What a difference a day makes.
Yesterday, I thought Hillary might emerge from yesterday’s primaries in the driver’s seat for the Democratic nomination. She had had a good two weeks, raising $10 million online in the twenty-four hours after her Pennsylvania victory, getting good reviews from her interview with Bill O’Reilly (and an audience of 10 million viewers), drawing large & enthusiastic crowds at her campaign appearances, earning admiration from erstwhile adversaries and rising in most polls.
At the same time, her opponent had a rough two weeks, with media focus on his former pastor and people taking notice of his contradictory explanations of his relationship with that unhappy man. I thought that ol’ Clinton luck was kicking in and she’d Indiana easily while keeping Obama’s margin in the single digits.
But, then Tarheel or Hoosier State Democrat. When they voted yesterday, things started to change.
Last night, when I went to bed, I expected to wake up to learn she had dropped out, but when I flipped on FoxNews, heard she was campaigning in West Virginia.
My best guess is that it was the trust issue which did her in. Only 54% of Democrats in Indiana think she’s honest and trustworthy. (44% do not.)* That coupled with her changing campaign persona may have factored into yesterday’s outcome.
I hate to break this to my conservative friends eager for a drawn out contest, but it’s over. It’s over. Mighty Clinton has struck out.
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*Jim Geraghty links the CNN exit polls which show that only 49% of Democrats think she’s honest and trustworthy and references a Washington Post article showing an “erosion of trust” in the former First Lady.
UPDATE: Hugh says HIllary won’t quit. The Corner’s James Robbins writes:
It will only end if Hillary Clinton loses the will to keep fighting. It all comes down to her inner strength, her belief in herself and her destiny. Right now the only person who can prevent Hillary from taking this all the way is Hillary.
Is there any good reason Hillary wouldn’t be on the ticket as Veep? It would unite the party, and she’d be just one
trip to Fort Marcy Parkheartbeat away from the presidency?Hillary’s strategy is pretty simple.
Obama is now mathematically unable to clinch the nomination with pledged; there are 217 delegates left, and because of the proportional representation rules, Obama cannot get the 184 he would need to do so decisively.
She’s throwing it to the superdelegates and using the fact that her connections are much better than his — plus the slime campaign that’s going to start in a matter of minutes.
Not that Obama doesn’t deserve to be slimed.
I agree with NDT. I have said all along, GPW, that it will be decided by the supers and the key for Hillary is to knock out Obama with a scandal that gives the supers a plausible and sufficient excuse to switch.
Wright might have been that scandal. He wasn’t. Rezko might still be. Ayers might still be. Obama has a lot of radical and/or terrorist connections that should, in theory, make him unelectable.
I’m not saying Hillary can do it… I’m saying we know what her strategy will be. She may “suspend” her campaign by June… while continue to work behind the scenes to get that knockout scandal and damage Obama badly enough to either get her the nomination in 2008, or ensure McCain’s election followed by her victory in 2012.
She wants power, and she can only gain it – now or in 2012 – by continuing to damage Obama. That is, as long as her fingerprints aren’t too obvious.
Yeah: The Obama people, probably including Michelle, have come to truly detest Hillary.
And I stand by my prediction – there will be a minor riot in Denver this summer which will be precipitated by either the superdelegate count or the seating issue of the FL & MI delegates.
It will make 1968 look like a tiptoe through the tulips.
Bank on it.
Regards,
Peter H.
It’s over and everyone knows it but Bill and Hillary.
BTW, if you take out the crossover voters Obama won Indiana as well.
But the best news is that even without spoiler voters turnout and new voter registration has been huge. This is good news for November not just for Obama but all the way down the ticket.
Hardly. It’s not 1998 anymore.
And the idea that the Clinton’s have some sort of ace in the hole to derail Obama is laughable. If they had it, you think they’d wait until Obama is the presumptive nominee to use it? C’mon!
Include the number of pledged delegates Obama is guaranteed in the remaining states and he is about 70 delegates away. With the “Pelosi Club” numbers running anywhere from 10-20, possibly more, with other cryptic superdelegates like Gore, Carter, Clyburn and Brazille being “undeclared” but in no way undecided, Obama has locked this down. He has the numbers, it’s just a matter of when they announce. He is the presumptive nominee and will win by over 200 delegates.
A lot of people (here and elsewhere) seem to be living in the past, thinking the Clinton’s have this monolithic power in the party or are somehow political Rasputin’s. C’mon folks, they can’t even raise enough money to keep their campaign in the black! They are 10-20 million dollars in debt. With every advantage, everything going for ’em, the Clinton’s let this slip away. Everyone here is thinking of the Clinton’s like Michael Jordan with the Bulls. When in reality, the Hillary Clinton campaign has been more like Michael Jordan with the Washington Wizards. The Clinton’s have lost a step.
Also, many seem to underestimate the wholesale hostility in the Congress towards the prospect of another Clinton Administration. Most don’t want to carry their water anymore. The House leadership is not on her side. Most of her colleagues in the Senate have endorsed Obama.
So, It’s over. The Clinton era of the Democratic Party has ended.
