Delegates to the Left of Me, Voters to the Right

In recent days, I've heard supporters of Hillary Clinton and supporters of Barack Obama fret about the extended nominating process their candidates are facing. Both sides are worried about how it will play out.

Michael Barone, co-author of The Almanac of American Politics for more than 30 years, points out, in U.S. News and World Report, that Clinton has only one "plausible path" to the Democratic nomination, even after winning three primaries out of four on Tuesday.

"[T]he Democrats' proportional representation rules make it impossible for her to close the gap in the remaining primaries," Barone observes. So Clinton must "win a majority of superdelegates (party and public officials) and perhaps ... reverse the party's decision disqualifying the Michigan and Florida delegations, i.e., overruling the voters in one case and changing the rules after the game has been played in the other."

This approach could succeed, Barone says, "if the national polls show an unambiguous and substantial move toward Clinton. Otherwise, in more likely and ambiguous circumstances, a Clinton nomination will seem illegitimate to many who have been swooning over Obama and streaming into polling booths because he alone offers hope."

Support for both candidates is taking on a hard edge, Barone suggests. "[E]xit polls show increasing percentages of Democratic primary voters unwilling to accept the rejection of their candidate. Each candidate has an incentive to attack on grounds that will weaken the other in the general election, as Clinton has already started to do with her 'red phone' ad."

Whether people acknowledge it or not, a lot of the venom in this year's campaign comes down to the misogyny vs. racism angle.

Maureen Dowd wrote about it this week, in the New York Times, and asked her readers, "Is misogyny worse than racism, or is racism worse than misogyny?

"As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past. Will America’s racial past be expunged or America’s sexist past be expunged? As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: 'A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, 'My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.' I told him, 'Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.'"

If this is really about coming to terms with the past, writes Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register, there are a few holes in the story.

"When everybody's a victim, nobody's a victim," Steyn asserts. "Ms. Gallagher can't appreciate the distinction between purely metaphorical chains and real ones, or even how offensive it might be to assume blithely that there's no difference whatsoever.

"On the other hand, Barack's ancestors didn't come here in chains, either: His mother was a white Kansan, so was presumably undergoing menstrual hell with the Gallagher gals, and his dad was a black man a long way away in colonial Kenya. Indeed, Obama would be the first son of a British subject to serve as president since those slaveholding types elected in the early days of the republic."

The candidate who stands to benefit from an increasingly bitter Democratic campaign, Barone says, is John McCain, now assured of the Republican nomination. "Unless he forgets that his party is in trouble and that he needs to make an affirmative case for himself and his policies," says Barone. "And loudly enough to overcome the din as Clinton and Obama pummel each other."

The New York Times reports that efforts are already under way to include delegations from Florida and Michigan in the nominating process at the convention. But Democrats remain "deeply divided" over how to resolve the matter.

It reminds me of what Will Rogers used to say. "I am not a member of any organized party. I am a Democrat."

The Democrats aren't the only ones with problems. The Republicans have problems, too, even though the presidential nomination has been decided.

And Republican problems couldn't be resolved by McCain's visit to the White House to receive George W. Bush's endorsement.

Jeffrey Bell says, in the Weekly Standard, that the Bush presidency is a problem for the Republicans in the general election.

"Until very recently, it was in the Republicans' interest to find ways of sidestepping or finessing this central political fact," Bell writes. "Congressional Republicans sensed that open acknowledgement of the failure of the Bush presidency could cause a collapse in floor discipline, perhaps leading to a series of veto overrides and even forced surrender in Iraq.

"Candidates for the Republican presidential nomination had to deal with the fact that in our polarized politics, Republican primary voters are still predominantly pro-Bush. ... GOP campaign strategists were aware that presidential candidates openly contemptuous of the Bush administration would go nowhere in the primaries ... or prove to be nonstarters."

Bell points out, and rightfully so, that the judgment of history is an entirely different thing from the judgment of the voters. Current political appraisal does not favor the Bush administration. While history may or may not judge Bush better than his contemporaries do, it is the judgment of contemporaries that matters in the current context.

"If the past seven years have been frustrating for millions on the left who from the start dissented from the president's world view and the actions he took in support of it," Bell writes, "they have been doubly frustrating for conservatives like me who voted for him twice without hesitation or regret, identified with most of his views and responses, yet watched as the train of events in the nation and the world turned most Americans against him and -- the more acutely current problem -- against his party."

For Republican candidates (not just McCain, although he is the most visible as the presidential nominee) to succeed, Bell suggests, they must remind voters of the ongoing threats America faces in the modern world.

It is "essential", Bell says, for Republicans "to point out the violent activities of jihadists all over the world. If these activities are real, and they are, voters can be not so much convinced as reminded that the American response to 9/11 was right. Mistakes by Bush or Tony Blair or any other war leader do not make the threat of mass murder any less real."

That presents a problem for Obama, who has claimed to have good judgment and has cited his consistent opposition to the Iraq War as proof -- while Clinton, as Obama points out, voted in the Senate to authorize Bush to declare war. That argument helped Obama win the Vermont primary, where opposition to Iraq remains a major issue for primary voters. But in larger states, like Texas and Ohio, the so-called "kitchen table" economic issues resonated more with voters. And that's safer territory for Clinton.

