White House 2008: Who Can Win?
“In the absence of actual voting events ... this crossfire between the campaigns becomes the only hot news available. And the media maw has grown wider and more ravenous and more insistent on daily feeding than ever before.”
An awful lot of people ran for president this year. Most have already been spanked and sent home.
Three still remain in the race, and presumably one will be president. But at the moment, all three look more vulnerable than invincible. In fact, it's easier to make the case against each of them than to make the case for any of them.
It's especially easy to make the case against either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, in part because the two Democrats have been working so hard to make the case against each other — mostly through their surrogates and campaigners.
This long-running war has escalated in the weeks since the last primary (Mississippi on March 11). In the absence of actual voting events — the next is Pennsylvania's primary on April 22 — this crossfire becomes the only hot news available. And the media maw has grown wider and more ravenous and more insistent on daily feeding than ever before.
So we have Bill Clinton calling Hillary Clinton and John McCain "two patriots who love this country" and pointedly leaving out Obama. This prompts a retired general (who backs Obama) to compare Bill Clinton to Joe McCarthy, the red-baiting bete noir of the 1950s. Then the Clinton operation releases a hit piece on the general from the American Spectator, the magazine that labored mightily to smear the Clintons throughout the 1990s. That in turn unleashes another tide of recriminations.
We also see James Carville, the consultant and media personality who rose with the Clintons in that era, outdoing himself by comparing New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson to Judas after Richardson endorsed Obama.
Each day, the respective campaigns stage conference calls to exchange insults for the benefit of reporters — one more reason the schoolyard taunting dominates the campaign coverage even in a week when all three candidates made serious speeches about the economy and foreign policy.
But the wounding of the Democrats goes deeper than that, and their deepest cuts come from their own associations and assertions. The videos that made the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright a media fixation have hobbled Obama with independents and with the blue-collar white Democrats he has struggled to reach throughout the campaign. If he survives to win the nomination, these videos will reappear in the fall as surely as yellow leaves.
For her part, Clinton has been burned by video of an airport landing in Bosnia that she had mistakenly recalled as taking place under sniper fire. The actual pictures of her — smiling amid welcoming children — undercut her self-projected image of international derring-do.
These missteps are all the more telling for both Democrats because their protracted struggle is sullying their respective images. The country has heard a lot about having the first woman or the first black nominated for president. But that inspirational note turns sour as the internecine knifings continue.
How long will it last? It is now clear that neither Obama nor Clinton can amass enough delegate votes to be nominated in Denver without winning a majority of superdelegates (automatic participants who are elected officials or party officers). Because the superdelegates can wait until the convention to declare, the nomination could be open until the balloting begins. That means the bloodletting could continue for another five months.
Clinton has a special problem. It now appears impossible for her to gain even a plurality of the pledged delegates (chosen in primaries and caucuses). So she must ask the superdelegates to reverse the judgment of the primaries and caucuses. This gets even harder if she also trails in the aggregated popular vote of all primary and caucus participants. And right now, without re-do votes in Michigan or Florida, she stands little chance of overtaking Obama in this measure, either.
If she somehow finds a way to sway the superdelegates and wrest the nomination from Obama, many of his supporters (especially among African-Americans and younger voters) may well shun her in November. Gallup also has found 28 percent of Clinton voters saying they would vote for McCain over Obama.
All these travails on the Democratic side help explain why most polls now show McCain running slightly ahead in November matchups.
Yet the obstacles between McCain and the Oval Office are imposing as well.
The first is the array of bad news greeting any Republican nominee in 2008. When a retiring president is south of 40 percent in the polls, his party's proposed successor loses — there have been no exceptions — and George W. Bush has been mired well below 40 percent for well over a year.
The public overwhelmingly believes the economy is now in recession and fears it will be a bad one. Once the public has taken this view, it generally takes a year or more to turn it around — even after the economy has begun to grow again. Ask George H.W. Bush about the recession of 1991 and how it cost him the presidency in 1992.
But the economy is just half the double whammy — with Iraq the other half. A large majority of Americans now regard the war as a mistake. Yes, a commitment of additional U.S. troops over the past year has improved security and economic conditions in Iraq. But political divisions remain and the comparative calm of recent months is fragile. If widespread fighting resumes, or if voters become impatient with the long occupation, Iraq alone could determine the election's outcome.
So the run from the convention to the White House would be steeply uphill for any GOP nominee. But McCain also has the special burdens of his age (71), medical history and reputation for being at odds with hard-line conservatives. The very qualities that endear him to many non-Republicans could cut into the base vote any nominee depends on in November.
On the other hand, seeking to allay concerns on the right may weaken his vaunted appeal to the middle. Just this week, McCain has taken an ultra-conservative stance on the economy (Clinton called it the return of Herbert Hoover) and taken up the cudgels for continuing the war, the single least popular element of the unpopular Bush presidency.
In sum, the weaknesses of each remaining candidate are now very much on display, while their strengths are at least temporarily eclipsed.
What happens in the weeks and months ahead will show which candidate can overcome the problems each now faces. Whoever does so will transform his or her current trials into a demonstration of new strength. And, in the end, that may well be what matters most to November voters.
10:32 AM ET | 03-27-2008 | permalink
