Watching Washington

What Keeps Hillary Going?

By now, no one needs more rehashing of the numbers, but here's the short version: Barack Obama has a virtual lock on the delegates he needs to be the 2008 Democratic nominee for president.

Obama needs only about a third of the delegates at stake in the remaining primaries and about the same share of the uncommitted superdelegates. Barring another outbreak of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama should do substantially better than that in both categories.

So game over. Even the seating of the full delegations from the outlaw primaries in Florida and Michigan is no longer a real threat to Obama's nomination.

So why is Hillary Clinton still barnstorming the country from West Virginia to Oregon (with stopovers in Kentucky and South Dakota) in a vain effort to stop him?

Let's consider a few possible answers.

She doesn't get it. She is drinking the Kool-Aid her aides are serving up on their daily conference call. She thinks the West Virginia primary (with a microscopic 28 delegates) is "critical." She thinks the real number for nomination is 2,209 rather than 2,025 (as the rest of the world thinks), because she really expects Florida and Michigan to be seated without penalty. She thinks she can sell all this to two-thirds of the remaining superdelegates, or else pry loose a lot of pledged delegates who are only part of the process because they are Obama true believers.

(This explanation is not persuasive because we all know Clinton to be a savvy politician with a head for hard numbers. In fact, you could argue, her problem is seeming too savvy and too political. So we must look further for an explanation.)

She thinks Obama will stumble. This represents a far more plausible insight. Perhaps she firmly believes her rival will, in a day or a week or a month, crash into a wall. It may be another round of Wright — worse yet than the first two — or it may be a torpedo of another nature. But somehow she is convinced he will blow up before the convention in Denver in August and she should stand at the ready until then.

(No one can dismiss the prospect of a disaster waiting in the wings for Obama. He remains a little-known rookie making his first bid for national stardom. He has been scrubbed and vetted up to now, but not to the degree he will be as the presumptive nominee. The rough stuff is just beginning, and the Clintons know this better than anyone.)

She wants the second spot on the ticket. While no one in her inner circle may admit to this right now, she has to be considering the upside and downside of being on the 2008 ticket in the No. 2 spot. She has already softened her language regarding her opponent, indicating an interest in moving beyond their rivalry. But she may think she has more leverage on Obama and his decision if she remains a rival for now.

(Is America ready for a troika consisting of Obama, Clinton and Clinton? Make no mistake, taking on one Clinton will mean all the benefits and baggage of both. Perhaps you can picture the threesome at the convention, or in the fall campaign. But in the White House? Still, if this proves the price of peace in the party, or the one way to hold the full Democratic coalition together, it cannot be dismissed out of hand. The real question is: Do Hillary Clinton's voters who say they can't vote for Obama change their minds if she's part of the package?)

She can't stop. Necessity dictates the long campaign because the Clinton campaign is now well into debt. She and her husband have lent at least $11 million from their own resources, and that number will almost surely go much higher. To get that back, the campaign must raise a great deal of money in the weeks ahead. Raising money is nearly impossible under a white flag.

She just doesn't want to stop. This campaign is clearly the culmination of Hillary Clinton's passion and her dream. Not many months ago, she seemed assured of being the first woman nominated. She seemed quite likely to be the first woman president. Now she finds herself beaten, besieged, beleaguered and substantially poorer. To quit now would be to lock in those losses. She keeps on going because to do anything else is to accept a defeat she cannot bring herself to accept.

She wants to stop, but just a little later. You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em. Judging by the body language and facial expressions the family displayed on stage in Indianapolis on Tuesday, they know their cards won't beat what's on the table. But by waiting for a better night or a better day to quit — after Kentucky and Oregon vote on May 20, or after the last primaries on June 3 — the Clinton team can plot a better trajectory for her future.

(Right now, Hillary Clinton might look forward to running again in 2012 or even 2016. She might also take a look at the New York governorship in 2010. And the talk about her becoming Senate majority leader also persists. Her prospects are still bright. She just needs a little time to stage manage her exit.)

She has reasons known only to her. This is the most intriguing prospect of all. Stay tuned.

