Razzle Dazzle
Clinton Back in the Ballgame

By RICHARD STEIER

The body language of Hillary Clinton's campaign in the week before the Ohio and Texas primaries suggested both perspiration and desperation: internal recriminations about who was to blame for bringing her to the verge of being knocked out of the race for the Democratic nomination, complaints about unfair media coverage, and a shift to negative attacks on Barack Obama.

"Usually when you go negative at the last minute, it tends to turn off voters," political consultant Maureen Connelly said.

But when Ms. Clinton took the stage in Columbus shortly after 11 p.m. on primary night March 4, with a decisive win in Ohio in her pocket and a close victory in Texas beginning to emerge, the puffiness of her face and the shadows under her eyes during their debate a week earlier had vanished. She positively glowed as she told her cheering supporters, " ... for everyone that's ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out ... this one is for you."

Obama Does the Math

When Mr. Obama spoke to his faithful in San Antonio a short time later, he emphasized, "No matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead that we had this morning." He was referring to the fact that once the caucus voting in the Texas primary was combined with the popular vote there, he would just about offset the delegate edge she gained in Ohio with her 10-point victory, and his win in Vermont canceled out her victory in the Rhode Island primary.

THE HIL IS ALIVE: Hillary Clinton's victories over Barack Obama in the Ohio and Texas Democratic primaries preserved her chances of getting the nomination while spurring questions about the Illinois Senator's troubles so far in states with the most electoral votes.

But while he was right about the math, the dynamic of the campaign had nonetheless shifted dramatically. The day had begun with Senator Clinton fighting for political survival, but not long after midnight it appeared that the fate of both of them could be riding on the Pennsylvania primary April 22.

Even there, Ms. Clinton would need to capture nearly 60 percent of the vote to garner significantly more delegates than Mr. Obama, a setup not unlike New York's. And doing so still is unlikely to be enough to overcome his delegate lead, unless the Democratic National Committee opts to hold new votes in Florida and Michigan, which lost their right to have delegates seated when they moved their primaries forward earlier than permitted. (Ms. Clinton won both those states, but Mr. Obama did not campaign in either and was not even on the ballot in Michigan.)

But having stopped her campaign's bleeding last week by ending a string of 11 straight primaries she had lost during February following Super Tuesday, she put herself in position to stake a claim to the nomination that might be as compelling as the delegate count.

There are seven states which have at least 20 votes in the electoral college. Discounting the home-town wins of Senator Clinton in New York and Senator Obama in Illinois, her no-count victory in Florida and the Pennsylvania primary, she has won the other three - Texas, California and Ohio, the latter two by 10 points.

Senator Obama has enjoyed his major edge among the 10 other states with at least 10 electoral votes that have already chosen delegates, having prevailed in seven of them. But his inability to defeat her in the bigger states has raised doubts about how he would fare in a general election against a Republican nominee, John McCain, whose appeal to independent voters means even reliably Democratic states like New York - where Ms. Clinton defeated Mr. Obama by 17 points - and California could be up for grabs.

Big Mo Changes Teams

When former U.S. Rep. Geraldine Ferraro, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last month, extolled the creation of superdelegates as the ultimate deciders on a Democratic nominee when no indisputable choice has emerged, it read like self-serving propaganda from a Clinton supporter. But the New York Senator's victories in Texas and Ohio have upended Mr. Obama's momentum, if not the delegate math, and confronted him with a dilemma that, unlike his rival, he has not previously faced: a must-win contest in Pennsylvania.

A loss there by Senator Clinton should effectively decide the contest, but a clear-cut victory for her would raise real questions about whether the bloom was off Senator Obama's candidacy and he was staggering toward the general election.

For Democrats, the choice would be akin to what baseball managers sometimes face: you're in the seventh game of the World Series and you have to choose between the pitcher who led your team in wins throughout the year but has been struggling lately and the one who has been more reliable in the big games during the playoffs. The percentage move is to go with the hot hand who seems to be peaking while your other pitcher is showing signs of weariness.

In this case, where perception sometimes matters as much as performance, the choice is more nettlesome.

Choosing the candidate with fewer delegate votes could lead to charges of elitism and risk alienating key Obama constituencies, most notably young and black voters who have turned out in much-higher numbers than usual but could decide to sit out the general election.

