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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: Obama has a punctuation problem http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9867.html Obama has a punctuation problem By JOHN F. HARRIS & DAVID PAUL KUHN | 4/25/08 4:46 AM EST POLITICO Barack Obama’s real opponent now is not Hillary Rodham Clinton. It is a pair of punctuation marks. The first is a question. The second is an asterisk. Both threaten to hover over Obama if he wins the Democratic nomination without confronting and defeating the doubts Clinton has raised about his political strength beyond his electoral base of African-Americans and upscale whites. This is the significance of Indiana. Obama can and probably will win the Democratic nomination no matter what happens in the May 6 primary. But a victory in the Hoosier state is critical to Obama gaining at least some of the political and psychic momentum that ordinarily flow to a nomination winner. A loss—on top of a succession of losses in Pennsylvania, Ohio and other big states—would mean the nominee would enter the general election defined to an unusual degree by his vulnerabilities. Could he run strongly in these states in a general election even after running weakly during the nomination phase? That is the question. It is strange for a party nominee to confront such a question. Obama faces it only because of the peculiar set of circumstances by which elected delegates and appointed superdelegates will likely give him the nomination. That is the asterisk. If Clinton reverses the current trajectory of the delegate race and becomes the nominee, this too would require peculiar, almost flukish, circumstances. She would have her own asterisk. But this is not likely. The logic that makes Obama all-but-inevitable as the Democratic nominee remains unchanged. As Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, among others, wrote weeks ago, when Obama finishes the primary season ahead in elected delegates, as he will, it is hard to conceive the circumstances that would cause Democratic superdelegates to deny an African-American politician with overwhelming support from the party’s most loyal constituency. But it is also hard for party leaders or political analysts to avert their gaze from Obama’s poor performance in Pennsylvania. Once again, as in Texas and Ohio, he failed to knock Clinton out of the race when he had the opportunity. Once again, he got beat among blue-collar whites, among older voters, among Catholics, among Hispanics (these categories frequently overlap)—all voting blocs any Democratic nominee urgently needs. Most damaging, these results came despite six weeks of one-on-one campaigning in which he enjoyed an enormous financial advantage. “There has been a repeat of his inability to close and I think that is the story and the press is so fixated on her having to get out rather than him having to win,” said Tony Coelho, a former House majority whip and campaign manager for Al Gore in 2000. “I just want to win in November and I’m nervous as hell,” Coelho continued. “What I get concerned about is that Pennsylvania is a critical state for us in November and if you look at the exit polls it shows that a lot of people are unwilling to vote for him.” Those poll results highlight the peril of a demographic thread-the-needle strategy to gaining the nomination. Usually, victory changes the optics surrounding a politician. It changes the prism through which voters and the media view a politician, highlighting strengths, and helping frail, life-sized people gain the stature needed to command a national stage. Usually, election rules themselves are meant to promote this process. Presidential nominees who win even modest popular vote victories usually (though not, needless to say, in 2000 or 2004) win wide Electoral College margins. This year, the Republican’s winner-take-all primary rules have similarly helped transform John McCain’s political stature, in both concrete and intangible ways. It is hard to imagine a politician with more glaring weaknesses with important elements of the GOP coalition. But the momentum created by his early victories in due course brought even skeptical conservatives to his fold. The Democrats’ proportional rules for awarding delegates, by contrast, are inhibiting this process—guaranteeing that the eventual winner will stagger to the finish line (with the help of superdelegates) rather than stride across it. Indeed, Bill Clinton was correct the other day when he observed that, if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, Hillary Clinton would be ahead. (By Politico’s count, her margin would be at least 125 delegates, and possibly much more given the stampede effect often seen in nominating contests.) Of course, both Clinton and Obama knew the Democratic rules when they got started---and Obama, unlike Clinton, has brilliantly devised a strategy to take full advantage of his own assets within those rules. What’s more, in certain states—such as Wisconsin and Virginia—he showed an impressive ability to broaden his appeal beyond upscale whites, blacks of all economic stations, and younger voters. But those states came relatively early in the process, and they increasingly look like aberrations. That is why party leaders see Indiana as a critical last chance for Obama to revive his old aura—to blur, if not erase, both the question mark and the asterisk. “Indiana is really the only one left where Obama can show he appeals to working class whites,” said Chuck Mannatt, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “The fact of the matter is he has not broken through, with the exception of Virginia and Wisconsin.” As Coelho put it, “Pennsylvania had an earthquake impact in this race in that it raised a lot of doubt about his ability to win in November. That means the burden on winning in Indiana is big.” “He does have a higher burden now because he has failed to close the deal,” said Donnie Fowler, who served in senior roles for the campaigns of Kerry, Al Gore, and Wesley Clark. “Every time Hillary Clinton has been on the edge of complete defeat he has failed to close the deal. Since it’s happened now in New Hampshire, Ohio, Texas, and Pennsylvania, it’s fair to ask why.” Obama is not the first nominee to come to Indiana dogged by questions over whether he can overcome challenges to his coalition. Today many of Obama’s supporters see him as a new Robert Kennedy—with a kind of electric charisma that can win an election but also lead a movement. Kennedy’s promise, dashed by his assassination in 1968, was that he could rally an old and increasingly fragile New Deal coalition. As it happened, the place where RFK showed his ability to unite was in Indiana. In May 1968 he entered the state urgently in need of help from moderate white voters, whom he enlisted by emphasizing the importance of law enforcement and public safety at the same time he talked about equal justice for inner-city blacks. On the strength of this coalition, he won a critical primary. If Obama really is a new RFK, Indiana would be a fitting place to prove it.
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#1. To: nolu_chan (#0)
#2. To: ghostdogtxn (#1)
The polls show one or the other ahead, generally favoring Obama by a narrow margin. But why all the focus on Indiana? The big state of that day is NC. Indiana has 84 delegates. (72+12) (open primary) North Carolina has 134 delegates. (115+19) (closed primary)
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