12:33 PM ET | 05- 9-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Clinton Borrows from GOP Playbook

Earlier in this primary season, Hillary Clinton warned Democrats that if Barack Obama won the Democratic presidential nod, he would wilt under attacks from the GOP in the fall.

Lately, as if to prove her point, she's been running a pretty good imitation of a Republican campaign herself.

It's not just the video of her chatting up Bill O'Reilly on his conservative TV talk show on Fox News, or the endorsement from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and its wealthy right-wing publisher, Richard Mellon Scaife.

It's more about the issues she's emphasizing and the lines of attack she's opened on her rival.

Lately, her big idea has been to suspend the gas tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day -- a gas tax holiday. It has become her emblem of solidarity with working families. Never mind that her campaign could not name a single expert who thought this was a good idea. And never mind that it was already the centerpiece of Republican John McCain's anti-recession package.

It was enough that the gas tax idea got applause at rallies and that Obama was opposed. It gave her another chance to portray herself as down-to-earth and Obama as elitist.

Truth is, there are few ways to sound more Republican than by calling for a tax holiday. It plays into the essential Republican contention that taxes are the chief cause of economic discomfort and unfairness for working families and the middle class.

The gas tax is a special case in point. It's been Republican doctrine for generations that taxes crank up the cost of a tank of gas. Some stations used to put out signs listing all the taxes included in the price at the pump. It's not the oil companies who are sticking you up, they seem to be saying, it's the government.

In fact, the 18-cent-per-gallon federal tax does not go up as the cost of gas does, so it becomes a smaller and smaller proportion of the cost we all pay as prices (and oil company profits) hit record levels. And that's not even to mention the ecological arguments for discouraging gas consumption.

None of that matters to the Clinton campaign right now, because the gas tax holiday is not about the economy, the energy crisis or the environment. It's a psychological device to establish empathy. It's this week's version of having the candidate belly up to a blue collar bar for a shot and a beer. Hillary Clinton looked a little ridiculous knocking them back in Pennsylvania, but it was better than the sight of Obama rolling gutter balls. Note to future candidates: power drinking beats bowling because it is very difficult to miss one's mouth.

All this sports bar chatter and the gas tax are temporary gimmicks that will have their day and then pass into history. The larger Clinton strategy is to portray Obama as suspect on the issue of national security.

Remember the red phone ringing at 3 a.m.? It started ringing nearly two months ago and has yet to be answered by any of those sleeping, innocent children, one of who resembles a juvenile version of the junior senator from Illinois. It's a Clinton ad, of course, but the first time you see it you could swear it's an ad for McCain. What could be more familiar than the Republican candidate pillorying the Democrat as a peacenik?

After the April 16 debate in Philadelphia, when Obama complained about the focus of the questions and argumentative nature of the moderators, Clinton all but called him a cry baby. Her next ad on the air was a lecture on all the tough calls a president has to make in the Oval Office, capped with the Truman dictum: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

Their assault has been largely successful, as it has been for candidates in both parties over the years. Few now remember, but John F. Kennedy ran against the Eisenhower-Nixon administration in 1960 from the right on national security. Among other things, he decried the supposed superiority of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the failure to project U.S. power in defense of certain islands off the coast of "Red China."

More recently, the flag-waving and fear-mongering campaigns have been run by conservative activists and ad makers such as Karl Rove, Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes. They have helped the GOP win seven of the last 10 presidential elections by painting a succession of Democratic candidates as liberal, elitist, irreligious, weak and out of touch -- a bad bet for a country striving to hold off foreign enemies.

Theirs is the playbook from which many of the current Clinton tactics seem to have been borrowed. It is a game plan many of Clinton's current advisors have themselves have struggled against in the past. This is their chance to make it their own. And they are making the most of it.

8:23 AM ET | 05- 2-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Sun Still Shining on Arizona's Favorite Son

It is good to be John McCain these days. Fortune beams upon him the way it sometimes did on heroes of Greek myth.

Many in the Republican Party are still rubbing their eyes in disbelief that the erstwhile maverick from Arizona is their presumptive nominee. How did it happen when several of his rivals had more assets and more affinity with the core GOP voter?

