Thusday Review 5-09-2008

That tiny starlight pinpoint in the distance may be the light at the end of the tunnel. Finally, after many months of struggle, the Democratic contest between the two titans may be coming to a definitive conclusion. Barack Obama's double-digit win in North Carolina, coupled with his better-than-expected showing in Indiana, now make the math virtually impossible for Hillary Clinton to overcome.

Not to put too sharp a point on it, but many political analysts, pundits and journalists have begun declaring the race over, despite the vocal objections coming from the Clinton campaign. The pressure for her to step aside may increase substantially over the next few days, and that pressure will surely come from some of the heavyweight voices within the Democratic Party.

The results from the May 6 primaries inch Obama still closer to his prize, for even his close second-place showing in Indiana was very much like a victory. Indiana was widely believed to be Hillary country, despite Obama's hometown footprint across the border in Illinois. Indiana's rich mix of traditional, old school Democratic constituencies--rural white, blue collar, labor aligned, older voters--were supposed break decidedly in favor of Clinton along the same lines we have seen for most of the year, leaving Obama to cull those voters that seem most at home with his image and message: the young, the economically upscale, the college educated, the African-Americans, and the vaguely defined progressives who know the difference between escarole and arugula.

Instead, in Indiana Obama fell short by a scant 14,000 votes statewide out of a million and quarter votes cast, tantalizingly close to a total upset. Clinton had started the evening out strongly, leading in the Hoosier State at times by margins as wide as ten percent. But in the slow hours after the polls had closed and the precinct reports flowed in, that gap began to shrink. By the time Obama walked out on stage in North Carolina to savor his big win in the south, the difference in Indiana had narrowed to within 2%, making the outcome too close to call for the cable networks and wire services. When the last results finally trickled in from Lake County--which includes the city of Gary, Indiana--Obama came within sight of his final prize.

Still, as both campaigns have said, a win is a win, and now the jury remains stubbornly out. Hillary Clinton is defiant and determined. Her campaign team has made it clear she intends to press on to the next contests in West Virginia and Kentucky, even as the math looks increasingly difficult...if not downright impossible.

The mood within the Obama team was one of guarded optimism at a triumph so close within their grasp. Obama's speech to his supporters in Raleigh was triumphant, but more importantly, it sounded conspicuously like a convention acceptance speech. Talking beyond the bruising primaries and caucuses, he made more direct comparisons between himself and Senator John McCain with hardly any references to Clinton or the internal Democratic struggle. This was the language of a politician now stepping into the larger arena of a general election, peppered with reminders to his audience that he intends to reach out to Republicans and independents in the fall in his ongoing (some say nearly successful) quest to change the rules of elective politics.

Obama's win in North Carolina--like his close call in Indiana--had taken him further than anyone had predicted, indicating a possible last minute shift in public opinion in the Tar Heel State. And his virtual draw in Indiana, according to many of the pundits and analysts late that evening, was a real-time snapshot of Democratic constituencies in flux: polling data only 24 hours earlier had indicated Clinton holding onto to her lead among seniors, blue collar voters, rural voters and women. But exit poll data demonstrated that many of these same voters changed their minds, and the conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton's negative attributes were beginning to outweigh her perceived strengths--even among those voters with a pattern of loyalty to her message this year.

Obama's own people were quick to point out that this was no total aberration--after all, Obama had won these same constituencies in other states as well, most notably Iowa and Wisconsin.

But after months of a quarrel that seemed destined to split the party into two more-or-less competing sub groups, and after many weeks of speculation that neither side would be able to wrestle this contest to a conclusion, Obama's success at drawing in voters from the traditional Clinton column may mean that the Illinois Senator is now the undisputed front runner by any criteria.

Still, a quick glance at the map reinforces the notion of a party deeply divided along multiple fault lines.

Obama carried the Indiana cities decisively. As expected he did well in Indianapolis and Marion County, carrying the Hoosier State's biggest city and its suburbs by a commanding 67%, and hauling in over 127,000 votes, and winning big in neighboring Hamilton County by 61%. Obama also did well in other urban pockets, including Allen County (Fort Wayne), where he won by 56% to Clinton's 44.

