Razzle Dazzle: Hil and Bam, The Musical

Razzle Dazzle
Hil and Bam, The Musical


Here came Hillary Clinton a little after 10 last Tuesday night, addressing a jubilant crowd in Philadelphia after it became clear she would win the Pennsylvania Democratic primary by close to 10 points, speaking about being "a champion who stands with" teachers and doctors and nurses and waitresses and cops.

It was as if she had decided it was time to ditch her Celine Dion campaign song and crank up The Pretenders "I'll Stand By You," the ringing pledge of someone who had "seen the dark side" to be true "When you're standing at the crossroads/And don't know which path to choose."

But while Senator Clinton has finally found the perfect theme to carry her into November, it's not likely that the leaders of the Democratic Party are humming along. Her resurgent campaign is unlikely to propel her past Barack Obama on either the delegate count or the popular vote for the party nomination, and her tough tactics against the Illinois Senator have made more than a few people nervous that she is softening him up for John McCain.

Boosting McCain At Obama's Expense

PUTTING THE BAM ON OBAMA: Hillary Clinton's tough tactics have thrown Barack Obama off-stride, raising questions about how he will hold up in a general election campaign even as they reinforce perceptions about her willingness to go negative against anyone who opposes her. The issue is whether her efforts will wind up hurting whichever candidate emerges with the Democratic nomination for President.

However much she and her supporters have argued that this is the place to prove your mettle before taking on the Republicans, there is good reason to question her past statements that she and Mr. McCain have already established their bona fides to lead the country but the same can't be said about Mr. Obama.

It's remarks like that which leave Obama supporters and some top party officials wondering whether she's become too consumed by what is now an underdog bid to win a nomination that she virtually handed to her Democratic rival during the first two months of the year.

From their perspective, the song that fits Senator Clinton best is, "And I Am Telling You, I'm Not Going," the showstopper from "Dreamgirls" in which a woman tells her former lover that she's not going to give him up no matter how emphatically he tells her the romance is over.

For anyone who saw Jennifer Holliday sing it in the original Broadway production, the emotion of the performance was overpowering - her voice swooping and soaring, growling with determination and moaning with hurt - despite the sense that she wasn't being realistic. At its core, the song demanded that her straying boyfriend examine whether a prettier, more personable rival really matched her on substance.

Many Democratic leaders aren't interested in revisiting the question; to their minds, the only issue is winning and they believe their best chance lies in Senator Clinton yielding gracefully rather than continuing to hammer away at Senator Obama in the primaries to come over the next month.

But the result in Pennsylvania further underscores Ms. Clinton's strength among working-class white voters and Mr. Obama's weakness with the same group, which has always been critical to Democrats' success in November. Some Democrats believe that Senator Obama by inspiring huge turnouts of blacks and young people has altered the political calculus and so the old math doesn't apply. For some reason, however, this is considered a valid theory despite the fact that it hasn't been proven in a general election, while Ms. Clinton's argument that her strength against Mr. Obama in big states matters more is dismissed as "spin."

Debunking the Big-State Argument

The case for Mr. Obama despite his problems in the states with at least 20 electoral votes - with the exception of Illinois, he has lost them all, most by sizable margins - is grounded in a certain logic, Bill Cunningham said a few hours before primary voting concluded. He knows the political terrain well, having been a top aide for Gov. Mario Cuomo and the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan before playing a key role in Michael Bloomberg's longshot victory in the 2001 mayoral race.

"For one thing," Mr. Cunningham said, "either Democratic candidate would win California or New York, so the big-state scenario doesn't apply for them. Florida and Michigan might be jump balls because of the Democratic Party rules" that right now leave those two states without delegations at the August convention in Denver because they violated a party directive by holding primaries in January.

And Mr. Obama, Mr. Cunningham noted, is "winning in states that could be borderline states," including some that traditionally have gone Republican. His big victory in Virginia, he said, gives him "the clearest shot" of bringing that state into the Democratic column. "And the Democrats are going to Colorado for their convention to say that they're coming after the Rocky Mountain states, and Obama's the one who won those states."

Pennsylvania and Ohio in recent years have been toss-up states; John Kerry's narrow loss in Ohio gave President Bush a second term. But while Ms. Clinton beat Mr. Obama by roughly 10 points in both, Mr. Cunningham said that does not mean the Illinois Senator won't be able to win them against Senator McCain.

"The economy in Ohio is going to be the big factor; it's going to be big in Pennsylvania, too," he said. Referring to Mr. McCain's embrace of the President's fiscal policies, including tax cuts that he himself voted against six years ago, he asked, "Is the person following in Bush's footsteps going to be able to win on that issue in those states? And McCain will be saddled with the fact that he's not seen by anybody as a strong domestic candidate."

