped to a single point. His fall in North Carolina would seem to be a result of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. Clearly, this is Clinton's golden opportunity. For the first time since her humiliation in South Carolina, she will be able to contest seriously a Southern state, and if she wins--as well she might--she will change the dynamic of the race. If she wins Indiana the same day--another more and more likely victory--she will be able to keep that momentum going for a week until West Virginia, which she also should win, and then another week to victory in Kentucky, which will offset her likely loss of Oregon the same day. (Many experts say that Clinton has the edge in Oregon, but I don't see it. Outside Portland and Eugene and Ashland, the state is very conservative, but those voters are not Democrats.) Clinton should win the Hispanic vote in Puerto Rico on June 1. Moreover, Guam a month earlier (May 3) may not be the predicted Obama win. Sharing the Pacific does not make Guam Hawaii, and Clinton, unlike Obama, has visited Guam several times.

Of the last ten Democratic contests, therefore, Obama may win only the three in the continental West: Oregon and then Montana and South Dakota on June 3. As his nearer goal, Obama absolutely must keep his loss in Pennsylvania less than twenty points. If he cannot, the margin will signal the kind of collapse in white support that Clinton experienced with African-Americans in South Carolina. Either scenario--a sweeping defeat in Pennsylvania or a slow bleed through the last ten contests--will plant the question of electability in the minds of some Super Delegates. For the reality is that Barack Obama cannot win the national election in November without the faith and enthusiasm of a good chunk of white middle class and lower class America. So the Obama Campaign can keep sending out daily press releases reminding us that their candidate leads in pledged delegates, number of states won and the popular vote until the cows come home. They can do the math over and over again demonstrating that it is impossible for Clinton to catch Obama in any of those categories. But absent the bigger picture it's whistling Dixie.

Remember Harold Ford? The arc of his 2006 Senate race may be a prognostication of Barack Obama's political fortunes. The national media loved Harold Ford. He was a very intelligent, St. Albans/UPenn educated black politician with seemingly limitless possibility. During the mid-term elections, Newsweek chose Ford for a cover representing all the Democratic contenders nationwide. But the national media never understood the dynamic of that Senate race in Tennessee. Partly because it took the Republicans until the eleventh hour to field a candidate, and therefore Ford dominated the race coverage for so long, the national media never grasped the unlikelihood of a Ford victory. But Tennesseans knew. For he was not just Harold Ford but Harold Ford, Jr. He came from a family that, since its rise to power in Memphis in the 1970s, had increasingly been in the news both for charges of political corruption and for personal peccadilloes--a sordid saga that all Tennesseans abhored, but that white Tennesseans, unlike black Tennesseans, either could not or would not place in the larger context of Shelby County's long history of public malfeasance.

Like Barack Obama, Harold Ford refused to disown a man close to him. For Obama, the mentor is a father-figure; for Ford, the mentor was his own father, whose House seat he had taken (inherited, really), who had been tried but not convicted of 18 counts of bank and mail fraud. White Memphians, who widely regarded Ford, Sr. as a crook, thought that these charges were only the tip of the iceberg. Stories about the father's questionable behavior had been circulating for two decades. The only chance for Harold Ford, Jr. to grab that Senate seat was to distance himself once and for all from his father and his family, whose scandals are too numerous to recount here. But Ford, a decent man, refused to disown his father. And even if he had, Harold Ford, Jr. had in his family a lot of baggage for white voters in Tennessee. Now Barack Obama has baggage. He is no longer the "post-racial" candidate.

It's not that white voters in North Carolina, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and Pennsylvania are racists. It's that a jug of Tide detergent now costs $12.99--about double what it did a year ago. With rising prices and all the other economic worries, middle class voters don't want to have to deal with one more thing--and a presidential candidate with uncertain baggage is that one more thing. Certainly not all--but many--middle class white voters are bewildered by Reverend Wright and Obama's refusal to disavow him. They have been dropped down in the middle of an ongoing story in black America for which they don't have the context. They are once again aggrieved, perceiving, rightly or wrongly, that they have made the effort, as one teacher told me, "to love all my students equally," while "these black separatists" have not done the same. Inadvertently, Barack Obama has opened an old wound. Obama truly is a post-racial candidate, but therein lays tragedy if he loses the Democratic nomination. It's precisely because he didn't grow up on the Southside of Chicago, or elsewhere in the continental United States, that he lacked the sense of place to divine where Trinity Church fit into the larger African-American narrative; and therefore he never grew the political antennae necessary to sense the price of a membership there. I hope I will be proved wrong, resoundingly, about white middle class voters soon to line up at the polls. But having talked to family and friends in North Carolina over the past two days, I fear not.