It happened in part because his rivals got in each other's way more than they got in McCain's. By winning rather modest numbers of votes and fractional percentages of the total, McCain won big states with mere pluralities and let the GOP's rules spin them into "winner take all" gold.

And if that all seems a remarkable stroke of winter luck, consider that it is happening again in the spring.

Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have both attracted far more votes in the primary than McCain and raised vastly more money. Yet they are using all that money and momentum against each other. McCain seems increasingly likely to be the beneficiary, not just now but in the fall against whichever Democrat survives.

Take the latest round of the controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a retired pastor without a church who insists on equating himself with the entire institution of religion in black America. The fallout is deadly for Obama, who has a 20-year association with Wright. But it's potentially toxic for Hillary Clinton as well; because the former first lady was already in danger of alienating African American voters with the tactics she and her husband used to stay alive in January and February.

But for McCain, the Wright storm presents a rare opportunity for having it both ways. He takes the high road by saying he wants to run a respectful campaign and by scolding North Carolina Republicans for an ad that ties Obama to Wright. At the same time, he gets days of positive coverage for taking that stand, and he keeps the divisive Wright issue front and center.

McCain can say he respects Wright's six years as a Marine -- getting on all the cable TV shows -- then get another cycle's worth of payoff when Wright compares the Marines to the legions of the tyrannical Roman empire.

It's almost too easy.

It is possible the Democratic vote will reunite after the nomination is eventually decided and the convention is held. But it seems equally possible the battle will continue through the convention and the rift will last much longer.

McCain need only stay alive, an interested observer from across the divide, watching the Democrats squander an extraordinary opportunity to take the White House from the Republicans. Polls suggest sizable numbers of Reagan Democrats will vote for McCain if Obama is the nominee, and many black voters and new voters will stay home if Obama is not the nominee.

The question is whether the split over personalities among Democrats will be powerful enough to outweigh all the other signs pointing to a broad, national repudiation of President Bush. Polls show majorities of Americans deeply disenchanted with the current administration and its policies, most particularly on Iraq, immigration and the economy. McCain is associated with all three, and lately has gone out of his way to reinforce his bond with Bushism.

That is why, with all the mayhem of the campaign to date, both Democratic presidential candidates remain statistically tied with McCain in hypothetical match-ups for November.

But if we have learned anything in our politics since World War II, it is that Americans choose an individual to be president, not a party or a platform.

And right now, the individual basking in the favor of the sun is John McCain.

8:39 AM ET | 04-29-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

The Proper Pennsylvania Lesson for Obama

Exit pollsters this week asked Pennsylvania primary voters at what point they had decided between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. About 1 in 4 said they had done so in the last week before the vote, and among these, 58 percent said they had decided for Clinton.

That enormous edge was far from the only factor deciding this primary. But it was a factor Obama might have done something about.

The one big event that took place in the final week of the campaign: the debate on ABC-TV on the night of April 16. While the exit poll did not specifically ask about the debate, no other happening in these final days had nearly the same potential to affect voter attitudes.

The April 16 debate was watched by more than 10 million viewers nationwide, the largest audience for any of the debates in either party in this presidential election cycle. But its impact was far wider, because debates influence far more people than just those who watch and listen.

Debates, like candidate gaffes, make their way into the voters' consciousness gradually. Most of the damage may be done days after the fact. Consider the classic example: President Gerald Ford's infamous statement (in his debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976) about Poland not feeling dominated by the Soviets. That remark barely registered with audiences during the debate, but after several cycles of media replay and regurgitation, it had become a major issue.

So it was with Obama's performance in the ABC showdown. While Clinton pounced gleefully on question after question, controlling the temperature of the evening, Obama seemed put upon and dyspeptic. And he compounded that impression by grousing about the questions in the days that followed.

Yes, the ABC team of Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos seemed obsessed with hot buttons and trivia, probing Obama's troublesome associations far more than Clinton's. But that goes with the status of front-runner, especially one who is still being introduced to the general public. Obama acted as if he had no notion such questions might be asked.