But the Democratic Party created the superdelegate structure more than a quarter-century ago to try to avoid repeats of the 1972 election, when the nominee chosen by the party's voters, George McGovern, lost all but one state in the general election against President Nixon. It was a hard-headed, practical attempt to make sure that in a close contest for the party's nomination, electability was factored into the equation.

Rebuilds Her Blocs

During Mr. Obama's string of consecutive primary wins in February, he succeeded in winning majorities of the kinds of voters who had favored Ms. Clinton in the earlier primaries. Last Tuesday, however, the New York Senator reasserted her strengths among those voting blocs and ran particularly well among Latinos in Texas, who could be critical in battleground races in that state and Florida in November.

"In Texas," Ms. Connelly said, "she reclaimed the middle-class and the lower-income voters," with exit polls showing that Mr. Obama's strength had been among those making at least $100,000 a year.

That can be explained, she said, by the nation's economic problems having increasingly moved to the forefront while the situation in Iraq has been relatively stable.

"Look what's been happening to the stock market and the economy in the last week," Ms. Connelly said. "People are really concerned about their financial future."

This works to Ms. Clinton's advantage. Having banished her husband to the traditional role of candidate spouse after a disastrous spell in which his critical comments about Mr. Obama created a backlash, she has been able to benefit from the most-positive association voters have with his presidency: a strong economy that he was able to produce after inheriting a recession from George Bush the Elder.

"In Ohio," Ms. Connelly said, "I think the flap about NAFTA and the telephone was a 1-2 punch."

Obama's NAFTA Two-Step

Both candidates had pledged to seek a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement imposing environmental and labor standards as a response to complaints in states like Ohio about how the arrangement has hurt local industries. If anything, the issue would have seemed to work to Senator Obama's advantage, since NAFTA was adopted early in President Clinton's first term.

But a week before the primary, it was reported that a senior adviser to Mr. Obama had privately told Canadian officials that the candidate had taken a hard line on NAFTA primarily for political purposes and that they should not worry that his election would lead to tough demands for changes in its terms.

The Obama camp denied such assurances were given. But the day before the primary, the Associated Press detailed a memo from an official of the Canadian consulate stating that Mr. Obama's senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, had assured them that the Senator's comments represented "political maneuvering" rather than a serious position.

In a campaign that has made remarkably few mistakes, this was a big one, particularly because a large part of Senator Obama's appeal stems from the belief that he represents a break with the old-school Washington wheeling and dealing. Saying one thing for public consumption while an aide is telling interested parties quite another - and having the campaign deny he had done so until the AP published the memo - is so inside the Beltway that it poked a sizable hole in the image that had served Mr. Obama so well. His handling of the controversy also raised questions about the trump card he has played to overcome doubts about his lack of experience: his judgment.

A Bell Goes Off

Ms. Connelly's telephone reference was, of course, about the ad Senator Clinton's campaign ran asking voters whether they could afford to take a chance on Senator Obama being the one to answer the call when a crisis announced itself at 3 a.m.

The spot wasn't original: former Vice President Walter Mondale used virtually the same ad against Gary Hart during the 1984 Democratic primary race. It didn't represent new territory in their campaign, either, as Senator Obama made clear in his rebuttal ad by stating that judgment was more important than experience and that he had proven himself superior to Senator Clinton in that regard when he opposed going to war with Iraq while she was voting to authorize President Bush to take that step in October 2002.

This time, however, it seemed to resonate with voters. It wasn't clear whether this was a case of Ohio and Texas being places where Ms. Clinton devoted more energy and resources than in other states last month, or the imagery of the red phone (which isn't actually red in real life) doing a better job of driving the point home.

There was some belief that complaints by the Clinton camp that the media had given Mr. Obama a free ride until then had altered the campaign coverage and thus its impact on voters.

A Stormy History

There are several reasons that the coverage favored or seemed to favor the Illinois Senator. Not to be discounted is the fact that his campaign had been a lot more cooperative with reporters than Ms. Clinton's. Her dealings with the media have been tense and sometimes acrimonious, a carryover from her years in the White House and old wounds from controversies ranging from the over-hyped Whitewater affair to Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, after which the Clintons didn't deserve what they got but their denials and stonewalling virtually asked for it.

There were those who accused reporters - including female columnists like Maureen Dowd - of sexism for using the word "whining" to describe Senator Clinton's complaints about media coverage and the interlocutory style Tim Russert took during the candidates' debate at Cleveland State University. They had a point about Mr. Russert incessantly boring in on her with follow-up questions and videotape, which are the proper tools for a TV journalist but go further than a debate moderator should unless they are applied with equal rigor to both candidates.

