WASHINGTON, 8 May 2008 — After a huge win for Barack Obama in North Carolina, and with Indiana’s race so tight that it was only decided yesterday morning, news pundits are widely saying it is now all but over for Hilary Clinton.
North Carolina had been seen by Clinton insiders as the senator’s last shot to seriously throw Obama off track, but North Carolina posed an uphill battle for Clinton.
Meanwhile, Obama’s quest to clinch the Democratic presidential nomination got a lift with his big win in North Carolina and strong run in Indiana, where he did significantly better than expected against the favored Clinton.
Obama came into the race at a low point, reeling from his former minister Jeremiah Wright’s racially divisive remarks, and a blistering loss in Pennsylvania that raised questions about whether he can win white voters.
By winning North Carolina with 14 percentage points, Obama recorded his first primary victory in nearly two months. Clinton narrowly won in Indiana by two percent, after her early lead was nearly erased by late, pro-Obama returns.
The close call, combined with Obama’s double-digit margin in North Carolina, reassured Obama supporters and uncommitted party leaders that he appears to have weathered weeks of controversies.
“Don’t ever forget that we have a choice in this country,” Obama said in an address in Raleigh, N.C., that sounded the unity themes of a convention speech. “We can choose not to be divided; that we can choose not to be afraid; that we can still choose this moment to finally come together and solve the problems we’ve talked about all those other years in all those other elections.”
Yet the split decision between the two states underscored some of the Illinois senator’s weaknesses and the party’s fissures — and left the likelihood that the nomination marathon will continue inconclusively for a final month, to be decided ultimately by the hundreds of party leaders known as superdelegates.
Obama’s win in North Carolina was aided by an electorate that was roughly one-third African-American. Nine out of 10 supported his bid to be the nation’s first black president. There and in Indiana, six of 10 white voters sided with Clinton.
The campaign’s increasingly bitter focus on race is a turnabout from its start more than a year ago, when Obama promised to transcend the country’s historic racial divisions as well as its political ones.
The Illinois senator drew significant white support in this year’s early contests. But his margins with white voters have grown smaller, and black voters have largely abandoned Clinton, as the candidates’ rivalry has intensified and each side has traded charges of playing the “race card.”
And his fallout among working-class white voters is likely to follow Obama to the next battlegrounds — West Virginia, which votes next Tuesday, and Kentucky, in two weeks.
He is favored in Oregon, which also holds a primary May 20, and in the final primaries June 3 in Montana and South Dakota.
Obama remains in much better shape than Clinton, who faces a virtually impossible task in trying to overtake his lead in convention delegates and the popular vote.
And Tuesday’s results undercut her effort to build on her recent big victories in Pennsylvania and Ohio to raise questions among party leaders about Obama’s electability.
Yesterday advisers to Clinton portrayed her as still confident; that she can win the nomination through a combination of victories in the handful of remaining primaries and persuading uncommitted superdelegates that she can perform better against Republicans than Obama.
But Clinton has a lot going against her. Former Sen. George McGovern, who had backed Clinton, urged her to drop out of the Democratic presidential race and said yesterday he has decided to endorse Obama.
After watching the returns from the North Carolina and Indiana primaries on Tuesday night, McGovern says it is virtually impossible for Clinton to win the nomination.
Also, a campaign aide said yesterday that she had lent her presidential campaign $6.4 million over the past month. The money more than doubled Clinton’s personal investment in her bid for the Democratic nomination; she gave her campaign $5 million earlier this year.
On the Republican side, the focus on the current Democrat slugfest for the presidential ticket has ignored a real problem the Republicans are facing — returns on Tuesday night’s primaries show that more than 20 percent of those who voted in the Republican primary in Indiana and North Carolina voted for someone other than Sen. John McCain, the party’s presumptive nominee.
Quite a few Republican crossover voters also said they participated in the Democratic primary. One in 10 of the voters who cast ballots in the Democratic primary identified themselves to exit pollsters as Republicans, and most of those said they voted for Obama.
Republican insiders are aware of this problem. Newt Gingrich, the man who steered the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, warned his fellow Republicans on Tuesday that they faced disastrous losses in November without a quick change in their political course.
Gingrich’s alarm was met with mixed responses on Capitol Hill where his influence is no longer what it was, but his experience is sufficient to draw attention when he does weigh in on political and policy matters.