Obama seemed almost equally ill at ease when defending some of his issue positions. Pressed by a rather argumentative Gibson about the effect of capital gains tax cuts on federal revenue, Obama seemed unprepared to defend the higher rates he favors.

At a minimum, the April 16 debate was a lost opportunity for a campaign that had been on the defensive for weeks. Here was a chance to be vigorous and affirmative in meeting these challenges to the candidate's reputation, independence and patriotism.

Failing to seize that chance, Obama seemed much reduced from his usual public stature. Not only did he fall short of the presence he has in his grand speeches, he also fell short of his better debate performances against Clinton earlier this year.

Polls in Pennsylvania during the debate week detected a stalling of the momentum that had cut Clinton's formidable lead by half. From then on, Obama slipped back the other way.

When media analysts break down an Obama loss, we tend to dwell on how various groups reacted to his candidacy. We talk about how he failed to capture women, or white voters, the working class, older voters or Catholics.

At times there is an implication that these voting groups have rejected -- or at least failed to appreciate -- this youthful black visionary who has enthralled other elements of the electorate and beguiled many a veteran journalist.

But there is an obvious alternative to this interpretation. It is that Obama is failing to connect with these voting groups because, with all his assets, he is still far from a complete candidate.

There's not much someone running for office can do about his or her race, gender or age. But one can get better at selling a viewpoint or defending specific vulnerabilities. What hurt Obama most in the April 16 debate, and in other moments in Ohio and Pennsylvania, was his failure to do either one.

If Obama hopes to restore his own trajectory in May after the rocky months of March and April, he will need more than his amphitheater rhetoric and his online fundraising. He needs to master the everyday campaign arts of debate -- delivering polished and punchy lines -- and of mixing with ordinary people in a way that wins them over.

12:55 AM ET | 04-23-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Desperately Seeking a Campaign Scoreboard

After nearly six weeks without a primary or a caucus, practically everyone following the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination is at wit's end.

Frustration and bewilderment are the watchwords of the hour.

Is it because the performances of the candidates are deteriorating? Perhaps. The latest debate (ABC News, April 16, Philadelphia) left partisans of candidates (and neither candidate) both underwhelmed and vaguely depressed.

You could blame it on moderators Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, as many outside of ABC News and their publicity department did. But the candidates, too, left much to be desired.

Polls show the country likes and trusts both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton less now than it did earlier this year. Obama seems halting on defense, while Clinton prevaricates on offense, so it's hard to find either inspiring at the moment.

But something else has gotten out of kilter as well in this long break in the voting. It's the lack of any truly meaningful measure of where it's going. With no one out there voting for all this time, we've been wandering in a forest with no marked trail.

Sure, we have the polls, which move around enough to keep cable TV anchors breathless and wide-eyed. The problem is that they fluctuate and contradict each other so much, they undermine their own credibility.

Take for example, the two most recent national polls on the Democratic race. The Gallup tracking poll has Obama up by just 3 points, down from 11 earlier in the week. That would tend to suggest his remarks about bitter small-town people clinging to guns and religion had finally registered and done him harm, and that his performance in the midweek debate was hurting as well.

But then along comes a Newsweek poll done in the same time frame that shows Obama up -- wait for it -- 19 points. That would represent by far his largest advantage in a national poll to date. What does that say about the bitter-cling snafu or the debate?

The polls in individual states can also be confusing. In Pennsylvania, polls released on April 15 showed Clinton leading Obama by as many as 14 points (typical of her lead in March and early April) or as few as 5.

Later in the week, a Zogby poll found her ahead by just 4, a Rasmussen poll by just 3. And a poll released at midweek (before the debate) by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic firm in Raleigh, N.C., looked at nearly 1,100 Democrats in Pennsylvania and found Obama ahead by 3 points.

Similar confusion reigns in Indiana, which votes on May 6. Surveys in that state in recent weeks had given Clinton consistent leads in mid-to-high single digits. The state was generally considered to be in the Ohio-Pennsylvania pattern, with blue-collar voters and rural voters opting for Clinton and offsetting Obama's advantage among blacks and the educated and affluent. But this week, two polls, including one for the Los Angeles Times and Bloomberg News, gave a 5-point bulge in the state to Obama.

