Pop Quiz: What Clintonian tactic most exactly resembles an infamous Nixonian tactic?  Answer: When the going gets tough—really tough—and everything is at stake, publicly blame your problems on an unfair media.

Richard Nixon made it one of his lifetime achievements to grouse bitterly about the way he had been treated by the press.  He did this in public, and he did this in private.  And in truth, his war with the media elite was a two-way street—in large part certainly his fault, and in some tangible part the result of a mainstream press predisposed to mock, ridicule—and find fault with—practically everything Nixon represented.  Nixon’s paranoia fueled his hatred of the press, and the elitist mindset of the reporting caste fed their 40-year festival of loathing of the man from Whittier, California.

There are plenty of reporters of that generation who would disagree with that statement, but there are plenty more who agree.

Here is something, however, that many reporters of this generation agree upon: Senator Hillary Clinton—facing a much more formidable challenger in Senator Barack Obama than any of her strategists could have imagined—now retreats into her familiar circle of wagons in reliable, Clintonian fashion.  We have seen this process many times before.  During the toughest challenges of the Bill Clinton years, Bill and Hillary often fell into short spirals of public self-pity, lashing out and paranoia—almost always accompanied by a predictable official complaint that they were not getting fair treatment in the media.  In short: reporters are a bunch of soft, swooning groupies when it comes to Obama; but they’re a school of hungry, cynical sharks when it comes to Clinton.

Example: Despite a total of 20 debates in less than 14 months, Hillary Clinton’s campaign juggernaut—once the most well-funded and well-run in U.S. presidential campaign history—has in recent weeks been reduced to simply grousing that Obama won’t debate the issues. 

Now, after two very recent debates—one on CNN on February 21 and another on MSNBC of February 26—Hillary Clinton complains in public and in private that she has not been given a fair shake: panelists always ask her the tough questions first, then throw slow pitches at Obama; reporters deliberately spin their questions for maximum hostility toward her, while failing to do any of the hard homework on her opponent.  Because she is a woman running for president, she is held to a completely different standard than male candidates.  On ABC’s Nightline a few days ago she complained that the playing field is not level for women, and that Obama—despite his own minority status—has been given a pass by the mainstream press because of his gender.  She and her campaign operatives also say that the press largely ignores opportunities to look at Obama’s paper trail and voting record, but when the Clinton team does their own negative research on Obama, they’re vilified for grubby mean-spiritedness.

And one of her recent advertise-ments—a 30 second spot in the same vein as the infamous “Daisy” spot developed for Lyndon Johnson in his 1964 race against Barry Goldwater—depicts children asleep in their room while the voiceover intones darkly about the kind of person you would want answering the Oval Office phone in a crisis.  The obvious implication is that Hillary Clinton has the experience and presence of mind to contend with such a high stakes moment, and that Barack Obama the lightweight might make an inopportune decision that could get children killed by terrorists or a hostile adversary.  The ad drew an almost immediate response from the Obama team, and a sharply produced ad of their own to counterattack.  But the deeper issue was this: Clinton’s ad drew a chorus of negative reviews in the media for its unvarnished appeal to voter fear and emotion.  The result: more Clinton campaign complaints of press unfairness.


Another telling example: during last Tuesday’s debate on MSNBC, Clinton became visibly annoyed at what she implied was a heavy-handedness on the part of NBC’s Bryan Williams and Tim Russert.  In contrast to the debate on CNN just the week before, which featured softer, friendlier questions, some of them bordering on softball, the debate on Tuesday was much tougher on both candidates, with Russert in particular asking clearly unsympathetic questions of each candidate.  Though Obama rolled with the punches in the style he has grown accustomed to in his recent debate performances, Clinton was openly peeved at times, and her raw nerve endings showed in her face and body language.

At one point she made the fair observation that not only was Russert asking her the hardest, most wrenching questions first—he was also piling on hypothetical upon hypothetical in an obvious attempt to snare the candidates in a bear trap.  He succeeded with Obama, who reacted to the “…if, after we withdraw from Iraq…” question with his now famous “no al Queda in Iraq” response, a clear misstep, though John McCain seemed to get more mileage from this small blunder than did Clinton.

