Snatching Defeat From the Jaws of Victory?

To judge from some of the columns being written about the presidential race, there are people out there who believe that Barack Obama's nomination is pre-ordained. To prevent him from taking his victory lap is obstructionist.

What happened to all the self-righteous talk in Democratic circles about how every vote should count, every vote should matter?

Nearly 20% of the states have not participated in the presidential primaries yet -- including a couple of reasonably large states, Indiana and North Carolina, that are slated to hold their primaries a week from next Tuesday. Are we to disenfranchise those states, even though no candidate has enough pledged delegates to secure the nomination?

Actually, this is a natural extension/outcome of something I witnessed as a young reporter in Arkansas a quarter of a century ago.

In the early 1980s, I was working as a newspaper reporter in central Arkansas. Former Gov. Bill Clinton was trying to return to the governor's mansion, after having lost a bid for re-election in 1980. Clinton was forced to wage a runoff campaign to win the Democratic nomination for governor, and I was assigned to the campaign.

During that two-week runoff period, I alternated between covering the Clinton campaign and the campaign of his opponent. On one occasion, I recall flying with Clinton in a small private plane. As we flew to a rally in southeast Arkansas, I mentioned to Clinton that I had heard that the supporters of the third-place finisher in the primary (who had received about 23% of the vote) were thinking about not voting in the runoff.

To be candid, I don't remember what I was going to ask Clinton next. I never got the chance to follow up on whatever my train of thought happened to be.

Clinton looked at me and said, "It doesn't bother me if they stay at home."

That statement was typical (to me) of Clinton's political pragmatism. To Clinton, it was a simple matter of mathematics. If the vote total loses 23% in the second round, that lowers the bar for the leader -- which was Clinton.

To apply a sports analogy, all he would have to do is "hold serve" and retain all his votes from the earlier primary -- and he would win the nomination.

That's the lesson Democrats should have learned in 2000. Winning is what matters. It's the only math that matters.

Forgive the return to sports, but it's certainly appropriate in this case. As legendary football coach Vince Lombardi said, "Winning isn't everything. It's the only thing."

In the 1982 primary, Clinton received 42% of the vote. When the runoff was held two weeks later, his share of the vote against a single runoff opponent was 54%. In the earlier primary, the third-place finisher received nearly 130,000 votes, but Clinton's actual vote total went up by less than 5,000 votes in the runoff.

If everyone who voted for the top three candidates for governor in the primary participated in the runoff as well, that left 125,000 participants who voted for the third-place finisher in the original primary unaccounted for.

Which means that Clinton's opponent could have raised his vote total by well over 100,000. Voters are not required to vote in every race on a runoff ballot.

But Clinton's opponent in the runoff only increased his vote total by about 40,000 votes -- not enough to overcome a 70,000-vote deficit in the earlier primary.

That knowledge always led me to believe that most of the third-place finisher's supporters did, indeed, "stay at home."

And that's the point. Winning is what matters.

Twenty-six years later, it's still a matter of mathematics. Only this time, Clinton wants everyone to participate. And, apparently, so does his wife.

What changes is whose ox is being gored.

"Hillary Clinton, flush with her 200,000-vote win in the Pennsylvania primary, is suggesting that the popular vote should settle the presidential nomination," writes June Kronholz in the Wall Street Journal. "But that plan ... is built on some shaky calculations -- or may depend improbably on Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that can't vote for president."

(And, by the way, former President Clinton, often referred to as "the big dog" by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, has been taken off his leash in the campaign and is now being presented front and center to the electorate.

("Dubbed the 'Billification' of Sen. Clinton's campaign by some insiders, Mr. Clinton has become something of a strategist-in-chief in recent weeks," says Monica Langley in the Wall Street Journal. "He has been pushing for harder and sharper attacks on Sen. Obama."

(Also by the way, since Langley brings it up, Bill Clinton did not coin the phrase "comeback kid" as a reference to himself on New Hampshire primary night in 1992. That phrase was used about him at least 10 years earlier -- by cartoonist Michael Gauldin. It referred to his eventually successful bid to unseat incumbent Arkansas Gov. Frank White in a cartoon that portrayed the two politicians as boxers in the old-fashioned "tale of the tape" boxing posters.

(How do I know? Well, Gauldin and I were journalism students together at the University of Arkansas. He graduated the year before I did. Until Gauldin was appointed Clinton's press secretary in 1987, he was a self-employed editorial cartoonist, and I kept up with his cartoons on a regular basis. I lived in Arkansas until 1988, and I had the "comeback kid" cartoon itself on my refrigerator door for several months. I thought it was funny.)

Increasingly, this campaign seems anti-democratic to me.

Paul Krugman writes, in the New York Times, that "[t]his wasn’t the way things were supposed to play out" in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. "'Yes we can' has become 'No she can’t.'"

There might be some reasons to re-consider the rush to nominate Obama.

For one thing, Carl Hulse of the New York Times reports that Republicans increasingly see Obama as a liability for the Democratic ticket.

"The growing Republican emphasis on Mr. Obama could also help Mrs. Clinton plead her case that she is more electable, bolstering her argument to superdelegates that Republicans are poised to pounce on her relatively untested opponent," Hulse writes. "Her advisers have been frustrated that some top Democrats rate Mrs. Clinton a greater liability for the party’s candidates in conservative parts of the country -- a view still held by some strategists -- even though she has shown a capacity to withstand Republican attacks."

