No one likes the night before – the night before the high school prom, the night before that final exam as you worry you’ll forget everything you know and aren’t even sure that you even know much of anything anymore, for athletes the night before the big game your team just has to win, the night before the big job interview as you toss and turn and plan answers to questions you think you’ll be asked and just know you’ll be asked what you never imagined, the night before your wedding. No, the night before your wedding can involve a bachelor party with quite naked and quite willing anonymous young women and all that, but then that’s just to blunt your anxiety about a big event that changes everything. The night before is always an odd time. You’re off balance.
Monday, March 3, was one of those nights before – the night before the big primary elections in Texas and Ohio, and the less important elections in Vermont and Rhode Island. It seems the Republicans have decided they have to make do with John McCain as their candidate, a celebrated war hero in his seventies, and, as he admits himself, not too sharp on economic matters, nor very sharp on basic facts regarding scientific evidence. It doesn’t matter. He’s running on character. He doesn’t take crap from anyone. He was a prisoner of war, damn it. He could sleep soundly.
Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton probably could not. The Associated Press here provides the basics of what was up with the Democrats on the eve of the day that could change everything, at least for those two, and likely for the rest of us.
Senior Democrats expressed their concern the party could suffer in the fall if their back-and-forth goes on much longer – each of them implying, or even stating, that the other is unfit for office. Republicans smile and take notes – it sure beats starting from scratch and inventing all those clever barbs yourself.
Clinton, significantly behind in delegates, was shrugging off those eleven straight primary and caucus defeats, like the star athlete before the big game that might eliminate his team from the playoffs - “I’m just getting warmed up.”
Right – the hypothetical athlete knows he’s just psyching himself up, but that’s necessary to having any chance at all. You hope you believe it. Whether she believes it or not may be unimportant. Say it enough and you come to believe it.
So she was in Ohio accusing Obama of double talk on NAFTA, and he was in Texas, with all its military bases, pledging to begin the withdrawal of troops from Iraq next year, saying he envisioned a “seamless transition from active duty to civilian life” for men and women who leave the armed forces. That didn’t help. He had to deal with her allegations that he had overstated his opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement to win votes back in Ohio. He told reporters his campaign never gave Canada back-channel assurances that his criticism of NAFTA amounted to political posturing. Then we learned someone in his campaign did, or at least talked to them. Then the Canadian government apologized – his man never actually told them Obama’s tough talk was all for show. It was too late – the damage was done. The folks in Ohio doubt him now.
As for those party elders getting worried, the AP item notes this:
Several Democrats said the party’s chairman, Howard Dean, told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week he was concerned about the possible impact of a nominating campaign that stretched through the end of the primaries in early June. Dean also said that if the party is divided going into next summer’s convention, it would remain that way afterward, even if the differences were papered over in the four days in Denver, these officials said.
Dean did not suggest any attempt to intervene. The Democrats who described his comments did so on condition of anonymity, saying they had been made in a private setting. Dean, Reid and Pelosi, all superdelegates, are neutral in the race between Clinton and Obama.
But another superdelegate, Bill Richardson, who dropped out of the race early, said over the weekend that the candidate with “the most delegates after Tuesday, a clear lead, should be in my judgment the nominee.” Another, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, was blunt – “We can’t go all the way through to the convention fighting with each other while McCain and the Republicans lob in whatever free shots they want.” But he supports Clinton and thinks, after Tuesday, Obama should pack it in. So you have the let-it-play-out crowd, those who think Obama has won often and widely enough to show he’s the best choice and Clinton should drop out, and those who think he should drop out, as Clinton has paid her dues, and, after all, has already spent eight years in the White House as co-president and de facto Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense, or some such thing. Yes, when you think about her experience, you do have to have a vivid imagination.
All of this is quite a mess. Much of what she has been saying is working and she knew she could pull this off. Her repeated argument that she has experience, and John McCain has experience, so Obama should be all voters’ last choice, was having its effect. There was this survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press – if their favored candidate does not become the Democratic nominee, a quarter of Hillary Clinton’s primary supporters would defect and vote for John McCain in November. Only ten percent of Barack Obama’s supporters would do the same. She will destroy Obama.
Here is Matthew Yglesias - after looking at the polls and suggesting that Hillary Clinton might win both Ohio and Texas, he says this:
Now under the circumstances, I see no real way for Clinton to make up the lost delegate lead, but at this point it does seem to me that she and her campaign staff are probably egomaniacal enough that if they pull out a narrow “win” they’ll keep running anyway hoping for lightning to strike and seeing the damage it’ll do to the party as a feature, rather than a bug, since a crippled Obama who loses to John McCain could set them up for another run in 2012.
Kevin Drum says Holy Cats!