While Barack Obama has acquired baggage, Hillary Clinton has finally got a narrative--and for her this is a very good thing, far outweighing any consequences of losing the possibility of revotes in Michigan and Florida, or of losing this or that endorsement, in an election where endorsements have not meant much. Voters firmly rejected her first queenly claims to the nomination--that she deserved it, that she was the inevitable winner--and punished her for the presumption. But now, almost despite herself, and certainly despite the royal style of her campaign, she presents a consistent persona of the hard-knock candidate, both giving and receiving blows, who refuses to lay down and die. There's a grudging respect for her now in middle America and, more importantly, a growing sense that as a nation we are so screwed--damned if we stay in Iraq, damned if we don't; the government needs to spend big on health care and education and infrastructure and rebuilding the military at the same time it needs to rein in the deficit--that it well may take a tough-as-nails, Washington-bitten, willing to get-down-and-dirty closer like Hillary Clinton to hack a path through the swamp.

In addition to placing North Carolina in the hands of Ace Young, last week the Clinton Campaign brought onboard P.R. maestro Howard Paster. This (undoubtedly very costly) hire also signals a victory strategy through Electability. Bill Clinton has already said that they are going to take it to the Super Delegates on that issue, and if Obama cannot hold onto enough of the white vote, the Clintons may get a hearing. Bill Clinton has made the cynical assessment that African-American voters will return to Hillary in November. (See "San Francisco's Mayor Gavin Newsom Spills The Beans On Clinton Strategy," my earlier piece on how Newsom has been parroting what Clinton told him in Texas.) As Carl Bernstein writes in A Woman in Charge, "'His [Bill Clinton's] ground zero assumption is that you're an asshole, but he can charm you.'" An unnamed source is talking to Bernstein about Clinton's attitude toward the press (former attitude, surely) but it is an apt description of the ex-President's condescension to his audiences out on the current campaign trail. Moreover, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been working to mend fences with African-Americans: attending a black leadership event in New Orleans, speaking with black pastors, seeing what worked and what did not in Mississippi, where all three Clintons campaigned vigorously even though Senator Clinton had no chance of winning. Therefore, the Clintons are not likely to credit the possibility that overturning the expressed will of the voters will fracture the Democratic Party.

Adding to the possibility of success for an Electability strategy are two recent polls on how Democrats would like to see Super Delegates make up their minds. In a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll of March 14-16, 49% of respondents said that the Super Delegates should choose "the best candidate;" 27% said the Super Ds should heed the race results in their own state; 19% said that the Super Ds should make a decision based on all primaries and caucuses combined. In a Newsweek poll taken March 5-6, 43% of respondents said that the trailing candidate should concede and 42% said that the Super Delegates should determine the winner. Unless these percentages change over the next few months, they undercut the belief that Super Delegates shouldn't feel free to choose on the basis of Electability over other (even though quantifiable) criteria.

So I'm dubious about your assertion that "Clinton has virtually no chance of winning," Messers VandeHei and Allen over at Politico, and that Clinton's long shot "seems to have grown a little longer," Mr. Adam Nagourney of the New York Times. Maybe I'm too much of a Faulknerian Southern pessimist. But I think you guys are sitting in the middle of the forest and draping narrative trees with spring solstice paper chains of reason, sanity, goodwill, hope, relief, healing, new beginnings and the higher truth of number theory. Meanwhile the Clintons gather again beyond the forest over the horizon, and whether the next nasty fight--and I predict North Carolina is going to be very nasty indeed--is the Ardennes (Clinton makes a terrific last push but is defeated) or the Wilderness (Clinton and Obama fight to a draw, inflicting serious wider damage) or Transalpine Gaul (Obama is Vercingetorix and Caesar Clinton triumphs) remains to be seen. But it's going to be one hell of a story, and I've already got my plane ticket to Charlotte.