So who's ahead, and by how much? What is registering with voters, and what is not? It is difficult to find a metric that satisfies.

Of course, we still have the total of pledged delegates, a number with real consequence. The problem is that this total has not changed much in more than a month. Anything that remains static that long becomes part of the landscape; we notice it less and less.

What about those superdelegate totals, the rolling tally of elected officeholders and party officials who will go to the convention and determine who gets the nomination in the end? Here, Obama has whittled away at what was once a substantial lead for Clinton. Now it's inside of two dozen delegates. But again, there isn't enough drama in this to grab people.

We are reduced, then to collecting anecdotes and seeking a pattern. This is the sort of non-numeric, squishy stuff that political journalists have always mucked about in -- dating back long before the computer or the telephone poll.

We take note when every major daily newspaper in Pennsylvania endorses Obama, but then we move on. We take note when Robert Reich, the first secretary of labor in the administration of Bill Clinton and a friend of Bill since Oxford days, endorses Obama. And we may even notice when two former U.S. senators, Sam Nunn and David Boren, endorse Obama.

Nunn speaks for defense hawks in the Democratic Party like few others have in decades. As a senator from Georgia, he rose to chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and won effusive praise from such conservatives as Barry Goldwater. Boren, who was governor of Oklahoma before being elected to the Senate, was the godfather of campaign finance reform in the 1980s, long before Senators John McCain and Russ Feingold took over the franchise.

But Nunn and Boren both left the Senate in the 1990s, and neither cuts much mustard in Washington these days, so it's hard to say whether their endorsements will register.

That's been part of the problem now for nearly six weeks. Nothing really resonates like results.

12:03 PM ET | 04-19-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Bush and Cheney: Riding Out on the Hard Line

It was the 10th of April in his final year in office, and President Bush sent several ultimatums to Congress before flying to Texas for a three-day weekend.

In his demands, he directed the lawmakers to:

1) Approve $108 billion in spending for Iraq without attaching strings or domestic spending.
2) Accept the suspension of troop withdrawals from Iraq for an indefinite period.
3) Sign off on a free trade agreement with Colombia without amendment.

The president's attitude on all three issues might best be described as impatient insistence. Why hadn't Congress complied with his wishes already?

Hearing the president, it was easy to imagine him in the spring of 2003, full of the authority that comes with a wartime mission and high approval ratings.

It was as if Congress existed to carry out his program, and as if there were no reason to think any reasonable person would disagree with him on any of the three issues at hand.

All this could be posturing, of course. The president might actually understand the resistance to his priorities far better than he lets on. It is even possible that he would use his days at the ranch, as President Lyndon B. Johnson once did, to schmooze and bargain and cajole the Hill's key members.

If that were the case, they might be days well spent. Back in Washington, the president might stand to get more of what he wants, while still allowing Congress some taste of success.

But will he? This president has never shown much interest in the grit and grind of working the Congress. When he was riding high he could issue directives, or send Vice President Cheney to the Hill to order the troops into line.

That was when his party still controlled the House and Senate majorities. It was also when his approval ratings still defied gravity. For a long time, this man could not seem to wear out the nation's admiration.

But on the day his latest extended weekend began, his approval rating in the Gallup Poll fell to 28 percent — the lowest for any president since Jimmy Carter hit the same number in his last year in office.

What troubles the Bush White House is not so different from those of the Carter years. The country is stuck in an endless stalemate in the Middle East that most Americans find both incomprehensible and insupportable. Gas prices are at record highs. The economy is faltering in the midst of a credit and banking crisis still unfolding on Wall Street.

As for the administration, its response to challenge after challenge ranges from disappointing to dysfunctional. The latest failing involves a regulatory culture at the Federal Aviation Administration that enabled major airlines to fly planes that hadn't been inspected. With that bad news came the overnight cancellation of thousands of flights, stranding passengers at airports across the country.

The president, we are told, will be "keeping an eye" on that situation from Crawford this weekend.