Even Saturday Night Live entered into the fray in their usual irreverent style.  With a set designed to look precisely like the flashy CNN debate stage of a few days earlier, faux candidates Obama and Clinton sat at their table being “questioned” by comedians posing as reporters John King and Campbell Brown, who fawned opened over Obama—asking him if he was comfortable and offering him a pillow—then savaging Clinton, cutting her off, and generally heaping the abusive splatter waist high on her natty wool suit.  But even on SNL there was a stab at balance: when “Hillary” was asked about her eleven straight losses to Obama and her shrinking demographic base, she fired back with a comic shrill cackle, saying “I think you are overlooking the impact of women over 80.”           


With the issues of “fairness” and “even treatment” of the Clintons by the press resurfacing with its usual shrill tones, the long unanswered question remains: does the media treat Bill and Hillary unfairly?  Or does the Clintons’ deliberately chosen roles as lightning rods and historical players of Shakespearean complexity make the abuse reasonable and even a bit healthy?

Once again, this has given Obama exactly what he reluctantly needs in his arsenal: another public example of the bitter, divisive politics of the past—the Clintons up to their old tactical tricks, throwing everything including the kitchen sink into the public conversation, then recoiling when members of the press call them down on the bad behavior.

And once again the thorny questions for Democrats remain largely unanswered:  Do the Dems really want the Clintons back in the White House for another four to eight years of contentious, partisan shenanigans, all in the name of experience and public policy aptitude?  Or do Democrats want to break with that divisive past and instead support a more visceral symbol of change, hope and unity, but in the process run the clear risk of—if not loss in November—disappointment later if this eloquent dream fails to produce results in Washington or the sought after change.                  

Monday, March 03, 2008:

With the start of the mega primaries just ten to twelve hours away in Ohio and Texas, the spin teams are working overtime to get the story arranged their way and adjust the expectations to maximum advantage.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign says bluntly that Barack Obama must win in both Ohio and Texas (emphasis: theirs) in order to prove he can be a meaningful, across the board winner in November, and not a novelty candidate skilled at channeling emotion, like, say, George McGovern (emphasis: theirs).  In other words: If Obama can’t win both Texas and Ohio, but he still manages to capture the nomination, Democrats can expect a trouncing in the fall when reality settles in and the GOP war machine turns Obama and his pretty speech-making into so much hammered veal.

The Obama camp, on the other hand, says that for Hillary Clinton to have any standing at all after tomorrow she must win both Texas and Ohio by large, sweeping margins, otherwise she must step aside to avoid further divisiveness and long-term damage to the party.  Obama’s spokespersons remind us that this is, after all, her absolute last firewall.  Even Bill Clinton has said as much.  Enough of the lame excuses: Hillary must win.  And besides, if she loses either state (emphasis: theirs), the delegate math no longer favors her staying in the fight.  Even a narrow win in all four states on Tuesday could leave her coming up short numerically.  By fighting on, Clinton will set the stage for disaster for the Democrats in November.

Both camps are working feverishly to lower expectations of their own performance, and both camps ominously predict catastrophe of the other fights on past this Tuesday.

Meanwhile, to boost their numbers, both camps are engaged in the biggest primary get-out-the-vote campaign in history.  Obama boasts thousands of volunteers doing nothing but making calls from cell phones.  The Clinton campaign has concentrated more advertising dollar firepower in Ohio and Texas than has ever been spent there.  Voter turnout is expected to break every record for the two states.  For both of these candidates, the may be the last battle to win the math.   

Indeed, the gamesmanship over the arithmetic reached fevered levels today, with even Florida Governor Charlie Crist weighing in on the still unsettled matter of the Florida delegation to the Democratic National Convention.  Crist has said that he would gladly discuss options for allowing Democrats in Florida to find a solution to their dilemma of no delegate seating in Denver.  Crist says he is open to whatever seems to work and serves the interest of everyone involved—up to and including holding another primary.  Despite the fact that over the past month Clinton has simply said things like “let’s wait and see” and “it’s too early to say,” top campaign officials and lawyers are already quietly working out their arguments in the eventuality they choose to go nuclear and challenge the legality of the party’s decision.  After all, if Clinton and Obama each show up in Denver with what amounts to a draw in total delegate strength, Clinton can make a justifiable claim to having won in Florida’s January 29 primary fairly and squarely—therefore she deserves her share of the Sunshine State delegate count.

