Clinton’s Campaigning Pays Off
WASHINGTON _ Somewhere, LBJ was smiling.
Lyndon Johnson was famous for saying, according to his biographer Robert Caro, that if a candidate was willing to do everything, truly everything needed to win, he probably would.
Johnson doubtless did not have a woman candidate in mind, but Hillary Clinton clearly followed the spirit of his guidance.
With no margin for mistake, she had to do what she had been unable to do previously: to make Barack Obama mortal.
Before the critical primaries in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday, her campaign had vowed to throw the “kitchen sink” at Obama to derail the momentum that had led to wins in 11 straight contests.
She honored that vow. It paid off in Ohio, where she won the popular vote but probably not a huge number of additional delegates.
Her strategy was built on a foundation of contradiction.
Clinton opposed the trade agreement that was considered a signature achievement of her husband’s presidency. She shed her serious side and mugged on “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” to change her image. After accusing Obama of plagiarizing speeches, she used an ad strikingly similar to one Walter Mondale ran in 1984 about a dreaded late-night phone call. Her campaign invoked Obama’s association with an otherwise little-known developer named Antoin “Tony” Rezko, a man also in possession of his own grip-and-grin photo with then-First Lady Hillary and President Bill Clinton. And, in an interview on “60 Minutes,” she even seemed to hedge on the question of whether she believed Obama might be a Muslim.
She also built her strategy on a platform of clarity. She focused intensely on national security and sowed doubt about Obama. And she focused on trade, especially in Ohio, and was aided by one of the few public mistakes of the Obama campaign, the revelation that his economic adviser might have signaled to Canada that Obama’s criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement might have been calibrated for politics and not really serious.
And she abandoned some of her self-imposed restraint. Her risk was rewarded.
The results were hardly conclusive late into the night Tuesday; she and Obama were locked in a very tight race for the popular vote in Texas. That contrasted sharply with John McCain’s victory lap to the Republican nomination and the period where he can focus strictly on November.
The Obama campaign could credibly argue that the contests in four states did nothing to alter the reality of delegate math that suggests it is not possible for Clinton to win the nomination without being put over the top by party elders and insiders known as “superdelegates.” It is doubtful that this argument will push Clinton out of the race anytime soon.
“I think Sen. Clinton has a scenario and a case to continue if it is a muddle,” said a Democratic strategist not aligned with either campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But if she won’t have netted enough delegates to have a positive gain to go forward, there will be more pressure on her to get out.
“The problem for her is that she wasn’t running just against a person but against a person’s ability to dream or hope. … The more people see him as just another politician, the less it will be about an aspirational message. Does she have a chance of making him mortal or does he stay above this with a post-partisan transformational kind of change?”
Clinton was able to dominate the conversation in the days leading up to these primaries by being first with the ad, by pouncing on NAFTA and by getting coverage for her cameos on comedy shows.
Her message was clear: If she was going to lose the race on this night, it would not be because of something she didn’t try.
Her pull seemed strongest in Ohio.
Ohio is Old America, where manufacturing once roared with tires and steel and built a middle class, a place that now is short on education and innovation and long on anger about globalization. Immigration matters here as an issue, but ethnic diversity is still largely a matter of black and white.
It is a place where you can still find the cracked foundation of the Democratic Party among the white working-class men and older women. It is the four-door Buick of the country, not particularly exciting but clinging to the hope that it is durable and safe. It is also a place where women represented nearly 60 percent of the Democratic primary electorate. It is a state that at times seems risk-averse. That made it an ideal place for Clinton to make her comeback.
New America is Texas, where cross-border trade is not a dirty word, where some of those manufacturing jobs from Ohio have migrated, where the population swells with Hispanics. It’s a place where risk is in the state’s DNA, from the oil “bidness” to computer start-ups.
In both places, there were strong competing pride votes, with women returning to Clinton in great numbers knowing that if she were to lose, the chance for the first woman president would vanish on a late winter night, and with blacks aligning in near monolith for Obama, knowing that if they could deliver for him, the dream of an African-American president was very much alive.
The most intense primary campaign in history, one now more than a year old, almost certainly will play on. As a measure of its unprecedented nature, the Democrats’ next contest will be in the most Republican of states, in Wyoming on Saturday.
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