When people look more closely at the Bush administration, they see a cabinet and sub-cabinet in near-constant turmoil. The latest to depart, Alphonso Jackson at Housing and Urban Development, didn't leave because the nation's housing market is dropping or because no one in power seemed aware of the looming mortgage crisis. He left because of allegations he directed lucrative contracts to cronies.

Underlying all of Washington's woes, of course, is the national anxiety over Iraq. Two days of congressional testimony by the respected and popular Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker left an impression of stoic resignation. U.S. troop withdrawals would have to be suspended this summer. More troops would remain after the surge than had been in Iraq before the surge. Progress made is "fragile and reversible."

While some found the report unsettling, the president seemed satisfied. The general would have "all the time he needs." Guarded and cautious as Petraeus and Crocker had been, Messrs. Bush and Cheney were full of new hope. The vice president even checked in with two of his favorite talk show hosts, Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt.

"There's a lot of good things happening," a sunny Cheney enthused.

It is one thing to see a glass half empty and pronounce it half full. It is another to contemplate the dregs and insist the glass is brimming.

5:53 PM ET | 04-11-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Will Democrats Care if the Clintons Are (That) Rich?

It's hard to imagine that anyone watching the 2008 presidential campaign woke up on Friday still thinking of Bill and Hillary Clinton as that impecunious yuppie couple we met in Little Rock back in 1992.

Still, eyes popped and eyebrows rose at the numbers in the news: The Clintons rolled up well over $100 million in their first seven years out of the White House -- including $20 million last year.

It's been well publicized that both the former president and former first lady received millions for their autobiographical manuscripts. And there's been general acknowledgement that Bill Clinton leads the list of top-dollar speakers at international conclaves.

What may have caught some of us by surprise, however, is the number and the average swag from those speaking engagements. You knew there were people willing to spend astonishing sums to impress their guests, but $52 million for speeches at business gatherings and motivational confabs? That's a lot of impressiveness.

The sheer speed and overpowering ease with which the fresh Clinton fortune was amassed amazed us. The Clinton legend, heretofore framed entirely in terms of political office, takes on a gilded edge.

Is any of this a problem for anyone other than the professional Clinton detractors? Will ordinary voters, especially those making less than $50,000 a year, be OK with a putative champion who's literally making 400 times as much?

Democrats in the past have accepted presidential nominees who were born to great wealth (Jack Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt), as well as those with aristocratic pedigrees (John Kerry, Al Gore, Adlai Stevenson) and those who were affluent before arriving in the Oval Office (Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter). Just as many of the Democratic standard bearers have been sons of the middle class who spent much of their prior career in government (Clinton, Michael Dukakis, Walter Mondale, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey and Harry Truman).

Democrats had a chance to size up each of these candidates and their financial background. They could decide whether they accepted JFK or FDR as a friend of the working man. Now they are being asked to make the same decision about a candidate borne on a tide of money generated by her husband's willingness to sell the cachet and connections of his presidency in the marketplace.

As a rule, most ex-presidents have made a soft landing on the assets they had before entering the White House. They were people of means first, national leaders after. Not the Clintons. They spent their early years together in government and their middle years together primarily in government. She made some money as a lawyer, but nothing like what she might have made outside of Arkansas.

When Bill was elected, the Clintons had never even owned a home. But over the next eight years, they became accustomed to holidays on Martha's Vineyard and in other exclusive retreats. It was a lifestyle to which they could see themselves becoming accustomed. That is an adaptation few could resist.

So once in the private sector, they made up for lost time. Bill Clinton may have been the first president in our history to be young, energetic and saleable enough to maximize his post-office earning power in this way. He saw his opportunities and took them.

No one questions his right to have done so, or her right to have ridden along. But for those who find any aspect of Clinton Inc. unseemly, the prospect of giving the enterprise another lease on the White House will be troubling.

9:10 PM ET | 04- 4-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

White House 2008: Who Can Win?

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 | e-mail column

 

Envy in the Capitol: Presidential Candidates Return

This week, for the first time in five months, Senate floor business brought all the Senate's prodigal children home from the presidential campaign trail on a single day.

That's right, a series of high-profile votes on the budget resolution was magnet enough to bring the last three senators still alive in the White House contest back to town at once.