It has been a sad day for me, in part because I supported Hillary Clinton for the nomination and was prepared to actively work for her election in November — the first time since I was old enough to vote for a president (Goldwater in 1964) that I wouldn’t be supporting the Republican nominee. More importantly, I’m sad for my country because it appears, unless the Rev. Wright, Williams Ayers, the elitism, etc., are just the tip of an iceberg, that Senator Obama is on the brink of an eight-year reign in the White House.
I really thought Hillary was on the verge of stopping Obama and was strengthening her argument to the remaining uncommitted super delegates that her strong appeal to white working class Democrats made her more electable against Senator McCain.
I don’t know what happened in North Carolina. I thought when she left Indiana late in the campaign to spend more time in North Carolina that internal polling showed she had a chance. But now I think my son, Trace, was probably right when he told me Hillary campaigned late in North Carolina to force Obama to cut short his campaigning in Indiana.
Obama had been ending up short of his poll numbers but that changed in North Carolina, where Hillary did not close strong like she had in other states.
In Indiana, Hillary lost some of the support among women voters she’d enjoyed in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She did poorly in most categories of voters under age 65 and won only because voers over 65 remained so loyal to her.
I believe Hillary made two major mistakes in the past week or so that allowed Obama to overcome most of the damage from Rev. Wright.
The proposal for a summer-long gas tax holiday was a major error. While drivers commuting long distances to work could have saved about $30 or more a month, the average motorist wouldn’t have seen much more than a $30 savings for the entire summer. She opened herself to ridicule from Obama and the idea that she was pandering to their fears quickly grew among voters.
Democratic and Independent women are queasy about military action and the decline in support among women was likely helped by Hillary’s failure to better explain what she meant about an attack on Iran to retaliate against an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. She needlessly left the impression our response against Iran would be nuclear when, in fact, the U. S. Air Force has contingency plans and (still) has the capacity to bomb Iran back into the Dark Ages with conventional weapons.
I’ll comment on why I think Obama will defeat John McCain in response to Dan’s previous post, “Barack’s Big Night”.
You can at least take some heart Trace, events in his hypothetical first term will determine whether Obama gets elected to a second term, not anything happening now. And two-term presidencies are the exception, not the norm. I suppose the silver-lining behind a (God forbid) Obama presidency would be that it would almost certainly be a one-term presidency, as the policies Democrats are promising to enact will savage the economy in very short order.
I believe Hillary keeps running because she was told by all of the power brokers in the party that she was going to be the nominee in 2008. She held back in 2004 because she didn’t think she could win with only half a senate term in, cause well….most people would think that it would be foolish for someone to run for the highest office with little experience. The grass roots didn’t like the Clintons, I saw that in how Daily Kos and other liberal activists referred to them before the Iowa primary. I think their hate was pretty much equal to what republicans felt of her and there has been nothing but joy since she fell.
The media created a sense that she would win this hands down, when I didn’t think it was such a slam dunk. Hillary didn’t plan for this to go longer than Super Tuesday, and that lack of planning was the real failure of her campaign. She got unlucky because she really had no friendly states during that month because FL and MI had been so stupid and broke the rules. When she finally got to those steel belt states, it was already too late. Its hard to run up the big margins in those states because of how broad the populations.
I am digusted by how the party has treated her, considering how much of a role she played in getting the last Democrat president elected. She never made politics into more than what it is, its bloody, dirty and all about winning. I know she will play that game and will win that game, no matter what it takes. I don’t get who hates her more, Republicans or Liberals? Republicans because they never seemed able to beat her and Liberals because she wasn’t beholden to do whatever they wanted and would change in order to respond to the new political landscape.
Yes the Clinton’s influence in the party is dimished, maybe completely, but now we have the blogosphere/Daily Kos party bokers. I don’t think the later is good for anyone.
Egos.
I can’t remember which pundit said it, but I agree that Hillary was a better candidate than Obama but that Obama had a better campaign than Hillary.
If we still had Theodore White around to write a “Making of A President 2008” he’d probably focus on the failure of Hillary’s campaign to have a straregy for the caucuses as the single most important reason she has failed. Obama’s lead in delegates is due entirely to winning the caucuses (and in the Democrats’ screwy way of allotting delegates, Obama won the most delegates in Nevada while still losing the popular vote).
I think just the opposite is true. If anything, Clinton was more established, more connected and had the stronger campaign. Obama won all the caucuses because he’s the better candidate. That’s why people are proud to stand up at caucuses and support him. It’s much easier to be a closet racist, or to support somebody whose policies you can’t defend as well if you’re voting by secret ballot.
I think it’s a combination of both what Trace and James said, strategy and the candidate. But probably the single most important reason in my view is that Obama always stayed on message. At the start of this campaign (what feels like 325 years ago) he picked a theme and has never wavered from it. Every presser, every position, every statement all fed back into his central campaign theme. Clinton changed theme’s like she changed pantsuits. How many people remember her original campaign slogan – “I’m in it to win it”?
And McCain will have a similar problem. I’m not sure what his message is. His challenge is wrestling away that change banner from Obama. Cause if he’s viewed as “stay the course,” he will lose.