Razzle Dazzle
Bam Refuels, Hil Outta Gas

By RICHARD STEIER

Politics being a field where perception and momentum often define reality, the Democratic primary results May 6 in North Carolina and Indiana delivered a very different message than they might have a couple of weeks earlier.

Coming out of the April 22 Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama was back on his heels while Hillary Clinton was pounding him while dancing on rejuvenated legs. It seemed that even a comfortable victory in North Carolina, where polls showed him leading by as much as 25 points, might not stop the bleeding; that he would need to win Indiana, which was considered a toss-up, to reassert himself as the best Democratic candidate for the November election.

And so there might be an inclination to ignore the pundits and accept Senator Clinton's interpretation of events last Tuesday, delivered before her lead in Indiana nearly dribbled away and she hung on to win the state by less than 2 points: that she had won what Senator Obama once called "the tie-breaker" in the three most-recent primaries and was continuing to move forward.

Got Past a Crisis

The reason she was virtually alone in that analysis had to do with the context in which those two primaries were decided. While Mr. Obama still struggled to win the support of white, blue-collar voters, he had weathered the biggest crisis of his campaign. This time, he was the candidate who benefited from a late shift in voter support that defied polls on the eve of the primaries, and he won new respect for not following Senator Clinton and John McCain down the Political Pander Highway to support temporary suspension of the Federal gas tax. And the 14-point victory margin in North Carolina allowed him to expand his lead among elected Democratic delegates, making the math on both delegates and popular vote that much more prohibitive against the less-tangible claims Ms. Clinton could stake to the party's nomination.

TURN OUT THE LIGHTS FOR HILLARY: By overcoming the fallout from new remarks by his former pastor to post a strong primary victory in North Carolina while narrowly losing in Indiana, Sen. Barack Obama regained momentum while also widening his lead over Sen. Hillary Clinton in both elected delegates and popular vote.

It was why, unlike his speech in Indiana on the night he lost the Pennsylvania primary, Senator Obama's address from North Carolina was delivered with conviction as he told his supporters "this is our moment and our time to change America ... because of you, we've seen that it's possible to overcome the politics of division and the politics of distraction, that it's possible to overcome the same old negative attacks that are always about scoring points and never about solving our problems."

He spoke just eight days after his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, had sought to put a stake through the heart of Senator Obama's campaign by telling an audience at the National Press Club that not only wasn't he sorry for incendiary remarks he'd made about 9/11's causes, Louis Farrakhan and a government plot to spread the AIDS virus in the black community, but that the only reason Mr. Obama had criticized him was because he was a politician trying to save his candidacy.

Six weeks earlier, when the furor first arose over the remarks, Senator Obama gave an impassioned, thoughtful speech on race in response in which he refused to condemn Reverend Wright, instead trying to explain him as being akin to a good-hearted relative who sometimes says foolish things.

Reverend Wright's speech at the Press Club seemed to be his way of responding, "Nutty relative? I'll show you a nutty relative!"

And so finally, Senator Obama severed his connection to Reverend Wright, first at a press conference and then on the May 4 edition of "Meet the Press," where he told Tim Russert that he would not consult the retired pastor on any matter if he were elected. During the first appearance, he displayed some anger at his pastor's seeming determination to be an albatross around his neck; by the second one, he took the more-thoughtful, reasoned tone that has characterized him during the primary season.

A Front-Runner's Air

He was back to projecting a front-runner's confidence, at a point when Ms. Clinton still posed a threat to that standing. Two polls completed May 4 and 5 showed her trailing Mr. Obama by five points or less in North Carolina, and a compilation of five Indiana polls by RealClearPolitics showed her up in that state by an average of five points after trailing him slightly immediately after the Pennsylvania primary.

In the Pennsylvania contest and those in Texas and California, Senator Obama's campaign had been prey to what loomed as a trend: a large deficit early in the polls that he would sharply reduce or completely overcome, only to lose by about 10 points in the actual voting. It wasn't clear whether he was suffering from a less-effective vote-pulling operation than Senator Clinton or whether some voters were telling pollsters one thing and then doing another because of uneasiness about his race.

Mr. Obama last week was helped by overwhelming support among black voters, but since they make up just 9 percent of the electorate in Indiana, clearly something else was responsible for his coming within about 18,000 votes of winning the state (he took North Carolina by more than 232,000).

It could be that his demeanor in politically divorcing Reverend Wright reminded some voters of why they first found him appealing. But exit polls also showed that many were convinced that he was being more straightforward with them in taking the politically risky stance of opposing suspension of the Federal gas tax for the summer, even as Ms. Clinton hectored him as someone reluctant to give ordinary motorists a break.

A Question of Trust

The contrast reaffirms a gut feeling many people have about the two candidates, and why one former city official in her mid-60s who might ordinarily be regarded as a bedrock Hillary supporter said she was backing Mr. Obama because she believes he's "the real thing."

A major reason voters of all political persuasions are cool to Senator Clinton is their belief that for all her talent and tenacity, she is a few degrees south of genuine, and on matters more consequential than her fable about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia a dozen years ago.

Mr. Obama became a viable contender for the Democratic nomination in no small measure because, for all the bluster various Hillary supporters have served up about her intestinal fortitude, she displayed palpable weakness when she voted to authorize President Bush to go to war with Iraq in October 2002. Mr. McCain's prime flaw as a candidate is that he believed the invasion made sense; Ms. Clinton's is that she probably didn't and voted for it anyway.

