Well, that was the worst possible outcome for the Democrats — and for all those in the United States and beyond yearning for change after eight years of failed Republican rule. The results of last Tuesday’s contests in Ohio and Texas promise a slow disaster for the party for which 2008 should have been an easy and golden year.
Even a week ago, Democrats had March 4 circled on the calendar as the day of closure. Barack Obama did not need to extend his winning streak in the past 11 contests by much, just enough to confirm that the momentum he had built over February was irreversible. A narrow win in Texas would have done it. Bill Clinton had said as much, noting that if Hillary did not win both of Tuesday’s big states, she’d be finished. The party bigwigs would have closed in, tapped Hillary on the shoulder and told her it was time to step aside.
Instead, Hillary won 51% of the vote in Texas and took Ohio by much more — and she’s not about to give way to anybody. This fight will go on. Which means the Democrats now have to brace themselves for months more rancour and division. Occasionally, they’ll be able to pause from their wrestling, look up and see a smiling John McCain strolling towards November.
Because the Republicans resolved their nomination fight on Tuesday night, just as Democrats ensured protracted indecision in theirs. McCain now has a clear path before him. He can simply press ahead, framing the general election debate on his own terms and defining himself before his opponent gets a chance to do it for him.
Optimistic Democrats see a sunny side to this never-ending saga. For one thing, with the drama all on their side, the media spotlight stays on them. And, say the Pollyannas, it’s actually healthy that the Democratic rivals test each other in combat now. It means that the eventual winner will be battle-hardened, his or her hide thick enough to repel anything the Republicans hurl their way. After all, if Obama can’t beat Clinton, or vice-versa, how could they hope to beat McCain?
But another view is possible. For the Clinton camp is sure to conclude that it won on Tuesday by going negative, setting out to rob Obama of his halo. Clinton attacked him for his links to a slum landlord now on trial in Chicago, his apparent double-talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement and, most arrestingly, with a TV ad featuring sleeping children, which suggested Obama was simply too inexperienced to deal with a 3am call to the White House warning of a foreign crisis.
Even if Obama had a good response to the TV ad — noting that when the ”red phone” rang for Hillary in 2003, asking whether America should invade Iraq, she gave the wrong answer — he was clearly knocked off his stride by the Clinton barrage and by intensified press scrutiny. That was bad news for him, but it’s also bad news for the party.
The ringing phone ad was the kind of scare commercial Republicans habitually run against Democrats, its tone similar to the Cold War ”bear in the woods” ad Ronald Reagan used to crush Walter Mondale in 1984. If Obama is the eventual nominee, McCain will simply have to hit rewind and play it back as his own. The same is true of Hillary Clinton’s declaration that she and McCain both have long records of national security experience — while all Obama has is ”one speech”.
Until now, Obama has avoided hitting back in kind. But now, almost an underdog once more, he may have to. That will mean weeks of hand-to-hand combat over ”ethics and disclosure and law firms and real-estate deals”, in the words of Obama strategist David Axelrod. It will mean dredging up Hillary’s Arkansas past as well as probing the sources of the Clintons’ current fortune. Why, for example, has Hillary refused to release her tax return? Obama can start dismantling Hillary’s talk of ”experience”, based on her eight years living in the White House: does that make Laura Bush qualified to be president?
Such negative campaigning would not only taint Obama, perhaps fatally undermining his claim to embody a new kind of politics, it would also contaminate the entire Democratic effort. Whoever emerges as the nominee will be damaged goods. Republicans will have been handed their attack lines for November and, worse, the Democratic party will have been plunged into a bitterness that may prove impossible to heal in time.
An early warning of that came in Tuesday’s exit polls: now only four in 10 Democrats say they’ll be satisfied with the nominee, whoever it is. A month ago it was seven in 10. That suggests that a sullen, defeated chunk of the Democratic faithful will slink off the battlefield come the autumn, rather than fight for the winner. If there is a protracted legal battle over the status of delegates from Michigan and — you guessed it — Florida, excluded for breaking party rules but whose inclusion would favour Hillary, then bitterness will turn into toxicity.
But that is not the gloomiest thought. Democrats could be facing a choice between a woman who can win the party nomination but not the presidency and a man who could win the presidency but not his party’s nomination.
Start with Hillary: it’s easy to work out how she could end up as the Democratic standard-bearer. She might win enough over coming weeks to make the delegate count close and she’ll brag that she bagged all the big prizes, the New Yorks and Californias, while Obama only got the minnow states. Then it comes down to the superdelegates, who will wield the casting votes. In that contest, twisting arms and calling in favours, the Clintons would surely beat the newcomer, Obama.
Yet not many would bet on Hillary, once nominated, beating McCain. Sure, she has proved her extraordinary resilience. But McCain trumps her on both experience and national security. And the simple presence of her name on the ballot would unite and galvanise Republicans more effectively than anything McCain could say or do himself.
Obama, by contrast, could reframe the entire contest, presenting McCain as, yes, a great hero – but from an era that has passed. He could tie him to George Bush, running pictures of yesterday’s White House endorsement, branding them partners in the disastrous ”Bush-McCain” war on Iraq. And Obama has showed that he can bring in the young, independent and suburban voters the Democrats need to win.
Yet to have that chance he has to first win the nomination, and that might be harder for him than winning the presidency itself. Going negative erodes his defining positive message; doing nothing allows Hillary to paint him as weak, potential snack-food for the waiting wolves of the Republican party. If it comes down to a stalemate to be settled by the Democratic establishment, he begins with an in-built disadvantage.
So this is the Democrats’ plight. In a year that should be theirs, they are caught between a potential winner who can’t seem to win — and a probable loser who just refuses to lose.
A family celebration, but where’s Bill?
The confetti was still swirling above hundreds of waving campaign signs when Hillary Clinton declared the next stage in her journey for political redemption. ”You know what they say, as Ohio goes, so goes the nation,” she said in the state capital.
The crowd — with many women in the trouser suits and sculpted hair that are Clinton’s campaign uniform — cheered mightily.
Last Tuesday night was almost a family reunion for Clinton. The rest of the country may have written her campaign off but the ballroom crowd had never counted Clinton out — even after Obama racked up a dozen victories in a row and Democrats called on her to pull out.
”All I have to say is I told you so,” said Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a member of Congress from Cleveland and one of Clinton’s most ardent supporters.
But one member of the Clinton family was missing — Bill. Democratic activists said the former president’s low profile in Ohio helped Clinton amplify her own message, without distractions. ”Clinton found her voice in Ohio,” said a Democratic state representative.
Without her husband in the picture Clinton was able to restate her case in television ads that she was the one voters would want picking up the phone in the White House in the middle of the night. The pitch seemed calculated to appeal to socially conservative white male voters who make up a large share of the electorate in Ohio and Texas, as well as the next big battleground, Pennsylvania.
Clinton also homed in on the economy — the overwhelming concern of voters in Ohio.
Exit polls suggested she picked up strength among last-minute deciders. Overall, Clinton took 65% of the white vote. For the first time she also managed to challenge Obama in his key area of support, performing strongly among independent and Republican voters. — Â