Watching Washington

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

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