If, on the other hand, Crist is able to work out a scenario in which Floridians get to go to their polls again—an unlikely scenario simply because of the high cost of holding a second primary—would Hillary Clinton still win such a sizable majority of Democratic voters in Florida?  Or would a “revote” simply give Obama another opportunity to swing Floridians into his column.

Charlie Crist has two reasons to want to work this out—or at least to make the public effort to try.  As a Republican himself, he would like to be able to seat the entire GOP delegation—not just half—at  the Republican convention in Minneapolis, so his interest in the disposition of the Democratic delegates plays a role in making this possible.  Secondly, Crist is a popular governor with lots of friends on the Democratic side of the aisles.  His efforts at bipartisanship were instrumental in his election victory.  It serves him well to be seen lobbying on national TV for what is good for Florida Democrats.

But the arguments about Florida’s delegation (and Michigan’s as well) cut to the heart of the matter for the Democrats: If after the dust settles on the Texas and Ohio primaries tomorrow the net result is a big numerical draw—similar to the virtual 50/50 split on Super Tuesday—then the chances of a brokered Democratic convention will approach 90%.  Even the Pennsylvania primary (April 22) will not be enough to tip the scales one way or the other.  Obama will almost surely win in Mississippi (March 11), North Carolina (May 6), and Kentucky (May 20), states will large African-American populations.  Obama will also likely win in Wyoming, which votes on Saturday, March 8.  This puts another 100 to 120 delegates into his column, assuming Clinton wins big in Pennsylvania.

So if March 4 is an even split—as it is looking now—where does Hillary Clinton go after Texas, Ohio, Vermont and Rhode Island?  Where does she set up her next firewall?  Is Pennsylvania her last chance?  How about Indiana?

But there was bad news for Senator Obama today.  Whether through poetic coincidence or malicious timing, former campaign fundraiser and early Obama supporter Tony Rezko began his trial in federal court in Illinois.

Although the full details of the case are somewhat complex, the crux of how this affects Obama is this: Rezko and Obama entered into a real estate transaction that some investigators and critics have indicated may have involved Obama paying less for his Chicago home than the fair market price, thanks in part—or so it is alleged—by Rezko’s heavy-handed influence.  Obama has always maintained that there were no improprieties in his dealings with Rezko, and Obama’s transactions with Rezko are not related to the matters currently being examined in the trial.  Also, as Obama’s team has repeatedly pointed out, the Obama-Rezko connection has been thoroughly investigated by many journalists on prior fishing expeditions, and the Senator has nothing to hide in this relationship. 

Still, the timing of the start of the trial could not be worse for Obama as he stands poised to attract undecided voters in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.  With polls showing such a close race, especially in the mega states, any sudden movement among those eight to nine percent of undecided voters could be pivotal.

And there was more bad news for Obama: some polling research was showing that the nearly infamous “White House telephone” ad—now being run heavily in both Ohio and Texas—might be gaining traction among voters, especially among two key groups: those who are still undecided, and women.  The 30-second commercial, which has probably received nearly as much free exposure on the TV political talk shows as it has received actual paid airtime, is viewed by some analysts as nothing more than a crass appeal to fear.  Still others say that the ad falls comfortably into the mainstream of hard-hitting political advertising, especially since it never mentions Barack Obama by name nor shows his face, but merely shows a seasoned and levelheaded Hillary Clinton answering the phone while most of us are asleep.

Like other famous political spots of the modern age of presidential politics—LBJ’s “Daisy” spot, Reagan’s “Bear in the Woods”—the ad relies more on implication and viewer projection than anything else: a vote for Obama is a vote for something uncertain and untested, a vote for Hillary Clinton means you can sleep soundly knowing your children will be safe from terrorists or a dangerous international crisis.  The current jury remains out on whether the ad is a fair and effective way to contrast political differences, or if it is just another component of the time tested Clinton program of nasty unscrupulousness.

Unfortunately for Obama, the recent injection of cash into the Clinton campaign has meant the advertisement has had plenty of paid exposure.  Like the start of the Rezko trial, the ad could result in a significant shift among the undecided voters.