The Evangelical Question

Mr. Cunningham also questioned whether the presumptive Republic nominee will be able to count on the huge support of evangelical Christians in Ohio - many of them unionized workers - that Karl Rove was able to produce for Mr. Bush. "They may not be that enamored of John McCain to turn out among the evangelicals."

Those, he said, were the arguments in favor of Mr. Obama being able to muster enough support to win despite his big-state woes. For Ms. Clinton to credibly continue her campaign, Mr. Cunningham said, her winning margin in Pennsylvania that night had to be close to double-digits.

"At 10 points she'll feel comfortable making the argument that she should be able to go onward with her campaign," he said. "At 8 or 9 points it becomes difficult; at 6 or 7 points it becomes almost impossible."

And, he added, "She needs money. It's hard to run a campaign with $9 million in the bank and $10 million in debts."

By late that night, as it became clear her winning margin would approach 10 points, money was pouring in to the Clinton campaign, and within 24 hours it had raised $10 million.

Obama Looks Ahead

Senator Obama did his best to put the result in his rear-view mirror: his speech that night was delivered in Indiana, which will be the next crucial testing ground, along with North Carolina, on May 6. Aside from congratulating her, he devoted the balance of his remarks to his upcoming battle with Senator McCain. In an arena where perception matters as much as performance, it's not an outlandish position to take, but it conjured the memory earlier this year of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones handing out tickets to his players for an upcoming championship game with Green Bay before they actually beat the Giants to qualify. Most of those tickets presumably went unused after the Giants upset the Cowboys.

Mr. Obama dismissed the Pennsylvania result as something that had been expected all along, instead focusing on how he had done significantly better than early polls in the state had suggested.

But this, too, was part of an unsettling trend for his campaign, since some polls in the week leading up to the primary had shown him cutting Ms. Clinton's margin to 3 or 4 points, just as polls before the California and Texas primaries had shown him with slight leads after being way behind, only to lose by 10 points in the actual voting. There is some suspicion that race has played a role, with some white voters telling pollsters they support him but not following through. But it could also be that the political organizations backing Ms. Clinton in those states did a better job of turning out their voters, just as Mr. Obama's forces have excelled in mustering up for the caucuses (which he actually won in Texas).

No Negativity Backlash

The Illinois Senator was clearly unhappy with the negative tone of Ms. Clinton's campaign in Pennsylvania, including a last-minute ad that used images of past crises for America, from the Great Depression to Osama bin Laden, and asked which candidate voters believed was better-prepared to cope with future ones.

But a poll taken just before the primary, which showed that 53 percent of those surveyed blamed Senator Clinton for the negative tone of the campaign while just 6 percent faulted Mr. Obama, indicated that if this mattered greatly to voters, he should have benefited from a backlash.

Instead, there seemed to be concern at how tepid his response was, both to Senator Clinton's attacks and to the questions asked during the debate a week before the primary by ABC-TV moderators Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos. Senator Obama made clear his annoyance that so much time was being devoted by his questioners to issues that strayed far from the most-pressing ones for this nation - the economy and the situation in Iraq. But he wasted time complaining about the questions rather than seizing the opportunity to hit them out of the park by explaining why wearing a flag-pin is a poor way to gauge patriotism or better articulating why he believes he has not done particularly well with blue-collar voters.

The 'Bitter' Brainlock

His statement during a San Francisco fund-raiser when asked that question that such voters become "bitter" under adverse conditions and retreat into religion or guns in response ranks with Senator Clinton's saga of surviving sniper fire in Bosnia as the two biggest unforced errors of the campaign.

She was among those who said his comments smacked of elitism, but that's just one of those political buzzwords meant to tell voters "he doesn't understand you like I do." Mr. Obama's theorizing sounded more like that of a college student trying to sound profound by making generalizations about things he really didn't understand. Even if there was some truth in his observations - and it's at least as likely that people hunt or go to church because there's something inherently appealing to them about either practice in good times as well as bad - nobody likes to be told that they're living their lives as a defense mechanism. Inasmuch as he was among friends at a fund-raiser in a state that had already held its primary, it's hard to imagine what possessed him to say something that could alienate the voters he was courting in Pennsylvania when it would have been so much easier to fall back on something innocuous along the lines of, "I'm not sure but I'm hoping to do better."