"After weeks of saying the economy is on the brink of a recession," write Amy Chozick and Sara Murray in the Wall Street Journal, "the Democratic candidates are now armed with Friday's report showing the biggest job loss in five years -- useful fodder as the long race for the presidential nomination moves into economically stressed Pennsylvania."

Clinton's campaign wasted little time making the economy its message in Ohio. "[E]xit polls show the approach worked," report Chozick and Murray. "Of the 59% of voters in Ohio who said the economy was the most important issue in this election, 55% voted for Sen. Clinton."

Eventually, Clinton finished with 54% of the vote in Ohio.

But it wasn't the economy alone that played well for Clinton on Tuesday.

The "red phone" commercial, unveiled by the Clinton campaign in the last days before Texas and Ohio went to the polls, raised concerns about Obama's judgment.

"Clinton's 'red phone' ad asked which candidate you would want to rely on to respond to a crisis at 3 o'clock in the morning," writes Barone. "Obama's campaign said this was a Republican tactic.

"Yes -- but Walter Mondale ran a similar ad against Gary Hart in 1984. It worked then, and it worked now. In Texas, where the ad ran, Clinton got a 60% to 39% margin among those who made up their minds in the last three days. That single ad may have made the difference in a contest she had to win to continue in the race."

Phone calls at 3 a.m. aside, the spectre of recession is hovering over the political landscape in Pennsylvania, where Democrats are scheduled to vote on April 22. "Pennsylvania has lost more than one-fifth of its manufacturing jobs since 2000 and remains one of the nation's slowest-growing states," Chozick and Murray point out. "In Pennsylvania, jobs grew at an annual rate of just 1.1% from 2000 to 2006, compared with 3.3% nationwide."

Paul Krugman says, in the New York Times, that anger over Iraq was the issue that enabled Democrats to recapture Congress in 2006. "But polls -- and Hillary Clinton’s big victory in Ohio -- suggest that, if the Democrats want to win this year, they have to focus on economic anxiety."

Krugman observes that "for the time being, public optimism about Iraq is rising: 53% of the public believes that the United States will definitely or probably succeed in achieving its goals. So anger about the war isn’t likely to be decisive in the election. The state of the economy, on the other hand, could well give Democrats a huge advantage -- especially, to be blunt about it, with white working-class voters who supported President Bush in 2004."

It all suggests that Pennsylvanians will be thinking about their pocketbooks when they vote -- unless something dramatic happens in Iraq in the next six weeks.

Whatever conventional wisdom has to say about which party will win in November, Stuart Rothenberg, writing in the Rothenberg Political Report, says, "If the Republican Party were a brand of cereal, it would be discontinued by its maker. But surprisingly, the Republicans actually have a chance to retain the White House in November."

Looking at things from a marketing perspective, Rothenberg notes, "Even though the Republican Party’s brand is damaged, John McCain’s remains surprisingly good. Because of that, the most important question for strategists in both parties is this: Will McCain’s nomination and campaign re-brand the Republican Party, thereby improving the party’s reputation with voters, or will the damaged GOP brand rub off on McCain and damage his reputation?"

Rothenberg goes on to say, "[L]ast week I spoke with two smart, extremely level-headed political consultants -- one Republican and one Democrat -- who told me separately that he/she (let’s not narrow the possibilities) believed McCain would defeat Obama for the White House in November."

In early March, as Rothenberg observes, "that seems a bit of a stretch ... but that’s not the point. Given the national mood and images of the parties, Obama should be leading McCain regularly in national polling by 10 to 15 points."

I've seen three polls matching the Democrats against McCain since the beginning of March. The margin for the Democrat exceeded 10 points once and never got close to 15 points (which would be landslide territory).

* ABC/Washington Post had Obama leading McCain by 11 points (53-42), and it had Clinton leading McCain by 3 points (50-47). The surveys were completed March 2.

" Cook/RT Strategies only asked respondents about Obama vs. McCain. It reported a 9-point advantage for Obama, 47% to 38%. That survey also was completed March 2.

* Newsweek's poll is the only one I've seen that was completed since the primaries in Texas and Ohio. It found Obama holding a statistically insignificant 1-point lead, 46% to 45%. Clinton's lead was marginally less insignificant, 48% to 46%. That survey was finished March 6.

Are the Democrats hurting their prospects by prolonging the nomination process?

Her victories in Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island revived Clinton's campaign, writes Tony Dokoupil in an article about the latest poll from Newsweek, but neither candidate appears to be taking political advantage from the economic numbers.

Newsweek found that "Democratic voters are ready to rally around the candidate they trust most to improve the economy, amid fears of a recession. But neither candidate has been able to lock up that issue, or many others, and the vast majority (69%) of Democratic voters now support the idea of a 'dream ticket' -- leaving aside the crucial question of who runs on top."

Reminds me of a little more of Will Rogers' wisdom: "You've got to be an optimist to be a Democrat, and you've got to be a humorist to stay one."