Then there was the odor of the NAFTA affair, a reaction to comments discovered by an aide to Senator Obama to Canadian officials to ignore his public trash talk about open trade with Canada.  After so much rhetoric about the negative effects of NAFTA, Obama found himself trapped momentarily, and the situation grew worse when his own campaign officials denied any such back channel communications to Canadian officials…until, the Canadians produced emails and other correspondence that turned the campaign’s clumsy attempt at spin into an outright lie.

The Clinton campaign made much of this moral contradiction.  The timing could not have been worse during a high stakes battle in Ohio, where so many jobs had been lost to overseas manufacturers.  It created the impression in the minds of many Ohio voters that Obama was all talk and no action, or worse, simply another example of the politics of the past.  And the fracas played into Clinton’s hands at the very moment when she was beginning to gain her best traction among blue collar and lunch bucket Democrats, giving them a reason to coalesce behind her candidacy, and giving her possibly another shining example of her ability to pull the Reagan Democrats back into the Blue column.                 

Can Clinton bring Democrats to the polls in larger numbers than Obama?  Though polls show Hillary Clinton with a still narrow lead over Obama in Ohio, Texas appears to be too close to call.  But in a few hours the voters of Ohio and Texas will begin their visits to polling places, and another chapter in this long epic will unfold.


Wednesday, March 5, 2008:

In a remarkable year of shattered precedents and broken records, the long-awaited and much-analyzed mega states of Ohio and Texas finally had their say, along with the smaller states of Rhode Island and Vermont.

The result?  Something akin to the groundhog’s reaction back in February: we have least six more weeks of campaigning to face.  Maybe more.

Hillary Clinton was finally able to settle some scores and claim success at her firewall strategy, for after losing 11 straight to Obama, Clinton walked away with big wins in three out of four “Second Super Tuesday” states.  Obama took Vermont easily and without fanfare, as expected.  Clinton took Rhode Island—also no surprise.  And though the polls had tightened in Ohio, Clinton was still able to pull off an impressive victory that penetrated deeply across the Buckeye State and helped reconstitute her disintegrating demographic base.

Only in Texas was the verdict still out as both the Obama and the Clinton camps sought to spin the result—a narrow win for Clinton—in their favor.  By the wee hours of the morning of Wednesday, most of the news agencies finally felt safe enough to declare Clinton the winner—so close were the numbers that rolled in all night.  CNN held back making the call until well past midnight to watch the results slowly trickle in from the urban areas of Houston and Dallas, which some felt still had the numerical power to tip the result into Obama’s column.  But it was not to be.  Like the morning after the New Hampshire results, the old realities were back in play and Hillary Clinton survives to fight another day on another battlefield.

Obama had started the night out remarkably well, especially in the Lone Star State, where he had hoped to pull off another coup.  The TV networks following most closely—Fox News, CNN and MSNBC—waited until the instant the polls closed in Texas to begin showing the slow-moving results as the tallies rolled in.  The earliest precincts to report gave Obama a big lead, the sort of lead that closely resembled all those polls that had shown him edging Clinton out.  These early numbers were mind-numbingly tiny…for over an hour CNN’s tallies showed less than one percent of the vote reported.  Alongside these meager numbers came the live video coverage of lines of people trying to get into the Texas caucuses, and the informal math and formal polling there showed a big win gathering for Obama.

But as the rural Texas counties started to report, the gap in the primary vote began to close.  By 10 p.m. Central Time, Clinton has opened up her own a modest lead.  Still, the most densely populated counties were slow to report—typical in Texas—and it was these counties where Obama was expected to pull the largest numbers: Dallas County and the neighboring Dallas suburban counties (Tarrant, Collin, Denton), Houston and its sprawl (Harris, Fort Bend, Washington and Waller counties), and the counties in and around Austin (Travis, Williamson, Hays and Bell counties), a densely Democratic area and one of the fewer truly liberal areas of Texas.

But in the end these population strongholds were not enough to carry the day for Obama’s insurrection, even as more live video showed huge turnouts at the many caucus locations.  Hillary Clinton won in vast tracts of the state.  From Dallam County and Lipscomb County along the border with Oklahoma in the north, to Zapata County and Hidalgo County along the Rio Grande in the South, Hillary mopped up the huge map of Texas.  And she won big enough and decisively enough in San Antonio and Bexar County to tip the scales numerically in her favor, offsetting Obama’s solid wins in the other urban areas.