Come a Long Way Fast

In a way, the amateurishness of the gaffe was an inadvertent reminder of what a remarkable run has been made by someone who is just midway through his first term as a U.S. Senator. The more-perplexing issue for Democrats - as well as independents - is whether the speed with which Mr. Obama seemingly mastered the art of campaigning is a tribute to his ability to learn on the run or a side-effect of Ms. Clinton's often-stumbling campaign and the ambivalence many Democrats feel toward her and her husband.

One reason Mr. Obama continues to gain ground among super-delegates even in the wake of her victories in Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania over the past two months may be that those elected officials remember all too well the baggage Mr. Clinton accrued with the Lewinsky mess and some of his dubious pardons on the way out of office, as well as the fact that during his tenure, the party lost control of both houses of Congress. Ms. Clinton herself has struggled among Democrats in no small measure because of her political timidity in voting to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq; Mr. Obama's big selling point, in addition to his gifts as a speech-maker, was that he opposed the war before it became popular to do so.

Economy More Hillary's Issue

But little divides the two candidates on Iraq now, and the faltering economy has led that to emerge as the primary concern across the nation over the past couple of months. That has worked to Ms. Clinton's advantage; the one unblemished memory people have of her husband's time in office was of economic prosperity and the sort of fiscal prudence that used to be associated with Republicans before Ronald Reagan showed that what George Bush the Elder called voodoo economics wouldn't necessarily hurt you at the ballot box.

Her problem is that the campaign didn't start in March, and her attempt to catch Mr. Obama has forced her to use sometimes less-than-admirable tactics. Her remark during the debate that Mr. Obama's fellow member on a board in Chicago, William Ayers, had said on Sept. 11 that his one regret as a member of the Weather Underground during the 1960s was not that they bombed buildings but that they didn't bomb more was a dagger dipped in a deception. Mr. Ayers had not made that remark in reaction to 9/11; rather, the remark appeared in a New York Times story that morning and was made prior to the terrorist attacks. In either case, his foolish rhetoric wouldn't seem to have much bearing on Mr. Obama's fitness, given Mr. Ayers' work as a productive citizen in the four decades since his Weather Underground days, and distorting the context the way she did was sleazy.

Shading the Truth

It won't hurt Ms. Clinton nearly as much with voters as the fibbing about sniper fire during her 1996 Bosnia visit, but it became one more example of her willingness to shade the truth for political advantage, and on such inconsequential matters that it makes you wonder what she might do on bigger stuff.

That is the other aspect of Senator Clinton that made Senator Obama so appealing by comparison to many Democratic leaders: the negative sentiment she engenders among so many voters, some of it rationally based.

But if not everybody trusts her, the Pennsylvania campaign burnished her reputation as a fighter who won't yield if she believes strongly enough in something. She likened herself to "Rocky," but a more apt comparison might be to "Rocky 2," a movie in which the two fighters absorbed more punishment than any two real-life boxers could take without being counted out yet kept on battling.

Mr. Obama is not wrong that some of the issues that attract the attention of the media and voters alike are trivial and a distraction from what people should really be focusing on. But so what? One of the consequences of television has been that we make value judgments based on Richard Nixon's makeup melting while John Kennedy looked cool and unruffled, and physical appearance has increasingly become a key prerequisite for presidential candidates.

Talent Isn't Enough

Those qualities have worked in Mr. Obama's favor, just as his lack of aptitude for bowling and his reluctance to eat junk food have not. People have recently complained that voters on "American Idol" are discounting talent in favor of likeability, which merely shows that many of us use the same values to decide singing contests as we have for our most-recent presidential elections.

Rather than polishing his locker-room post-mortems on why what went wrong wasn't really a reflection of his true ability or his chances, Mr. Obama perhaps has to update his iPod, shelve the Marvin Gaye medley of "What's Going On?" and "Mercy, Mercy Me" in favor of Kanye West's "Stronger."

He has to adapt and win a contest that really matters, something he has failed to do in three consecutive big-state primaries. The race in Indiana offers a good barometer, since unlike in Pennsylvania he is not starting far behind Ms. Clinton in the polls; two of them taken two weeks ago in the state actually showed him with a small lead.

Does Math Still Compute?

If he can't win there, the people who make the decisions at the top of the Democratic Party have to ask themselves whether the math up until now does not add up to electability in November. They clearly don't want to be forced to make such a calculation and run the risk of many Obama supporters staying home rather than voting for Senator Clinton. The party, as much as Mr. Obama, would love to ride into the convention singing that old Youngbloods song, "Get Together."

But until Mr. Obama can definitively establish himself as the choice of the party's voters in the here and now, rather than just its king of January and February, there are nothing but uneasy choices ahead, with either road potentially taking Democrats down the Highway to Hell.

 

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