Last week, after Louisiana, Washington and Nebraska, I pondered, “How many states can HRC afford to concede?”
Such a strategy, even if driven involuntarily by financial mismanagement of a huge campaign budget, failed wildly for Rudy Giuliani. The Mayor skipped all the early, low count, primaries to focus on a big prize, but before he knew it, he was in no headline and was disappearing from the campaign narrative. Florida had not reason to vote for him when the hard-working barnstormers showed up, and he lost then quit.
HRC sat out or had to sit out the mid-sized states after Super Tuesday, beginning with Louisiana, Washington, Nebraska, Maine, Virginia, Maryland and D.C. She essentially is conceding Wisconsin, too, which should be her bailiwick. Obama racks up win after win, primaries, caucuses, states, demographics and broad-spectrum voters. He now has more delegates, even irresponsibly counting superdelegates. The only legitimate trophy HRC has won is California, but her demographics from that win are jumping ship like mad. (Lest we forget, she just fired her loyal, Latina campaign manager, too.)
(She does have a spurious claim to results from the Florida and Michigan non-campaign, non-primaries, and Julian Bond, who is not complaining about minority enfranchisement in Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland and D.C.)
Last night, the narrative changed before our eyes. Tom Brokaw said, “This is the forth quarter and time is running out.” The folks on CNN, MSNBC, Politico.com, the New York Times and throughout the blogs shifted from arithmetic to momentum. They adopted Obama’s theme of more states, more delegates, broader appeal, and they rejected HRC’s theme of Big, Important States that Matter in the general election.
She has explained away every loss as driven by identity politics, unfavorable formats, bad timing or strategic dismissal. Last night, Obama beat her everywhere and in every way except among White women. He beat her in elderly demographics, among White men, all Black voters, all Hispanic voters, those with college degrees and those without college degrees, those in the working class, middle class and affluent class.
Meanwhile, the
internecine squabbles in the HRC campaign are causing collateral damage. Last night was not the tipping point; the $5,000,000 loan to herself while drawing Super Tuesday was the tipping point. Math does not matter much now, because she would have to do better, now, everywhere, than she has done in any other race henceforth, except California and New Jersey.
Her only hope is to play
Machiavellian hard-ball with her political debtors at the convention, who then would have to buck Obama momentum, Obama money, Obama pledged delegates, probably the popular vote and certainly the raw number of states that Obama has won. If she does that and wins, the party will be eviscerated, discouraged and discredited and doomed to an 18 state race to 51%.
On the other hand, Obama would proceed into the general election with an inspired, unified party, immense turn-out among newly self-enfranchised and active populations, raging discord among the Republicans, a huge war chest and in-roads into otherwise unthinkable Red States, like, dare I say it, Alabama.
Make no mistake, Obama can claim all of HRC’s supporters for the general election, but many of Obama’s new base are exhilarated Black voters, genuinely inspired Gen X and Y voters, independents and conservatives. These voters are not now party loyalists or committed liberals, but are moved by the candidate and his promise and Meaning, and they will not vote for HRC. They will stay home, in gloom, disappointment and disillusionment that, however naïve, politics is rotten.
She will not concede. She did not even mention Virginia, Maryland and D.C. last night, as if there was no news to address. Instead she played to her supposed firewall in Texas. She will lose Texas or split it at best. She cannot mount the
ground game that Texas requires, and Ohio and Pennsylvania will not hold for her. At best she splits these last three big prizes, and by splitting, she loses the nomination.
Oh, and there’s
this sort of fruit ripe for the picking.
Here also is an esteemed conservative legal scholar from our
sister school, advisor to Mitt Romney, saying that Obama has the best line to Catholic votes and his own version of Reagan Democrats, whom Obama called last night, the Obamacans. HRC has no such voters.
UPDATE: Here's some good analysis, since it agrees with mine. Check out the margins of victory. How will Clinton superdelegates justify voting against that trend?
MORE: From a different voice, here is a similar view and the same conclusion.
(If I've learned anything from this election, it's that I dig Andrew Sullivan's blog.)