By the next day the Texas totals—still incomplete—looked something like this: Hillary Clinton, 1,459,000 to Barack Obama’s 1,358,000, giving the Senator from New York about a 100,000 vote lead out of nearly 3 million total votes cast.            

In Ohio, by contrast, the results flowed fast enough and with sufficient decisiveness to make it clear that the big rewards would go Hillary Clinton.  Though Obama would still win a few chunks of urban Ohio, Clinton carried the rest of the state, leaving Obama only five counties in his column: Montgomery County (Dayton), Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Franklin and Delaware Counties (Columbus), and finally Hamilton County (Cincinnati) where he won by an impressive margin of 61% to Clinton’s 38%.

The rest of rural and blue collar Ohio—where lost jobs, factory closings, and home mortgage pain has made the economy the central issue—was swept comfortably by Clinton.  She also won in Toledo and Lucas County, and in the cities of Akron and Youngstown.

Some Ohio counties were blowouts for Clinton.  In the northeast part of the state she won Ashtabula 66% to Obama’s 32%; Trumbull County, Clinton, 67% to Obama’s 31%; and Columbiana County, Clinton, 71% to Obama’s 26%.  In some parts of southern Ohio, Clinton’s edge was even wider.  She won working class Scioto County—home to the river towns of Wheelersburg and Portsmouth—by 81%.  Clinton won Jackson County 80% to Obama’s 18%.  And she won Ross County (Chillicothe) by 70% to Obama’s 28%.  And she won in the smaller cities of Toledo and Sandusky where it was believed Obama has the capacity to pull off an upset.

Again, there were those who watched closely the slow-moving results from the big cities of Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati.  There was still a chance that evening that huge urban numbers for Obama might blunt Clinton’s gathering victory.  Because of severe weather issues (snow and ice) and extremely long lines at many precinct polling places, a judge in Cleveland had ordered polling places to stay open an additional 90 minutes.  Even Clinton’s people were concerned that Obama might close the gap as a result of these factors, but in the end the numbers did not help Obama.     

Ohio’s final vote: Clinton: 1,207,806; Obama: 979,025.  (These figures were derived from CNN’s website, which keeps an updated county-by-county map of the states which have voted).

Like in Texas, Obama’s deep penetration into Ohio’s cities, middle class suburban sprawls, and college towns did not have enough impact to mitigate Hillary Clinton’s powerful appeal to the working class and rural Democrat, a demographic group she seemed only weeks ago in danger of losing completely.  Obama’s campaign strategists had known for a week or more that he would not win in Ohio, but the closing gaps in the polls, plus Obama’s surging momentum, seemed to indicate a potentially close race—thus denying Clinton of bragging rights and rolling over yet another of her firewalls.  Instead, Ohio to a large extent—and to a lesser degree Texas—have put her back in play and will almost surely now mean a brokered convention in Denver.

And her win in Texas came as a surprise to most of the pundits and journalists (myself included) who figured Obama would steal the show Tuesday night, and possibly deliver a knockout blow to the Clinton juggernaut.  Opinion polls in Texas—where Clinton had once led by huge margins—had narrowed after the February 9-10 primaries, when Obama’s latest surge began to crest.  And one week ago Obama had tipped the scales in the Lone Star state, edging past Clinton by a few points in the composite polls.  But there had always been that edgy, fluid undecided voter.  Stubbornly making up anywhere from six to nine percent in Texas, it was enough to change the balance at any moment.  And indeed, it did.

The Clinton campaign’s multi-front assault had paid off: Obama, still the leader in total popular votes and still very much the front-runner in the delegate math, was at least for the night, halted in his tracks.   

When CNN declared Hillary Clinton the winner in Ohio at nearly 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, those crowded into a ballroom in Columbus went wild with excitement.  A little later, her face beaming with a genuine smile not seen in weeks, she had much reason to be pleased as she came out on stage to greet those supporters.

