Friday, March 21, 2008: It had been a tough two weeks for Senator Barack Obama. His campaign was poised to pull off some surprises going into Mini-Super Tuesday, and there was more than a moderate chance he would win in Texas, plunging-perhaps-a potentially fatal dagger into the Hillary Clinton candidacy and possibly assuring himself of the nomination.

But that had all gone sour. First, there was his one time friend and business associate Tony Rezko being dragged past the TV cameras into the first days of his trial for fraud. Then there was a significant loss of ground when Senator Clinton hit him hard with what is arguably the best political TV ad so far this year (certainly the most replayed and discussed), an ad suggesting boldly that she is the person to answer that red telephone at 3:00 a.m. There was more erosion among the Latino vote, now being touted as the all-important swing vote of this election cycle. Then, after getting clobbered in Ohio and enduring a painfully narrow loss in Texas, there were the viral and brutal facts of his close friendship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., the pastor caught on video engaging in openly racist and inflammatory preaching in front of Obama's home congregation at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

About the only good news for Obama was his continued lead in the rank-and-file delegate count, which allowed him to keep some high ground under his feet. But though he was not losing ground per se, there was a growing sense that this long, exhaustive battle with Clinton may just be starting, and that the fight will almost surely go into the convention unresolved.

Then, at 10 a.m. on the west coast, something good happened to change the pace and mood of things in Camp Obama: New Mexico governor Bill Richardson stepped up to a microphone in front of thousands in Portland, Oregon to say that he was endorsing Barack Obama for President. With Obama standing gracefully at his side, Richardson gave the enthusiastic crowd and the TV cameras the first full-fledged good news the Obama campaign has had in weeks. And in doing so, Richardson may have unraveled the knotted, high stakes problem facing many super delegates-namely, how to make peace with a decision in this emotionally charged contest for the nomination.

"You are a once-in-a-lifetime leader," Richardson told Obama and the audience, "and, above all, you will be a president who will bring this nation together." Richardson, offering graceful praise for Hillary Clinton's leadership and experience, nonetheless made it clear he was endorsing not just Obama the man but also the change that Obama represents. Richardson called an Obama presidency "historic," and said that Obama "can bring us the change we so desperately need by bringing us together as a nation here at home, and with our allies abroad."


For what it is worth, endorsements rarely equal shifting votes on the ground. Network TV commentators, cable news shows and the political talkers of the Internet were in nearly unanimous agreement on this point. And to be sure, though he is hugely popular and the nation's only Hispanic governor, Richardson's announcement can't possibly sway enough Latino votes to create a Big Shift in favor of Obama. Indeed, Democratic strategists estimate that some 90% of Latinos have already voted in the primaries and caucuses up to this point.

But the Bill Richardson endorse-ment is certainly greater than the sum of its symbolic parts. And it may turn out to be the first open step among Democrats in creating unity out of discord, and consensus out of division.


Much has been written of late about the deepening divide within the Democratic Party. Some analysts-and more than a handful of Democratic strategists-have suggested that the current Democratic Party is, in fact, two parties sharing the same big tent. Dating this divide back into the 1960s, these historians have suggested that loosely termed New Democrats and Old Democrats have been in a continuous state of struggle for control of the party since the days of Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern: the Humphrey wing of the party representing traditional sectarian politics, a focus on populist economics and a liberal social service architecture; the McGovern segment representing "change" in its ever-shifting forms and specters, progressive and sometimes erudite social visions, and a thoughtful, often intellectual approach to politics. In short, the Humphrey wing thinks Washington works but requires great skill and a solid governmental resume, while the McGovern wing feels Washington is broken, or worse, corrupted beyond traditional fixes.

The roots of the split can be found in the emotional divide that confronted the Democrats during the Lyndon Johnson years of 1965-1968, a time when-perhaps not coincidentally-New Politics arrived amid much fanfare, discussion and analysis by those who watch and talk politics. By the end of 1967, Johnson's presidency was-by all accounts-shattered, along with any semblance of cohesion or unity among Democrats. The Party split deeply, with Eugene McCarthy at first, and shortly afterwards Robert Kennedy mounting challenges so costly to the incumbent Lyndon Johnson that he conceded-decling to seek a second term-rather than face the inevitable destructive fight that lay ahead. The grassroots appeals of McCarthy and Kennedy had a visceral impact on many voters, especially younger voters. At that moment in time, the great divide among Democrats became tangible and easy to trace, and so began a feud which has struggled onward more-or-less continuously to this day, sometimes feverishly, and sometimes quietly.