In Indiana's substantial college areas, also as expected, Obama's reach was powerful. He won in Monroe County (Bloomington) by an impressive 65%; Tippecanoe County, home to Lafayette and Purdue University; and he carried St. Joseph County (home to South Bend, the University of Notre Dame, and St. Mary's College) by 53%, racking up another 33,000 votes in the South Bend-Mishawaka area alone.

But Obama's strongest play came in the slow-reporting Lake County, where almost everyone agreed he would perform well at the polls in large part because of the substantial African-American vote. Turnout was especially high in Gary, and long lines at polling places were part of the reason the results trickled in so slowly from many precincts. Even then, his margin in Lake County was not as large as expected: he won by 56% and netted approximately 73,500 votes.

By contrast, Clinton's penetration was deep and unyielding in the rural parts of Indiana. In some counties her margin of victory was over 70%. Examples from the southern part of the state include Washington County (75%), Crawford County (73%), Harrison County (72%), Dearborn County (75%), and Ohio County (County Seat: Rising Sun, population 2099) where Clinton won by 75%. Clinton won in neighboring Switzerland County, in the southeast corner of the state and bordered on two sides by the Ohio River, by over 75%. And she won in Scott County by an impressive 78%, taking 4,477 votes out of over 5700 votes cast.

Delaware County (Muncie) was closer: Clinton won there by about 53%. Obama had been expected to do well there because of Ball State University. But instead, high voter turnout may have resulted in gains for Clinton as a result of large non-student constituencies.

Clinton also did well in counties to the immediate east of Gary, Indiana, part of the densely populated crescent at the southern end of Lake Michigan. In Porter County she carried 58% of the vote to Obama's 42%, netting her over 20,000 additional popular votes in her quest to maintain numerical bragging right. And in neighboring La Porte, she won by 52%, netting another 13,624 votes.

And in Clark County, in the southern part of the state just across the river from Louisville, Kentucky, Clinton won by better than two-to-one, pulling in nearly 68% of the vote from the small cities of Clarksville, Sellersburg and Jeffersonville and netting roughly 18,000 votes.

Despite Clinton's dominance in most of the rural areas of Indiana, Obama won where the numbers mattered most--in the population centers. In the end they will split the Hoosier State delegates very closely, with Clinton getting only a slight edge of perhaps 38 pledged delegates to Obama's 34 in the proportional math. And for Obama, this near draw represents (perhaps) a new reality beginning to settle into the nomination fight--that his message may finally be ringing true with the Old School components Clinton has been so conspicuously courting this year.

Fully one third of those who voted in Indiana's Democratic primary were between the ages of 45 and 59, according to exit polls conducted by CNN and other polling entities. A fourth were 60 or older. And of all Democratic voters who par-ticipated in Indiana, over 56% were women. If Clinton was counting on these core groups to be among her most reliable constituents in the Hoosier State, then somewhere the math failed to produce numbers sufficient to give her the clear edge.

In North Carolina, Obama's victory was even more triumphant considering that the Clinton team had attempted to steal this state once considered safe for the Illinois Senator. Bill Clinton had campaigned in the Tar Heel state almost non-stop for several days, making appearances before any crowd that the advance team could conjure and assuring audiences that his wife was focused on their economic well-being and security in a way that Sen. Obama was ill-equipped to understand or find empathy with. The Clinton campaign was making a clear effort to blunt an Obama victory.

Like almost every other Democratic contest thus far, turnout in North Carolina was high. Boosted by intensive press attention, armies of campaign volunteers on the streets, and high profile politicians within the state vying for attention as they endorse one candidate or the other, voters turned out in remarkably large numbers to participate.

North Carolina was the bigger prize of the two May 6 primaries. The North Carolina delegation is larger than Indiana because of the bigger population--largely the result of the fast track, high growth cities and suburbs along the I-85/I-40 corridor. But in addition, the Tar Heel State was awarded bonus delegates for their (at first reluctant) acquiescence in a Democratic National Committee request to leave their primary as originally scheduled late in the season (rather than move the primary closer to Super Tuesday as part of a proposal discussed early last year). As a result the DNC gave North Carolina a total of 115 pledged delegates, and a healthier-than-average share of super delegates as well, creating something of a windfall for the Illinois Senator.