One can get a hint of what may be to come in the question posed by conservative political journalist Fred Barnes in the Weekly Standard: "Is Obama who he says he is?"

And there are rumblings about Obama's judgment -- from some of his supporters.

"Many who have been disposed to admire Obama, including me, see these matters as raising troublesome questions about his judgment and character," writes Stuart Taylor Jr. in the National Journal. "Many of us have come to wonder whether the purportedly post-ideological Obama is so close to his party’s business-bashing, pacifistic left wing as to skew his judgment on matters ranging from the capital-gains tax to Iraq. Perhaps our suspicions are mistaken. But Obama has hardly laid them to rest."

Some people insist that both Clinton and Obama are electable. John Dickerson writes in Slate that there are good cases to be made for both candidates.

From across the Atlantic Ocean comes the proclamation from Gerard Baker of the Times of London that, because of this protracted battle for the nomination, the Democrats are squandering a sure thing in the 2008 presidential election.

"Four-fifths of the American public think the country is on the wrong track," writes Baker. "The president wallows in the highest disapproval ratings since polling began. The Republican Party has spent most of a decade bungling almost everything it touches, abandoning its principles and sinking into a mire of corruption, hypocrisy and incompetence.

"And here we are, six months from a presidential election, and it is the Democrats once again who seem to be staring defeat in the face."

Using history as his yardstick, Robert Stacey appears to (partially) confirm Baker's assertion in the Charlotte Observer. "It has been 32 years since a Democrat won a majority of the popular vote. The last to do so was (Jimmy) Carter, who won a whopping 50.1% of the votes in 1976. He defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Richard Nixon and carried the burden of Watergate and the Vietnam War into the election."

In typically British fashion, Baker compares what's happening to a soccer game: "It's like a soccer match in which one team keeps conceding a penalty in the final minutes only to watch as the opponents repeatedly boot the penalty kick high into the stands."

I'm an American. I also happen to be a Democrat. And, although my earlier sports analogy is more international in flavor, if we're going to use a sports analogy to describe what's happening in Democratic Party politics, I would prefer an American sports analogy.

American football will do nicely.

This game isn't in overtime yet. The schedule has it being played into June. Right now, it's kind of like the most recent Super Bowl. The early favorite has been on the ropes but has been making some big plays in the fourth quarter. The upstart may need some last-minute heroics to pull it off.

It's intriguing because it's different. In most Super Bowls (as in most presidential nomination campaigns), the issue is decided early and everyone can settle into party mode, nibbling on goodies and mingling with other guests. But this year, the game required more involvement -- and the result was more exciting, more memorable than usual.

Maybe that's what will happen in the presidential race.

Lionel Barber, Edward Luce and Andrew Ward say, in the Financial Times that the matter will be resolved by the end of June.

According to the authors, Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean believes the "superdelegates" will support the candidate they perceive to have the best chance of defeating John McCain in the fall, a perception that is likely to be based on the performances of the candidates in the last six to eight weeks of the primary campaign.

"He said there was nothing in the DNC’s rules that would prevent the party’s unelected superdelegates, who make up about a fifth of the overall delegate tally and who will ultimately pick the winner, from 'doing what they want.'"

I'm not saying that Baker is entirely wrong, however. Clinton and Obama do seem to be beating each other up. But keep in mind that the spotlight hasn't been divided between the parties for more than a month. All the attention is on the Democrats, which only serves to magnify everything.

Even so, Baker makes a point when he says, "There's a popular view among Democrats and the media establishment that the reason for the party's current disarray is that it just happens to have two most extraordinary candidates: talented, attractive, and in their gender and race, excitingly new. But there's an alternative explanation, which I suspect the voters have grasped rather better than their necromancers in the media. Both are losers.

"The longer the Democratic race goes on, the more obvious it appears that each is deeply, perhaps ineradicably flawed."

The fact that both candidates are "flawed," as Baker suggests, is better than some of the theories and excuses being offered by some in the press these days.

Geoff Garin, a strategist for the Clinton campaign, asserts in the Washington Post that Clinton is being held to a different standard than Obama. Garin's defense of Clinton's campaign tactics seems to dissolve into -- dare I say it? -- bitter whining at the end -- "in America," Garin says, "fair is supposed to be fair."

Well, that depends on what one's definition of "fair" is -- in the context of political reporting. The Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of the press. It doesn't guarantee you will like what the press has to say.

Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University, observes in The New Republic that, a few decades ago, "it was very difficult for Democratic presidential candidates to hold their party's diverse electoral coalition together. That was because Democrats were ideologically divided and Republican presidential candidates like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan found it relatively easy to pick off conservative Democratic voters when they were running against liberal Democratic candidates like George McGovern and Walter Mondale.

"Since the 1970s, however, the American electorate has undergone an ideological realignment with conservative voters strongly loyal to the Republican Party and liberal voters reliably pulling the lever for the Democratic Party."

That shift, Abramowitz points out, favored Republicans in the first half of this decade, but has been leaning to the other side in the last couple of election cycles.

Has the Democratic campaign been so negative that it wiped out the party's advantage on domestic and foreign issues?