Forget her claims that her knowledge of Saddam Hussein during the time that her husband was President, coupled with what turned out to be misleading information from the CIA, led her to believe that the Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction. They are not credible simply because of her insistence that she never read the National Intelligence Estimate issued at that time which concluded that the available evidence did not produce a "compelling case" that Iraq was pursuing nuclear weapons.

Thrives on Detail

As Ms. Clinton has showed in her debate performances, she prides herself on consuming information and mastering even obscure details of government. And so if she told the truth when she claimed she hadn't read the NIE, the logical conclusion would be that she didn't want to have any reason to reconsider a vote that had everything to do with her perception of political prudence rather than whether legitimate reasons existed to go to war with Iraq.

That flaw also surfaced in her support of a summer gas-tax moratorium after Senator McCain floated the idea. When she was pressed on the fact that leading economists had all concluded that the savings to motorists - an average of $28 for the summer - was not worth the $9 billion it would cost the Federal Government in lost tax revenues, Ms. Clinton did a variation on the bandit leader in "The Treasure of Sierra Madre," essentially saying, "Economists? I don't need no stinkin' economists!"

For anyone who perceived the irony in her calling Mr. Obama elitist after his clumsy claim that white working-class voters who shied from voting for him might be too "bitter" to consider him as a viable option, this bit of phony populism became a reminder that she, too, was capable of talking down to her audience. And where Mr. McCain by his own admission doesn't know much about economics, Ms. Clinton has cited it as one of her strengths, meaning there was no excuse for her pushing the dubious idea of the tax moratorium.

Bloomberg's Putdown

The most damning commentary on the position she and the Arizona Senator staked out on the matter came from Mayor Bloomberg while discussing his executive budget five days prior to last week's primaries. He sometimes doesn't say enough about the political chicanery that passes for policy in Washington and Albany, but when he does it is a reminder of the virtues of a politician who doesn't calibrate his positions based on how voters might react.

Asked about the gas-tax suspension, the Mayor - who based on personal compatibility or local considerations would figure to be more kindly disposed to Senators McCain and Clinton than to Mr. Obama - replied, "It's about the dumbest thing I've heard in a long time from an economic point of view. I just do not think it's an intelligent tax policy, and it's not a good energy policy. In this case, Obama had it right."

The American public on more than one occasion has allowed itself to be snookered by glib promises or artful spin. George Bush the Elder was elected President in no small part in 1988 because of the "Read my lips: no new taxes" pledge he made despite realizing that the policies of President Reagan - which he had derided as "voodoo economics" while opposing him for the Republican nomination eight years earlier - would soon be presenting a bill. George W. Bush sold a phony case for the war with Iraq, then gained a second term after his supporters made him appear more of a patriot that John Kerry, a genuine war hero in Vietnam while Mr. Bush and Vice President Cheney used their political connections to avoid serving there.

Lesson Taught by Failure

The crumbling of this administration over the past four years may have finally made a large segment of the public wary of politicians who are too eager to tell them what they want to hear. That seems to have been a factor in Mr. Obama's outperforming the late polls in both North Carolina and Indiana at a time when he could have been pushed deeper into the political hole that Reverend Wright's comments dug for him.

He still hasn't resolved the doubts about his tepid support among white working-class voters or his inability to win states with 20 or more electoral votes (North Carolina has 15 and Indiana 11, the kind of mid-size states where he has been strongest) other than Illinois, where he has Favorite Son status. But Mr. Obama has done enough, in finally shedding Reverend Wright (as much as Republicans may look to keep him busy on the lecture circuit) and winning on his own terms, to have defined himself as the Democrats' best candidate for the general election.

He also did it minus the macho posturing that Ms. Clinton embraced, from downing shots in Pennsylvania bars to her threat to "obliterate" Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel, evoking memories of Gen. Curtis "Bomb 'em Back to the Stone Age" LeMay, George Wallace's running mate in his 1968 third-party bid for President.

Senator Clinton wasn't ready to bow to that reality last week, talking about her determination to get the delegates from Florida and Michigan seated even though both states violated Democratic Party rules to hold early primaries, prompting neither candidate to campaign in Florida and Mr. Obama to not even have his name on the Michigan ballot. She insisted she was prepared to take the battle all the way to the Democratic convention in Denver this August.

The folly of believing anything productive would result from this was laid out cogently by Maureen Connelly, a veteran political consultant who had made the leap over the course of the campaign from "ABG - Anybody But Giuliani" to Clinton contributor.

'What Does She Gain?'

"I don't see what would be gained by Hillary continuing her campaign, except to benefit the Republicans," she said May 8. "I'm not one who gives up easily, but there's a certain time when you have to look at what's good for the party. If she stays in until the convention, for three months John McCain talks about what he would do as President, while the Democrats talk about seating delegates from Michigan and Florida."

That logic is as unassailable as the math coming out of last week's primaries. As hard as it may be for her to yield, it's time for Ms. Clinton to realize that what she threw away 5-1/2 years ago with her failure of nerve on Iraq coupled with an overconfident campaign strategy that left her clueless when she didn't clinch the nomination in early February is not something that grit and perseverance can recapture. Her chance to make history has passed; the only issue is whether she will help Mr. Obama's quest for that prize.
 

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