Tag: Barack Obama

If Hillary Clinton is to have any chance at all of winning the Democratic presidential nomination, she’s going to have to make a strong moral claim. By the time the primaries and caucuses are over, Barack Obama is almost certainly going to have won more pledged delegates and more states.

Clinton’s possible arguments — that she’s done better in traditionally Democratic big states like New York and California, or that the unpledged superdelegates should slide her way because she’s somehow more electable — aren’t going to cut it. That’s a profoundly undemocratic case, and the Obama delegates (not to mention general-election voters) would react with revulsion.

But there is one unlikely possibility: she could wind up winning the nationwide popular vote. If that were to happen, then it would be the Obama campaign suddenly having to talk about delegate counts and party rules, the very sort of inside baseball that turns voters off.

Could it happen? Take a look at last night’s results. Clinton succeeded in slicing quite a bit off Obama’s lead in the popular vote. According to the numbers, Clinton picked up 328,589 votes in winning three of the four primary states. The lion’s share — 227,556 — came from Ohio, where she won a decisive victory.

According to Real Clear Politics, Obama as of this morning has won 12,946,615 votes and Clinton 12,363,897 votes, not counting Florida — which shouldn’t count given that a party-rules squabble prevented both candidates from campaigning there. That gives Obama 51.1 percent to 48.9 percent for Clinton, or a margin of 582,718 votes. It also means that Obama lost a whopping 36 percent of his popular-vote lead yesterday.

When you look at the calendar, you can see that it’s going to be very difficult for Clinton to pass Obama in the popular vote unless she starts winning by large margins everywhere. The next big prize is Pennsylvania, which doesn’t vote until April 22.

But let’s say Obama and Clinton go into the convention with Obama ahead in delegates, but with neither having won enough to clinch — a very likely scenario. If Clinton has somehow built a lead in the popular vote, no matter how narrow, Obama’s margin among pledged delegates starts to look like the Electoral College: an undemocratic vestige of a bygone era.

And, at that point, the superdelegates, impressed by Clinton’s rather startling comeback, could award the nomination to her on the grounds that they were merely following the will of the people.

File photo (cc) by Daniella Zalcman and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Scott Helman, writing in the Boston Globe, finds striking parallels between Hillary Clinton’s “red phone” ad and one used by Walter Mondale against Gary Hart in 1984. The non-missing link: Roy Spence, who worked for Mondale 24 years ago and is with Clinton now.

Over in TPM Land, Greg Sargent reports that Clinton honcho Mark Penn was asked whether the ad was based on Lyndon Johnson’s infamous 1964 ad, which exploited fears of Barry Goldwater by depicting a daisy-picking girl followed by a nuclear explosion. Not quite sure I see that, but there you go.

You’ve probably seen Obama’s response ad by now. But I’ll bet you haven’t seen this.

Seth Gitell explains that Hillary Clinton’s fear-mongering telephone ad is a direct lift from a pitch George H.W. Bush made in trying to defeat Bill Clinton in 1992. “This appeal, emotional as it is, didn’t work for Bush the Elder. Given the public mood right now, it’s not likely to work for Hillary Clinton,” Gitell writes.

I thought Clinton sounded sad and subdued at the end, as though she knew that whatever she needed to do tonight she didn’t do. If she’s going to get back into the race, it won’t be because of this debate.

A further thought on the Louis Farrakhan reject/denounce exchange. Russert really let Obama off the hook by not forcing him to answer for things his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has said. Yes, Russert noted that Wright has praised Farrakhan, but then he let it pass. Obama “rejected and denounced” Farrakhan, but we never got back to Wright.

To be sure, Obama needn’t endorse everything Wright says to belong to his church. But it would have made for a more interesting conversation than simply beating up on an easy target like Farrakhan.

Maybe I’m too caught up in the moment, but I thought Clinton really got the worst of it in trying to say Obama didn’t go far enough in “denouncing” Louis Farrakhan’s endorsement — she said he should have “rejected” it, as she had done with a sleazy supporter in New York. Obama laughed a bit, said he didn’t see the difference and added that if it made her feel better he would “reject and denounce.” Oof.

This is their third one-on-one, but the first time I’ve seen such a performance differential between the two of them.

Tim Russert is questioning Obama about what assurances he can give to Jewish voters in light of Louis Farrakhan’s unsolicited endorsement of Obama and controversial remarks by Obama’s minister. No mention of Obama’s “Likud” comments in Cleveland.

Obama just pulled off the neat trick of going to Clinton’s left and right on national security simultaneously, and he was able to do it because Clinton handed him the opportunity. First, she criticized his opposition to the war in Iraq as nothing more than a speech, saying both of them had voted the same way on war-funding and related issues since that time. Then she questioned his judgment for saying last summer that he would bomb Pakistan.

Obama responded by saying that Clinton had enabled President Bush to “drive the bus into the ditch,” and that the reason their voting records are similar is that there are only so many ways to get out of the ditch. Then he said he didn’t favor bombing Pakistan, but did favor targeting specific Al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan. And he praised the Bush administration for doing that last week in taking out Al-Qaeda’s third-ranking leader.

That said, Brian Williams and Tim Russert seem to be doing everything they can to drop live grenades in her lap while making it easy for Obama to cruise along.

I think Hillary Clinton may have just burst into flames. After a contentious, 16-minute exchange over health care, Brian Williams finally moved the discussion to trade. Before she answered, she started channeling her campaign spokesman, Phil Singer, by complaining about always being asked the first question and referring to a “Saturday Night Live” skit in which Obama was portrayed as being coddled by the media. This can’t be helpful to her.