“People are watching this historic campaign,” Clinton said, “and they want their turn to make history!”  Clearly, she felt she was back on solid footing, and now she was telling her followers, the press corps, and Democrats in the rest of the country that she will carry the fight onward, all the way to the convention if necessary.  She offered direct words of contrast with Obama, the sort of language that had gained so much traction in the last few days.  “Americans don’t need more speeches, Americans need solutions and they need them now.”

Shortly before she came out, commentators on MSNBC had suggested that her speech that night would be sharper and contain new, hard-hitting language, rather than the traditional stump speech she often offers immediately after primary results have become clear.  Indeed, though she plowed through the usual litany of themes at the core of her message—health care, jobs, a shrinking economy, education, along with the stories of individuals she has met along her campaign trail—she had retooled the words and the rhythm to echo her renewed (and seemingly successful) message of the last days.  “I think we’re ready for health care…not just for some, not just for many, not just for most…but for every American, period.”  Wild applause.  “Protecting America is the first and most important responsibility of a president…and when that phone rings at three in the morning there’s no time for on-the-job training!”  There followed more enthusiastic applause as she drew noticeable energy from the crowd.

It was clear very quickly she did not intend to retreat from the formula that had brought her to this badly overdue victory.  Her message and her field tactics had stopped Obama, and she was not about to experiment with a new recipe. 

Clinton thanked those who had helped her in Ohio, including the Ohio governor who had been so instrumental in her victory, along with some congressional names and Senator John Glenn and Glenn’s wife Annie.  She thanked “the two most important people in my life…Bill and Chelsea…” whereupon she was interrupted by the wildest applause of the night.  Finally, she thanked Senator Obama for having fought such a good fight in the last couple of weeks.

But after the celebrating came the usual spin control, just as had been widely predicted the day before.

Obama’s camp said plainly that after all the hoopla it didn’t matter—the whole night had remained as a clear moral victory for Obama, a man who not long ago had trailed badly in the polls in all four of the March 4 states.  Besides that, they said, Obama has more delegates and has accumulated more votes in the total primary and caucus math.  Hillary Clinton had merely survived this battle in the trenches.  She had finally created a firewall that held intact, with math that still won’t help her in the end.  Senator Obama owns the high ground and the numbers, the Obama supporters say, despite Clinton’s strategy of stink bombs, hurled kitchen sinks and clever hardball advertising.

The Clinton team also claimed victory.  Not only had their candidate scored big victories in three out of four contests that night, and not only had she put a halt to Obama’s march through the last eleven states, she had won in two more of the mega states, which like New York, New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, will make a real difference in the general election.  And, the Clinton campaign was happy to point out, all that media talk about Hillary’s shrinking base is over: she had reclaimed her full penetration into Democrats at large, pulling back into the Blue column tens of thousands of working class and middle class voters that had—for perhaps the last 25 years—been inclined to vote for Republicans.  Furthermore, they had finally revealed Obama as a hollow man, an eloquent candidate whose sole issue seems to be a speech against the Iraq war delivered back in 2002.

Still, despite the Clinton team spin, Obama holds onto his modest lead in the delegate count, and when the dust settles the most chilling fact remains: almost surely now, these two candidates will each face entering the convention short of the number of delegates needed to secure the nomination on the first round of balloting.  Short of a major stampede of super delegates into one column or the other, a floor fight will unfold.

There are scant few remaining wild cards: Pennsylvania, which holds its primary on April 22; the mini-Super Tuesday of Indiana and North Carolina, when another 187 delegates will be at stake; and finally the disposition of the Florida and Michigan delegations.

In this protracted contest over delegate arithmetic, do not be surprised if the war of technicalities between the governors of Michigan and Florida and their nemesis Howard Dean in the DNC turns into a nasty court battle.  Several independent efforts are already under way to bring the outcome of Florida and Michigan into a federal court venue.  There are also other ideas floating around, including a proposal by a consortium of wealthy Democrats willing—perhaps—to pay for a re-vote in one or both states.  The most notable offer comes from media mogul Harvey Weinstein, a co-founder of Miramax Films and once head of HBO, who is rumored to be offering to raise the capital necessary for the Sunshine State to have another chance at participatory democracy.

So is it possible that yet another election may come down to a critical and controversial outcome in Florida?     

 

Road Show is published each week by Thursday Review publications, copyright 2008

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