Republican John McCain of Arizona was on hand, having wrapped up the GOP nomination for president earlier in the month. McCain could scarcely miss a chance to vote for the amendment — sponsored by himself — that would eliminate legislators' favorite practice: earmarking funds in spending bills for special projects back home. McCain has made a lonely crusade against earmarks for many years, and now the issue is one of his best bridges to fiscal conservatives in the GOP voting base.

Democratic rivals Barack Obama of Illinois and Hillary Clinton of New York were also in the chamber, chatting up their old colleagues and making nice with each other for the C-SPAN cameras. With five weeks to go before the next campaign event in Pennsylvania (April 22), both could afford to spend some time on their day jobs. Besides that, it was a chance to chat up the Democratic senators from Florida and Michigan about disputed votes in those two states.

Despite months of missed votes, the three were not shunned as wayward siblings but welcomed as returning heroes. That is because the Senate considers this sort of absence quite acceptable and even honorable. After all, being a presidential hopeful is almost part of a senator's job description.

Consider that those warmly greeting the return of the three included several colleagues (Sam Brownback, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd) who until recently were competing against them in Iowa and New Hampshire (before their own presidential hopes played out).

There were others, of course, who had flirted with the idea of running for president this time around but demurred: Chuck Hagel of Nebraska on the GOP side, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Evan Bayh of Indiana among the Democrats.

An even larger number of incumbent senators could greet McCain, Obama and Clinton with rueful smiles and memories of their own White House campaigns in earlier eras: John Kerry and Joe Lieberman (2004), Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole and Orrin Hatch (2000), Richard Lugar and Arlen Specter (1996), Tom Harkin (1992) and Ted Kennedy (1980).

Beyond all these, there are many others in the chamber who have dreamed of presidential glory without declaring for the office in public. And yet again as many are dreaming that dream now with their hopes set on four, eight and 12 years from now.

Few indeed are those in the Senate who have never peered into the mirror and heard "Hail to the Chief" playing faintly in the distance. So it should surprise no one that these three illustrious absentees were objects of admiration and envy when they strode the Senate's deep blue carpeting again this week.

In days ahead, it is possible that McCain will make the Senate his base of operations, at least temporarily. He needs to re-engage with the issues of the day and benefits politically by doing so. He can make his forays into the country from here as well as anywhere.

Obama and Clinton are less likely to be visible in Washington. Their struggle goes on into Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana and Kentucky — among other states.

But there remains a chance that all these aspirant presidents will be drawn back to the reality of their current jobs for a major issue or crisis precipitated by the current president. This week George W. Bush reissued a 1995 order finding that a national emergency exists with respect to Iran and its threats to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the U.S.

The State Department called this reissue of the 13-year-old order completely routine. But the language recalls the preamble to the invasion of Iraq. So with the fifth anniversary of that war at hand, the coincidence of the order's renewal drew notice.

In the same week, Admiral William Fallon abruptly resigned as chief of the U.S. Central Command, which runs American military operations in the Middle East. It was widely known that Fallon opposed military confrontation with Iran and regarded the Bush administration's policy posture against Iran as aggressive and inadvisable.

Now this 40-year veteran is gone. And while his superiors at the Pentagon were at pains to deny any move against Iran was imminent, the impetus for the question was obvious. Add to all this the plan for Vice President Dick Cheney, the leading Iran hawk in the administration, to travel to the region to visit, among other places, Oman, the forward logistics hub for U.S. operations in the theater.

It may be an illusion, but all these signs point in one direction. Could the lame duck president who has been well below 40 percent approval for two years be planning a major rearranging of the landscape? Might he attempt to re-seize the initiative in his final months by striking Iran?

Such an attack would radically reshape the national debate and the 2008 presidential campaign overnight. Perhaps it's time all the senators who would be president spent more time back in the Capitol peforming their duties — including their responsibility to provide oversight of the executive branch in a time of war.

7:12 PM ET | 03-13-2008 | permalink | e-mail column

 

Will Split Decision Shift Texas to Obama?