But one action alone by the Clinton camp last year - muscling GQ into killing a piece by a writer who previously had been critical of the Senator by threatening to withhold Bill Clinton's cooperation from a softer feature - made any future complaints about the media hard to take seriously. Any reporter who's ever had a legitimate story killed by an elected official who used influence with an editor or publisher is going to resent a candidate's use of that kind of big-footing. And when someone bullies a member of the media that way, any later laments that they are not being treated fairly amount to whining, regardless of the candidate's gender.

Honeymoon's Abrupt End

Mr. Obama also does not have an extensive-enough record, or the Clintons' knack for winding up in controversial situations - many of their own making - to generate the kind of scrutiny that Ms. Clinton has received. His campaign's mixed message on NAFTA changed that, and his walking out of a press conference when reporters pressed the issue suggested the honeymoon phase of his campaign may be ending fast. The beginning of a trial last week for a key campaign contributor, Tony Rezko - who also owns a piece of property enjoining the Obamas' home and sold them part of it to establish a boundary line - figures to prompt a deeper exploration of their relationship, even though the charges against him have nothing to do with the Illinois Senator.

And so Mr. Obama is now being vetted more intensively at the same time that some of the gloss has been wiped from his image and questions are being raised about his inability to win either of the two primaries last week that might have delivered a death blow to Ms. Clinton's chances.

As Ms. Connelly put it the morning after the votes, "What her victory did last night was to stop the stampede of superdelegates from neutral to Obama or from Hillary to Obama. And it's going to stop the fund-raising imbalance in Obama's favor."

She scoffed at the conventional wisdom that the continuing struggle gave a major advantage to Senator McCain by allowing him to begin defining his future opponent while the two Democrats were expending large sums of money and energy in the continuing campaign and criticizing each other in ways that would give him ammunition for the general election.

'Won't Damage Dems'

"If the spotlight is now on the race between the Democrats, that's where the media is going to be," Ms. Connelly explained. "I don't think it's damaging to the party. You have two very good candidates, and it's an exciting race."

Some commentators have said Senator Clinton has done Mr. McCain a favor by focusing on Mr. Obama's lack of experience, noting that he is in even better position than she is to cite the disparity should the Illinois Senator get his party's nomination. They say the "red phone" commercial, by raising questions about whether Senator Obama will be ready to face crises immediately upon taking office, could be used by Senator McCain to argue that members of his own party doubt that the man who is 25 years younger than him has the seasoning for the job.

On the other hand, it could be said that Mr. McCain is doing Senator Clinton a favor with his pledge to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years if necessary.

Mr. Obama's argument that his judgment on Iraq is clearly superior to both his current rival and his potential opponent in November becomes less compelling with Ms. Clinton able to argue that her own plan for a phased but speedy withdrawal of troops is a stark contrast to Mr. McCain's. It puts her in the position where her husband as President was always most comfortable: triangulating between Republicans on the right and other Democrats on the left.

What's Lost in War

During his concession speech, Senator Obama offered an eloquent tabulation of the cost of the Iraq misadventure, both in dollars and as it affects our standing in the world.

"We spend billions of dollars a week that could be used to rebuild our roads and our schools, to care for our veterans and send our children to college," he said. "It's the same course that continues to divide and isolate America from the world by substituting bluster and bullying for direct diplomacy by ignoring our allies and refusing to talk to our enemies even though Presidents from Kennedy to Reagan have done just that."

To make that argument in a general-election campaign, however, he has to do a stronger job of selling himself to voters in Pennsylvania than he did in Texas and Ohio, and hope that the growing media scrutiny does not lead to further errors.

Senator Clinton has run a mistake-filled campaign: indecisive, frequently changing in tone, over-confident and sometimes operating without contingency plans for when expectations didn't translate into reality. But her campaign found an apt analogy last week the day after her primary victories by invoking the 1986 Mets, a talented if not always endearing group that was heavily favored to defeat the Red Sox in the World Series, underachieved to the point of being one out away from elimination in the sixth game, and then clawed back to win both that epic and the one that followed.

She's forced Mr. Obama to a seventh game in a state where the support of Governor Ed Rendell and the demographics suggest she can hold the lead she has in early polls. Both ought to treat it like the decisive contest in the Democratic race, because it probably should be.