The Hubert Humphrey side of the family tree counts among its membership Walter Mondale, Geraldine Ferraro, Richard Gephardt, John Glenn, Tom Harkin, Joe Biden, John Edwards and (to a degree) Al Gore. The McGovern branch of the family includes Robert Kennedy, John V. Lindsey, Edmund "Jerry" Brown, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, John Kerry and now Barack Obama. A few notable Democrats have switched sides gradually or stealthily. Though during his presidency he leaned solidly into the Humphrey track, the post-presidential years of Jimmy Carter have given him the freedom to shift his allegiance more toward the McGovern lineage. And though Ted Kennedy probably still thinks of himself as carrying an uncanny familial echo of his brother Robert, he is by almost any measure or historical criteria a Humphrey-style Democrat.

And yes, although Hillary Clinton clearly started her career as a card-carrying member of the McGovern track (even before that she was a Goldwater Girl), she is now the most prominent member of the Old School, Humphrey side of the family, as well as its de facto leader. After John Edwards' withdrawal from this race, the populist economic concerns and red meat working class issues shifted decidedly into her column.

Some have dubbed the two factions the Dunkin Donuts Democrats versus the Starbucks Democrats. Others have used the terms Beer Track versus Wine Track Democrats. The generational differences between the two sides of the family are obvious, and the educational differences have been widely discussed: Obama attracts the college educated; Clinton attracts those without a college degree. Obama gets the votes of the young (all races and genders), where Clinton's most reliable base is found among women over the age of 55 and those voters struggling financially. Obama attracts the upscale liberals; Clinton attracts the union members. Obama attracts the arugula and Belgian endive crowd; Clinton gets the loyalties of those who can keep track of a bowling score.

There has been much written over the decades about these two groups, but the media attention lately-especially in the last few months-has been powerful if not a tad overpowering. Never before have the Democrats witnessed these two major subsets struggling with such ferocity over control of the party apparatus, especially in such a public way. And never have the two sides been matched so closely in strength and votes.

Some regard this relative parity as an indication of generational shift: clearly a pendulum is swinging within the party, and a legion of new voters is arriving in large enough numbers to change the landscape. These younger, educated, web-savvy, highly mobile voters are willing to disregard or ignore old party structure and scripture in favor of Obama's appeal-direct and unfiltered-for a different kind of politics, one that largely leaves party affiliation and brand loyalty behind in favor of multilateral community action and reconciliation. Clinton appeals to traditional party loyalists and older voters-those more steeped in the processes and machinations of conventional textbook diagrams of government. These voters have a higher tolerance for partisanship, and they seek (and indeed expect) something in return for their vote, namely the delivery of social and governmental services coupled with assurances of competence when it comes to the economy and their jobs.


Others see the African-American voter as helping to turn the tide for the New School. Blacks this year are voting for the McGovern side of the family tree by voting for Obama. Historically the black vote flows largely toward the traditional liberal or the old school Democrat during primaries and caucuses, but Obama's early surge starting in Iowa gave black voters a belief that finally a candidate of color was being taken seriously enough by the press and by white voters that there was the real possibility of electoral success.

Prior to this year, no clearer example of the family feud could be found than in the mid-point of the Reagan years. Democratic voters in 1984 understood the differences between the Beer Track and the Wine Track, and they chose accordingly: the Humphrey branch of the family siding predictably with Walter Mondale for his promises of various social services and government expansions; the McGovern side of the party swooning toward Gary Hart for his noble, somewhat bipartisan goal of asking government to move beyond the confines of the old LBJ-style politics.

Looking back at some of Hart's speeches and position papers, one can see very clearly the political lineage that leads to the doorstep of Barack Obama. Like Obama, Hart was a potent orator, effective on TV, and often compared to JFK in his style and demeanor. And he was filled with the sort of idealism that sometimes asks the audience to look beyond party lines and the traditional confines of establishment politics and its partisan bickering. Hart did not see the nation's capital as a giant mechanism for change requiring merely the right driver or operator/manager; Hart saw Washington as a place that would require a radical make-over, and he asked voters to consider that the machine itself might have to be disassembled or even scrapped in favor of a new template and a new way of thinking. His mercurial slogan became simply New Ideas.

And, like Obama, Hart had the audacity (some would say the temerity) to largely ignore the party's internal machinations and mount a direct challenge to the party's most senior icon.