Obama carried not only the population centers of the state but also those counties with large African-American populations and a number of counties previously believed to be ripe for a Clinton upset. Obama swept nearly 50 counties, and the only substantial region of the state to go decidedly for Clinton was the mostly white, mostly conservative area of the state west of Interstate 77 and Charlotte.

In Charlotte, Obama's win proved to be massive: the Illinois Senator carried Mecklenburg County by slightly over 70%, and was able to use Greater Charlotte to rack up over 106,000 popular votes. His victory there spilled easily into neighboring Cabarrus and Rowan counties to the north of Charlotte. Obama also carried the densely populated business, education and research corridor, including Winston-Salem (Forsyth County), Greensboro and High Point (Guilford County), Burlington (Alamance County), Chapel Hill (Orange County), Durham County, and the big prize of Wake County, which includes the capital city of Raleigh. In this one elongated cluster of cities, suburbs and exurbs alone, Obama netted over 300,000 votes in a primary season increasingly fixated on popular vote scores as an indicator of potency in a general election. When one factors into the mix the other population clusters within the Tar Heel State--Asheville (Buncombe County) in the west, Rocky Mount (Edgecombe County) along I-95, Wilmington (New Hanover County) on the southeast coast, Greenville (Pitt County), and Goldsboro (Wayne County), Obama's sweep of North Carolina's cities and major towns was nearly complete. In the end Obama earned over 875,000 votes statewide.

But draw a line along a north-to-south axis from just west of Winston-Salem down to Gastonia, and everything to the west was Clinton County, save for the two small Blue Ridge pockets of Watauga County (Boone) and Buncombe County. This predominantly white, mostly evangelical or mainline protestant, and traditionally conservative area of the state gave few votes in response to Obama's message of change. Instead, these picturesque and relentlessly mountainous counties and their conservative, grounded voters reinforced the continuing pattern of this primary season by endorsing Hillary Clinton's traditional appeal to voters and their immediate interests.

In some western counties Clinton walked away with victories so lopsided as to make Obama's name nearly useless on the ballots. In Clay County she won by 73%. In Ashe County, by 75%. And in Graham County, along the eastern side of the Unicoi Mountains on the border with Tennessee, Hillary Clinton won by over 77%, though in the whole of the county only about 1,200 people voted. In neighboring Cherokee County, tucked into the sharp, westernmost corner where the borders of Georgia and Tennessee converge, Clinton's margin exceeded 73% of the 3000 Democratic votes cast.

Still, the night belonged to Obama as the results ticked in. Like in Indiana, the exit poll numbers raised the distinct possibility that Obama was beginning to chip away at Clinton's core groups of support. In North Carolina, 35% of those who voted Tuesday were between the ages of 45 and 59, and another 30% were over the age of 60. This undercuts the growing notion of older voters finding comfort with Clinton in dominant numbers. Indeed, the youngest voters-those between the ages of 17 and 29--made up less than 14% of all votes cast in the Democratic primary in North Carolina. Furthermore, according CNN's exit poll data, over 57% of those who voted in the Democratic race were women.

Clearly there is something more at work here than the usual, now predictable divide between Hillary Clinton's traditional Democratic constituency and Obama's reliable legions of progressives and reformers.

If Obama can prove that he can win in the big states, pulling in big chunks of popular votes, he will undercut Clinton's stubbornly held position that her candidacy makes more sense in a general election.

But the Senator from New York remains defiant, as always. The Clinton thesis: an Obama nomination will spell doom for Democrats, for indeed the GOP war machine will tear him to shreds, and we'll watch helplessly as electoral map falls inevitably into place, just as it did for McGovern, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, et al-so why make a risky roll of the dice when you can nominate a proven fighter (like me) who can go toe-to-toe with John McCain.