It’s also almost certainly wrong on an analytical basis since Democrats are famously hard on candidates who don’t win their first time around. Name the last time that a Democratic primary loser came back to win a subsequent Democratic primary without being vice president in between. You have to go back 80 years. Hillary Clinton knows perfectly well that this is her only shot at the presidency. That’s why she’s fighting so hard.
Perhaps so or perhaps not – but even the Canadians, as Josh Marshall explains here, are in this mess with both feet:
The Obama campaign just sent out a YouTube clip from a little more than an hour ago on MSNBC that shows video from the Canadian parliament in which a member of the opposition (I’m not sure who, if anyone can tell me, I’d appreciate it) attacks the government for meddling in the Democratic primaries; and then Prime Minister Harper responds.
The video is at the link. This is all very odd. Any night before is odd. There were three new polls showing Clinton’s lead in Ohio growing impressively, while in Texas, where Obama had led, things were getting closer. But there were outliers showing the opposite. The night before is no fun at all.
Something has changed. Perhaps her red phone ringing in the White House at three in the morning ad did the trick. Andrew Sullivan suspects so:
It’s not that Clinton would make better decisions on national security. She has scant experience in foreign policy, and is guided primarily by what will be least vulnerable to Republican demagoguery (it’s the only common thread over the years when you look closely). It’s also going her way because she’s familiar to people - and blue-collar voters in Ohio associate familiarity with security. (One reason they narrowly backed an untested governor from Texas was his last name.) The anti-Muslim smears may also have worked, and Clinton delicately managed to keep them alive last night. And the press has gotten cold feet - caving to the Clintons’ preposterous idea that somehow the field is tilted against them.
You can see Clinton on Sixty Minutes here – she’s asked if she thinks Obama is secretly a Muslim. She says no, but implies you only have his word for that, and she thinks he’s not lying. But there’s a hint and nudge implied in what she says – he might be a Muslim, as all you have is his word. That’ll peel off some votes for her. It’s only implicitly reprehensible. She’s very nice about it. And she repeatedly sighs that the press is being unfair to her, playing the grimly happy but noble victim. That will also peel off some votes for her.
Sullivan, worked up about the pull of the familiar, has his night-before worries:
She has to win all four states tomorrow by very healthy margins just to stay viable. Her husband and co-candidate for president, Bill Clinton, has openly said that she has to win both Ohio and Texas for the two of them to stay in the race. What matters tomorrow night will be the delegates. If Obama maintains or increases his delegate lead, she should withdraw. But, of course, she will never withdraw of her own volition. And that’s part of her strategy. She will gladly hold her party hostage to her own narcissism. She did it with her husband for much of their last second term.
I get the feeling that if she ekes out a win or two, she will insist on pursuing the full Monty: a scorched earth effort to seat Michigan and Florida delegates; suing Texas if the delegates don’t go her way; a full court press on any super-delegates who balk; and a gut-wrenching struggle for power up to the convention.
If she cannot be stopped, she can still be slowed.
Perhaps – but she’s got the right message. Sullivan himself points to Marc Andreessen, one of Netscape’s founders, pointing to what Obama represents:
This is not some kind of liberal revolutionary who is intent on throwing everything up in the air and starting over.
Put the primary campaign speeches aside; take a look at his policy positions on any number of issues and what strikes you is how reasonable, moderate, and thoughtful they are.
And in person, that’s exactly what he’s like. There’s no fire in the eyes to realize some utopian or revolutionary dream. Instead, what comes across - in both his questions and his answers - is calmness, reason, and judgment.
So you would vote for this guy for temperamental, rational reasons. And you would vote for him on foreign policy matters – stopping the “preemptive war, build an empire, bully your allies and never speak to your enemies” crap.
Andreessen ends with this:
Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer. If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.
She’s betting there are not many like Andreessen. Some Republican strategists like Onzelo Markum fear that there are:
“One thing we’re hearing that we really didn’t expect is people going and voting in the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton,” Markum said. “They come up to me and they say McCain can beat Hillary, but he can’t beat Obama. It’s fueled by guys like Rush Limbaugh, by Ann Coulter, who’re telling them to keep Hillary in this race, and that trickles down to Republicans going into those voting booths who can’t vote in our election. These were some voters we were counting on, so that’s thrown bit of a kink in our extrapolations.”
And Rush Limbaugh was urging listeners to vote for Clinton :
As Hillary Clinton battles to keep her presidential bid alive, she may be getting help from an unlikely source: conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh has been actively urging his Texas listeners to cross over and vote for Clinton in that state’s open primary Tuesday, arguing it helps the Republicans if the Democratic race remains unsettled for weeks to come. “I want Hillary to stay in this…this is too good a soap opera,” Limbaugh told fellow conservative talk-show host Laura Ingraham on Fox News Friday. He reiterated the comments on his Monday show and replayed the exchange with Ingram.
Yep, what would tossing and turning in bed the night before be without a monster under the bed? The night before is always awful.