Comments

[alyceclover]

If one's opponent has vowed to do whatever it takes to win, considers you an enemy and will stay in the race for another 50 or 100 years, as Senator Clinton has said, perhaps a man who already has had death threats might not feel secure enough with the money he has carefully spent in his campaign. It is sad that the Clintons voters can not see past her lies, which are constant, especially on what she feeds them about Senator Obama. I wonder why the press remains silent on Peter F Paul VS William Jefferson Clinton lawsuit which is scheduled to begin on April 25, 2008 in Los Angeles? Both she and Bill must be well aware of it, as she is well aware she mis-reported his prior campaign contributions. Perhaps if the press would start reporting news, rather than conjecture it would help citizens remember Vincent Foster, Billy Dale, Whitegate, Rose Law Firm and all the rest of the scandals revolving around our impeached ex-president who wants a "buy one, get one free" proxy 3rd term in DC.

[mrJJ]

The results for Texas County and Senate District Conventions for the caucus delegates can be viewed online as the results come in at BOR. The complete results probably wont be ready till sometime this evening. 67 Texas Delegates at stake. err plus the supers

http://www.burntorangereport.com/

[baldhawk]

The head article, and seven + pages of comments, I see from the heart. Most are pre-judgments made before inspection, the author posting others' opinions to prove their opinion is right.

I think this is the season for surprises. Past behavior (back to Lincoln's times) has shown unbelievable shifts of trends when the public has had enough. This is the first time in 50 years that I've taken the time to speak about issues and politicians. I'd like to see people's personal views based on what they've read, and seen, or even, estimated from the candidates' words or actions.

So here is my preference, and why: Obama took a big political risk talking as he did about his pastor and American racial issues. In this instance, he put his personal integrity above his political future. I have never seen a politician ever do that. But no only on this issue, this man is a cut above the rest.

Hope, you say? Sure... When there is nothing else, what is left but hope? Do I expect things will change with either of the other candidates? No. Will they change with Obama? He'll have an uphill battle against the status quo, but at least, he's likely to Veto anything that's against the public interest, and has nothing to lose in doing that. For now, I'm happy to see someone who will head off any further decay of our nation.

[GrannyFitz]

Hey people... why all the bickering?? Everyone has their mind made up. Obama is simply not presidential material. Plus he is a racist. As far as I'm concerned I vote for Hillary in November or against Obama. McCain ain't such a bad guy.

Granny

[nuglet304]

he really isn't such a bad guy. once upon a time i told myself he was one of the only republicans i could ever vote for. at least he won't be held to any superhuman standards that no one could ever live up to.

[alyceclover]

GrannyFitz: That is slander or libel calling Obama a "racist". Rather like 3 fingers pointing back at you. "There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America" and "There is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America - there's the United States of America." and "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success."

Senator Obama believes the majority of American people are "decent". He never met people like you obviously and others who judge and label.

[nuglet304]

great analysis, and all the more reason to keep the race going. the democratic nomination process isn't new, and it's not appropriate to simply scrap the whole thing just because people find it unfair this time around. nobody seemed to have as big a problem with it before barack obama came along.

perhaps more people than ever are realizing that prince charming wouldn't have done as well in this race if the wright issue had to come light sooner. any other surprises around the corner?

[Lap48]

(conclusion)
Obama has to realise that for all his formidable talent and-yes-audacity, he's going to have to face the fact that he can't surmount the issue of race with one beautifully crafted and delivered speech. Even without Wright and considering the subtle race/character slurring delivered by both white and black Clinton surrogates along with Geraldine Ferraro's rancid [but to a New Yorker, familiar] disquisition on race, Obama should have seen this coming. He should have realised this comes with the territory of seeking the Presidency and he now should avoid becoming dispirited. If he wants this as badly as it appears he does, he should continue full speed ahead fully aware of the fact that if he wants the office, and the power that comes with it, he's going to have to rip it away it from the cold, clammy grasp of those opposing him. Translation: stay on top of his game, keep your head on a swivel, continue to be aware of race as an issue and know that its all coming down to Pennsylvania (spend whatever financial, personal and political capital to keep the margin of victory ten points or less) and North Carolina (nothing less than victory will suffice) before he can drive a stake through the heart of the Clinton candidacy....and, then, it really gets hard.