Likewise, comparisons between the Hillary Clinton of 2008 and the Walter Mondale of 1984 are striking. Like Clinton, Mondale ran primarily on the weight of a substantial resume and a long career in Washington as a tenacious fighter for old school liberal causes. Like Clinton's use of her First Lady experience, Mondale used his White House years as vice-president as evidentia demonstrata of his credentials and on-the-job training. Like Clinton, Mondale was pre-tested and pre-shrunk, someone resilient in the highly partisan arena of traditional Washington. Like Clinton, Mondale began running for president early, consolidating trade union and labor endorsements and a wide variety of traditional Democratic special interests as soon as possible, in the process securing the role of presumptive front-runner even before the first contests were fought. And like Clinton, Mondale built (well in advance) an impressive war chest of money, resources and volunteers in a clear effort to scare off pretenders to the throne.

Mondale's speeches were less about actual change and more about making Washington work using traditional liberal leverages and enhancements. In debates Mondale was unapologetic: yes, taxes would need to be raised in order to 1) pay for badly needed federal social services, and 2) to offset the resulting sea of red ink.

Walter Mondale prevailed in large part because the Democratic Party was still largely a mechanism of the old Humphrey side of the clan. Hart's time had not arrived, though it was widely believed-after Mondale's defeat in the November 1984 elections-that Hart was due his rightful success in 1988. Unfortunately for Hart, his infamous self-destruction in 1987 would permanently sideline his presidential ambitions. Later, Michael Dukakis would rise to fill this void. Dukakis, the multi-lingual policy wonk and technocrat, was a rising member of the New School. But when the Democratic Party got burned by his devastating loss in 1988, it returned to the more traditional framework with Bill Clinton, himself a migratory politician who moved from the "new" party to the "old" party by the time he entered onto the presidential radar screens.

Bill Clinton-like Jimmy Carter before him-attempted to stay unaligned within this divide, but ultimately found it more practical to side with the Humphrey/Mondale wing of the family. Indeed, some historians can fairly argue that Bill Clinton was at times a member of both subsets of the Democratic Party. Perhaps this was political expediency on his part, or perhaps it was a result of the evolving nature of his presidency, especially after the mid term elections of 1994 cost him a working coalition and gave the GOP such a dominant role in Washington. Either way, it is interesting to note that after LBJ the only two Democrats successful in a general election were Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both southerners and both of whom had attempted self-consciously to dodge allegiance to one side or the other in the family struggle.


Barack Obama has dramatically recalibrated this traditional math. The adherents of the New Politics have always attracted the young, so Obama's achievement there is no great marvel. Still Obama's timing has been masterful: he could have waited a few years, but clearly the massive generational change has crested to his maximum advantage. Because Obama is also drawing in large numbers of white votes, most impressively in some nearly all-white states like Iowa and New Hampshire, he breaks free of the mold of the traditional novelty candidates of color like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Most potently of all, Obama's rhetoric asks voters to reconsider the frayed framework of the past decades and consider that politics can mean something more than just nasty partisan bickering. Was Obama a madman or a genius by choosing to challenge Hillary Clinton? Consider this: people born in this country after the beginning of 1970-which means they would have arrived at voting age in time to vote in their first general election in 1988-have had only a handful of options at the polls every four years, and most of those options have been Bushes or Clintons. Further, an entire generation has no memories of anyone in the White House whose name was not Bush or Clinton.

Clearly Obama seeks to break this dynastic pattern. His timing is not so much an act of madness as it is a deliberate attempt to offer his candidacy as the antidote to a 20-year cycle of partisanship and divisiveness. Four years ago-or four years from now-his timing may prove to have been wrong.


And this takes us back to Bill Richardson and his well-publicized endorsement. No ethnic group in the U.S. has had as much political press in the last few years as Hispanics. Once a staple of the Republican Party base, Latinos have begun a slow but steady migration away from the GOP, across the independent lines and into the Democratic column. These changes are evident in a wide range of regions and states, from Texas to New York, from California to Illinois. Once upon a time in Florida, some 75% of Spanish speaking voters identified themselves as "strongly" Republican. Now those numbers have nearly reversed themselves. The Republicans have won few friends among the Latino community during the last few years of the ever-more-shrill immigration and border security debate. Even with John McCain's relatively centrist position on immigration-one of his core issues that still rankles some on the Right-the Arizona Senator's bridgehead back to Latinos is not enough to secure Republicans the right to call the Hispanic vote their own.

Obama himself has struggled with the Latino vote since the very start of his campaign. Part of this is mainstream antagonism between blacks and Hispanics. And surely still another part of the equation is Clinton's more direct and traditional appeal. Writing in National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru said "it may also be that Hispanics vote on bread-and-butter concerns...Hillary Clinton presents her campaign as a fairly straightforward exchange: your vote for her delivery of social services. What Obama is selling is less tangible."