Hillary Clinton has called her primary victories this week "stunning," but their contribution to her delegate total continues to dwindle.

Senator Clinton won the Ohio primary with a healthy margin and squeaked past 50 percent in the Texas primary. She went on TV as the shiny new star of the 2008 campaign, the belle of the ball once again. All the glitter seemed legit at the time. She had cleared a high bar set by no less an authority than Bill Clinton himself, who said she had to win both of the big states on March 4 or it was lights out.

But even as the confetti fell in Columbus there were flaws with the Comeback Kid scenario. The delegate dividends from the states she won were surprisingly poor. She picked up just four delegates net in the Texas primary, one fewer than her net gain of five in tiny Rhode Island. Even her big win in Ohio gave her just 74 delegates to Obama's 65.

Subtract from this total the three delegates Barack Obama netted in tiny Vermont and Senator Clinton had gained just 15 delegates in the March 4 primaries. Given that she trailed by 152 pledged delegates as the day began, this shift did not seem nearly as impressive as the victory celebration and headlines implied.

And now it appears that even her net gain of 15 on the day may be cut nearly in half.

Because in Texas, one-third of the 193 delegates at stake this week were not awarded by the primary but by the caucuses held after the polls were closed. A record 4 million voters showed up for the primary, and a record 1.1 million also stayed for the caucuses at more than 8,000 sites around the Lone Star state. And in these caucuses, Obama won handily.

They call this hybrid the "Texas Two-Step," and it's had its fans and critics since invented in 1988. But this year it's really going to cause some howling.

The Texas Democratic Party says Obama's wider caucus margin will probably give him a 37-30 break in the delegates allocated from the caucuses. The primary had almost twice that many delegates at stake, but Clinton's primary margin there was much narrower. So when the two steps are all done, the projection is for Obama to emerge with 98 delegates to Clinton's 95.

So who won Texas?

The Clinton camp will point to the larger turnout in the primary to support their claim of victory. The Obama camp will say both events were valid and rules are rules.

But what's the bottom line if more Texans go to the convention in Denver pledged to vote for Obama than for Clinton?

Is it possible that instead of winning two big states, Senator Clinton won one-and-a-half?

Truth is, the Clinton campaign had anticipated exactly this kind of split decision in Texas. That's why efforts had been made to discredit the caucuses in advance. Her campaign complained that the caucuses were too small to be representative and too random in administration to be fair.

On caucus night, her campaign held a stormy conference call with reporters to say Obama forces were attempting to hijack the proceedings at specific sites. Similar complaints had been lodged against caucuses in other states in January and February, as the Obama campaign racked up consistent wins in delegate counts.

The Clinton campaign had much to fear in Texas. The state had once stood for her dominance in the presidential race, but after her 17-point drubbing in Wisconsin it began to symbolize her campaign's decline. Up by 20 in opinion polls, Senator Clinton saw the lead disappear. She sent in her crack operative from California, Averell "Ace" Smith, to reprise the ground organizing that preserved her 9-point victory in that state on Super Tuesday.

On March 4, Ace Smith & Company delivered a record turnout among Hispanics, who cast nearly one-third of the total vote and favored Clinton by about 2-to-1. It was enough for just over 50 percent of the vote, but not enough to make the caucuses ratify the the primary.

So the argument over "who won Texas" begins. And it's far more than just an academic debate.

One suspects the Clinton campaign would have carried on beyond this week even if she had lost the primary in Texas as well as the caucuses. Ohio was going to be all they really needed to claim a turnaround. (Note that she made her "going all the way" victory speech in Ohio before the results from Texas were clear).

More important, she and her retinue clearly believe they have finally found the key to the Obama riddle. After months of frustration, they loosed a flurry of blows and landed just enough of them to stall his momentum and grab some of their own.

Besides, most of the country will go on thinking that Senator Clinton collected a bonanza in Texas (and elsewhere) this week. So even if she didn't, and even if she did not quite meet her own goal of winning both big states, she got her momentum back for the first time in a month.

And at this point in the campaign, momentum is as important as message and money.

4:38 PM ET | 03- 6-2008 | permalink | e-mail column