[Lap48]

"...Obama truly is a post-racial candidate, but therein lays tragedy if he loses the Democratic nomination. It's precisely because he didn't grow up on the Southside of Chicago, or elsewhere in the continental United States, that he lacked the sense of place to divine where Trinity Church fit into the larger African-American narrative; and therefore he never grew the political antennae necessary to sense the price of a membership there..."

We're more or less in agreement, Mayhill. As unfortunate as it appears, you're on to something about Obama's lack of truly divining the racial lay of the land; I wouldn't just chalk it up to geographic serendipity, however.

Barack IS post-racial but the reason for that is something I've rarely seen discussed: It's because neither one of his parents' lineage can be traced back to the butt end of slavery as, say, Michelle's.

Obama's father is Kenyan, or rather continental African. If his line had had anything to do with the human trafficking of Africans for profit during the period from the 17th to the 19th centuries (we're counting European-New World slavery, not the earlier-- on-going, at the time--Arab trafficking),
(cont'd)

[Lap48]

(Continued)**
...it would likely have been through the facilitation of moving slaves-to-be through the interior of the continent to the West coast, where most of the European slavers stopped to fill the lower galleys of their slave ships. And, of course, Ann Dunham, his white mother, was not descended from slaves (we're not discounting indentured servitude, here, but once and for all, indentured servitude was nothing like the race-based full-on slavery in what became the continental US where, say, an indentured servant had the out of buying his freedom from servitude, once and for all, while even free blacks were often wrongfully impressed into or returned to slavery).

I suspect that Michelle, whose parents can trace their lineage back to slavery and who reportedly was not happy about her husband's audacity for hoping he could be President of a nation that is still 3/4's European-American, didn't possess the naivete Barack apparently has about the nature of the challenge he was undertaking (I don't think an African-American with roots grounded in the "Plymouth rock landed on me" version of US history would have been so clueless as to have overlooked the incongruity of contemplating a run for President while immersing himself in Rev. Wright's Liberation Theology church.
(cont'd)

**(I think the moderators missed this in posting the 1st and 3rd sections of a 3 part post that is otherwise unintelligible, if the 2nd part is not published)

[eshever]

Great analysis. I loved Harold Ford Jr. but he had a very tough and dirty opponent, too. He ended up carrying well in most parts of the state except east Tennessee which is always Republican.

Re North Carolina, don't forget that there's an upscale, liberal white element of the population in the Triad area and a lot of out-of-staters living there now. They can skew the politics to the left in the state somewhat. It may be a hard fight but I give the edge to Obama.

[ARealist]

Daniel, He is unelectable as he is an apologists for the black people again, only in a different package. Before everyone but blacks knew about the Rev. Wright situation, they were willing to vote for him. Now they find out that he is just like Al and Jesse only he is much more attractive in many ways. But they just don't want a Black apologist and enabler as their President.

[Daniel8168]

Let's take a real score here:

Obama's pastor spoke to the anger, hurt, and disenfranchisement of generations of American citizens. He spoke a personal, generational truth that many are afraid to address and many others are afraid to hear.

Clinton lied about her visit to Bosnia to convince us that they sent her to places too dangerous for the president.

Let's address electability. Hillary may be able to get more of the white vote than Obama, but she won't get the young vote if they feel disenfranchised, and Hillary won't get any of the independent vote that Obama can garner. Polls have consistently shown that Hillary Clinton loses to John McCain in the general. So, what the hell is so electable about her?

In any fair measure that does not disenfranchise voters, Hillary Clinton lost the nomination, yet she continues to fight, dragging us all down while singing the praises of John McCain.

