Even after the turbulence he encountered last week, Barack Obama still seems the probable Democratic nominee for one simple reason. By June 8, all 54 primaries and caucuses will be completed. (Why 54? In typical American fashion, the United States does things to excess, so not only are all 50 states represented, but the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam and “Democrats Abroad”.)
And on that morning Obama will, unless something really weird happens, be ahead of Hillary Clinton in the count of pledged delegates. It’s difficult to imagine the so-called superdelegates going against the guy in the lead — “overturning the will of the voters”, in the fashionable parlance.
Difficult to imagine, but hardly impossible. Obama may win the mathematics argument, but the Clinton campaign is counting on persuading uncommitted superdelegates — the 300 or so elected officials and party insiders who have a vote but haven’t made up their minds yet — that Obama is unfit both to go up against John McCain this November and to govern the country. Her only hope is to make the superdelegates, many of whom will be on the ballot themselves in November, queasy enough about Obama that they’ll damn the numbers.
Hence Clinton’s recent attacks. Some have been fair, some have crossed the line. But they have been relentless since her campaign announced its “kitchen sink” strategy in advance of the Ohio and Texas voting and will presumably continue to be so.
How Obama responds — how forcefully he decides to return fire, and by what means — will be the main factor in determining whether he’s the nominee. Here’s why: to be elected president, one has to prove somewhere along the campaign trail that one is tough enough to be president and the handiest way to show that is to fight off the opponent’s punches and land a few of one’s own.
This raises an interesting and so far mostly unexamined question — indeed a question on which the contest may ultimately turn: How does a man attack a woman without looking like a big bully?
As Obama begins to wade into the dark waters of negative campaigning — demanding recently that the Clintons release their tax returns — most pundits in the US have described a risk for Obama, but an entirely different one. The standard line is that negative campaigning will diminish his message of hope and optimism, and that if he “descends to Clinton’s level”, as it’s sometimes put, the aura that has bathed him will flicker and be extinguished.
I don’t buy this. It’s true that it will be a factor, bemoaned on op-ed pages and by a few cable chatterers for a few days. But what campaign reporters really want is a fight, so that their stories get maximum play. So at the end of the day they’re not likely to lecture one of the pugilists to step out of the ring. They’re going to egg him on.
Now let’s switch gears a bit and talk for a moment about race and gender in this campaign. Which is a bigger burden — Obama’s, of being a black man seeking the presidency, or Clinton’s, of being a woman?
Each presents its challenges, but in fascinatingly different ways. For instance, polls have generally shown that femaleness is a larger handicap than blackness. Advantage Obama. On the other hand, Clinton is allowed to talk openly about becoming the first woman president, but if Obama said he’d be proud to be the first African-American president, the mainstream media and his critics would start alleging that he was going to take his marching orders from Al Sharpton; much of white America would need smelling salts, and his campaign would be effectively over. Advantage Clinton.
On and on we could go down this road. On balance, I suspect that the US stands more vigilant guard against signs of racism than of misogyny. So Clinton’s burden is probably a little greater.
But when it comes to the politics of the gutter, she has a clear edge.
She can do down and dirty without raising alarms. Admittedly this is more because she’s a Clinton — and that’s the kind of politics that’s expected of Clintons — than because she’s a woman. But it’s gender-determined as well as Clinton-determined: more than half the voters in these Democratic primaries are women, and when they see a woman throwing punches at a man, most think “good for her”.
But when a man starts punching at a woman? That raises the risk of backlash. And who knows whether, for some white women at least, his race raises the stakes and makes him an even more menacing figure, making the backlash greater still? So Obama is going to have to do a unique kind of negative campaigning. It will have to be somewhat polite and high-minded.
It will have to steer clear of any possibility of being interpreted as misogynistic. Yet at the same time it has to be tough enough so that he can prove he’s president-tough.
That’s quite a tightrope. The slightest mistake and you can be sure that the Clinton campaign, not widely known for its sense of shame, will exploit it in ways that you and I can’t even begin to imagine. And if he falls off that tightrope, the superdelegates who hold his fate in their hands will hear the thud when he lands. The Clinton people will make sure of that, too. — Â