Bill Richardson is as bread-and-butter as they come: a popular governor of a high growth, mid-sized sunbelt state next door to McCain's home turf. If ever there has been a decisive example of a segment of the voting population that could tip the demographic scales, turning marginally Red States into solidly Blue States, it is Latinos. Even if Latinos make a substantial migration from the GOP in only three states-New Mexico, California and Florida-the electoral math could suddenly favor the Democrats. Remember how close the Florida and New Mexico results were in 2000? Though Richardson's endorsement comes too late in the primary and caucus season to generate a Latino stampede toward Obama, his embrace of the Illinois Senator nevertheless may have powerful sway at the convention. If Obama prevails over Clinton, Richardson's voice will be important to begin the immediate task of creating party unity and cohesion. And in the weeks between the convention and November, Richardson's impact will be mighty when Hispanics go to the polls to choose between John McCain and Barack Obama.


Wednesday, March 25, 2008:

Just when Senator Barack Obama thought the issue of his controversial pastor has been put to rest, Senator Clinton has made an effort today to kick up more dust over the words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago's south side.

Obama had hoped his eloquent and potent speech from March 18 had been the leveling force, setting the record straight while also helping the nation to advance a few more steps in the "post-racial" direction so often linked to the Illinois Senator's candidacy. The speech had met with generally rave reviews, and had also been widely characterized in the mainstream press as the most important speech of his career. But the Clinton campaign was having none of it. With the polls now growing tighter in Pennsylvania, another mega state where voters will be given a chance to choose between the titans, Clinton can ill afford to waste an opportunity-any opportunity-to ask the press for further vetting of her opponent. Clinton, referring to Obama's remarks that he cannot turn his back on Rev. Wright than any other member of his family, fired back that in fact Wright is not family, and that Obama is being disingenuous on the issue of Wright's highly controversial statements. Clinton made it clear that as long as Obama keeps that bridgehead open to his spiritual mentor, Obama is avoiding making the sort of tough adult choices that major league politics requires. Obama should walk away from his relationship with Wright, not merely denounce a few offending statements.

The Obama camp fired back, suggesting that Clinton is rehashing this issue for one obvious reason: to distract media attention from her overstatements regarding a trip to Bosnia in 1996. It seems that last week, while delivering a speech a George Washington University, Clinton repeated an anecdote she has used before when talking about her foreign policy experience, recalling the time when she arrived at an airfield in war torn Bosnia expecting a small, formal ceremony, but instead having to run from the plane-Chelsea at her side-crouched with heads down to avoid sniper fire. It's a colorful and harrowing image, and one that surely demonstrates her gutsy willingness to get involved in the real world of foreign policy and international dangers. There's only one problem: file news footage from that visit to Bosnia shows no crouching, no running, no ducking to avoid bullets, no danger at all-only a calm entourage (including Chelsea) strolling casually along the tarmac with reporters, cameras, and even local children in tow.

When Clinton was confronted with the apparent inconsistency in her story, she said she "misspoke." During a question and answer forum for the editorial board of the Philadelphia Daily News, a newspaper whose endorsement she hopes to receive, Clinton called the issue a "minor blip." "I say a lot of things-millions of words a day-so if I misspoke, it was just that-a misstatement." Later in the day on radio interview shows she expanded her revision, saying that public figures have to deal with this sort of thing as a matter of routine. "I have been in the public eye for many, many years, and this is something that [can] happen to anybody."

But the Obama campaign wasted no time hitting back hard, saying that Clinton's exaggeration is part of a larger attempt to spin for herself a more important foreign policy role than was the reality during her years as First Lady. Obama, still stinging from the effects of the "3:00 a.m. telephone call" ads, has sought to throw more light and scrutiny onto the truth of Hillary Clinton's foreign policy "experience," which the Obama campaign maintains is equal to that of their candidate visa vie their roles as members of the U.S. Senate.

In response, the Clinton bloggers and spin masters quickly seized on his Senate comparison as an example of Obama's naivety and presumptuousness: Hillary Clinton was been a United States Senator while Obama was just wading into local Chicago politics as a community organizer.

With a surplus of time between now and the next crucial primary tests, there is also plenty of space on the calendar for more public knife fighting. February's happy talk of a Dream Ticket has been replaced with a general sense that this muddy contest could go on through at least late April-if not until June-an antiquated state of affairs for a major political party not seen since the mid 1970's.

If the fight goes to the door of the convention (Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford battled for every delegate nearly to the first gavel) Democratic unity in the fall might prove to be difficult. This could be the ideal environment for John McCain as he seeks to regroup the GOP and it's onetime coalition of red and blue voters.

 

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

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