What bothers me most is that I see people saying that Obama is the divisive one, yet I rarely if ever even see any attempt to substantiate these claims - where is the evidence? Please, people, if you're going to hate Obama, try to have a reason, and try to express that reason. Don't just try to associate him with someone like Harold Ford Jr. The issue of electability and the issue of corruption are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but in Obama's case that is an unfair conflation and sad attempt to change the opinions of thinking

[ARealist]

This is why Obama is losing the white vote.

http://www.newsmax.com/kessler/obama_wright/2008/03/26/83129.html

[Daniel8168]

He's losing the white vote because other people chose not to denounce Rev Wright's comments? Or is he losing the white vote because Condoleeza Rice doesn't talk about race. I'm not sure I understood that article, although I did get a good laugh when they started touting Condi as an upright person - this is the stinking pile of crap that sat in front of a committee hearing and said that the administration had no reason to believe that Bin Laden was going to attack the U.S. This is the same filthy liar that that was forced to admit that a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack U.S." came across her desk and was flatly disregarded. This wonderfully moral person is a pile of trash that was complicit in allowing the deaths of over 3,000 people on September 11th. But because she is afraid to address the racial discrimination she suffered as a youth, we are to believe she is somehow morally upright? Heck, on that note, let's tell rape and molestation victims that they are better people if they pretend it never happened.

[Eratosthenes]

Why is it that facts and math are so troubling to some? This is a delegate race. Barring a Spitzer-like meltdown, Obama will easily win the elected delegate count. The super delegates are not Olympic figure skating judges. They will not give the second place finisher the nomination. Period. Anyone who does not understand this should just ask Nancy Pelosi.

[maryy1947]

Mayhill spoke a little too soon. Obama is way ahead (26 points, to be exact!!!!!) in the North Carolina Polls, according to USA Election Polls, the site you she linked.

And from the Huffington Post:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/25/poll-obama-regains-big-l_n_93331.html

[ntmessage]

PPP has been wildly inaccurate as a pollster. A week ago, they had Obama ahead by only 1 point. Obama does lead in NC, but by most measures perhaps 3-8 points. At the same time and the why the article was posted, the most accurate of the pollsters, SurveyUSA have McCain ahead of both candidates in the general, and is an example of another state that were Obama is ahead in the primary, but not likely to change the general.

[keriheb]

Hillary is a person who wants to set up a council made up of Rubin and Greenspan to oversee the mortgage crises. Considering Rubin worked for Bill Clinton and led the charge to deregulate the banks. It is the same with Greenspan, considering he was part and parcel to the banking fiasco, how it is considered prudent to again place these men in an oversight position to the banking system? What judgment does Hillary exhibit with this recommendation. Sure it gets her a sound bite in the news and to the uninformed she is able to throw around big and familiar names.

Obama represents to many people not someone who pretends to have the experience of the presidency. Obama represents someone who has enough integrity to lead this country to a higher moral ground, recommit this country to the high standards suggested by our constitution.

A vote for Obama is not a vote for experience, it is a vote for the HOPE of something better, something new, where the standard is that people must strive to live up to their potential and where people commit to at least trying to live in a world where we work towards a green standard, a holistic approach, a moral foundation for ourselves and others. We cannot fail at this effort, or all that is left is debauchery, hate and wars and more wars.

[ntmessage]

HuffPost's Pick

I would rather have people who know what they are doing as opposed to hope. The dereg by Clinton 10 years ago had nothing at all to do with the current mess. Bush, his lack of regulation enforcement and his SEC allowed businesses like country wide to enter the mortgage business without the same banking regulations that are still in force from the 30s. Sounds like another attempt to pin a Bush issue onto the Clintons, who oversaw one of the best economy in years and a budget surplus that no one can remember before or after. Sorry to say, what we need is a Clinton like economy, my friends. Not Hope.

[indalay]

I'd pick hope every time it comes in a candidate who has the intelligence, compassion, vision and integrity.
People who "know what they are doing" but who lack integrity scare me.

[SoulSistah]

"For the reality is that Barack Obama cannot win the national election in November without the faith and enthusiasm of a good chunk of white middle class and lower class America."

Lower class America? Really? Are you referring to yourself.

With regard to Ford, Jr. in Tennessee. He was swiftboated with ads about a relationship with a white woman. I guess Tennessee is not ready to move beyond race and you're not either. The strangest thing about this presidential race is not gender or race. It is that a wife of a former president thinks she is entitled to be the next president of the USA. Don't you find that just a little bizarre?

You too need an upgrade to version 2.0.0.8.

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RIP -- HRC Presidential Aspirations