Well, that was the worst possible outcome for the Democrats — and for all those, in America and beyond, yearning for change after eight failed years of Republican rule. The results of Tuesday’s contests in Ohio and Texas promise a slow disaster for the party for whom 2008 should have been an easy and golden year.
Even a week ago, Democrats had March 4 circled on the calendar as the day of closure. Barack Obama did not need to extend his winning streak over the past 11 contests by much, just enough to confirm that the momentum he had built over February — measured in votes, money and top-drawer endorsements — was irreversible. A narrow win in Texas would have done it. Bill Clinton had said as much, noting that if Hillary did not win both of Tuesday’s big states, she’d be finished. The party bigwigs would have closed in, tapped Hillary on the shoulder and told her it was time to step aside.
Instead, Hillary Clinton won 51 percent of the vote in Texas and took Ohio by much more — and she’s not about to give way to anybody. This fight will go on. Which means that the Democrats now brace themselves for months more rancor and division, tangled up in a battle with each other. Occasionally, they’ll be able to pause from their wrestling, look up from the mud bath and see a smiling John McCain strolling toward November. For the Republicans resolved their nomination fight on Tuesday night, just as Democrats ensured protracted indecision in theirs. McCain now has a clear path before him. He can simply press ahead, framing the general election debate on his own terms and defining himself before his opponent gets a chance to do it for him.
Optimistic Democrats see a sunny side to this never-ending saga of primaries and caucuses. For one thing, with the drama all on their side, the media spotlight stays on them. And, say the Pollyannas, it’s actually healthy that the Democratic rivals test each other in combat now. It means that the eventual winner will be battle-hardened, their hide thick enough to repel anything McCain and the Republicans hurl their way. After all, if Obama can’t beat Hillary — or vice-versa — then how could they hope to beat McCain?
But put down the rose-colored glasses and another view is possible. For the Hillary camp is sure to conclude that it won on Tuesday by going negative, setting out to rob Obama of his halo. Hillary attacked him for his links to a slum landlord now on trial in Chicago, his apparent double-talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement and, most arrestingly, with a TV commercial featuring sleeping children, which suggested that Obama was simply too inexperienced to deal with a 3 a.m. call to the White House warning of a foreign crisis.
Even if Obama had a good response to the TV ad — noting that when the “red phone” rang for Hillary in 2003, asking whether America should invade Iraq, she gave the wrong answer — he was clearly knocked off his stride by the Hillary barrage and by the intensified press scrutiny that came with it. That was bad news for him, but it’s also bad news for the party as a whole. The ringing phone ad was the kind of scare commercial Republicans habitually run against Democrats, its tone similar to the Cold War “bear in the woods” ad Ronald Reagan used to crush Walter Mondale in 1984. If Obama is the eventual nominee, McCain will simply have to hit rewind and play it back as his own. The same is true of Hillary’s declaration that she and McCain both have long records of national security experience — while all Obama has is “one speech”.
Until now, Obama has avoided hitting back in kind — but now, almost an underdog once more, he may have to. That will mean weeks of hand-to-hand combat over “ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals”, in the words of Obama strategist David Axelrod. It will mean dredging up Hillary Clinton’s Arkansas past as well as probing into the sources of the Clintons’ current fortune. Why, for example, has Hillary refused to release her tax return? Obama can start dismantling Hillary’s talk of “experience”, based on her eight years living in the White House: Does that make Laura Bush qualified to be president?
Such negative campaigning would not only taint Obama, perhaps fatally undermining his claim to embody a new kind of politics; it would also contaminate the entire Democratic effort. Whoever emerges as the nominee will be damaged goods. Republicans will have been handed their attack lines for November and, worse, the Democratic Party will have been plunged into a bitterness that may prove impossible to heal in time. An early warning of that came in Tuesday’s exit polls: Now only four in 10 Democrats say they’ll be satisfied with the nominee, whoever it is. A month ago it was seven in 10. That suggests a sullen, defeated chunk of the Democratic faithful will slink off the battlefield come the autumn rather than fight for the winner. If there is a protracted legal battle over the status of delegates from Michigan and — you guessed it — Florida, excluded for breaking party rules but whose inclusion would favor Hillary, then bitterness will turn into toxicity.
But that is not the gloomiest thought. For Democrats could be facing a choice between a woman who can win the party nomination but not the presidency and a man who could win the presidency but not his party’s nomination. Start with Hillary: It’s easy to work out how she could end up as the Democratic standard-bearer. She might win enough over coming weeks to make the delegate count close and she’ll brag that she bagged all the big prizes, the New Yorks and Californias, while Obama only got the minnow states. Then it comes down to those party chieftains, the superdelegates who will wield the casting votes. In that contest, twisting arms and calling in long-owed favors, the Clintons would surely beat the newcomer Obama.
Yet not many would bet on Hillary, once nominated, beating McCain. Sure, she has proved her extraordinary resilience. But McCain trumps her on both experience and national security. And the simple presence of her name on the ballot would unite and galvanize Republicans more effectively than anything McCain could say or do himself.
Obama by contrast could reframe the entire contest, presenting McCain as, yes, a great hero — but from an era that has passed. He could tie him to George Bush, running pictures of yesterday’s White House endorsement, branding them partners in the disastrous “Bush-McCain” war on Iraq. And Obama has showed that he can bring in the young, independent and suburban voters that Democrats need to win. Yet to have that chance he has to first win the nomination, and that might be harder for him than would be winning the presidency itself. Going negative erodes his defining positive message; doing nothing allows Hillary to paint him as weak, potential snack-food for the waiting wolves of the Republican Party. If it comes down to a stalemate to be settled by the Democratic establishment, he begins with an in-built disadvantage.
So this is the Democrats’ plight. In a year that should be theirs, they are caught between a potential winner who can’t seem to win — and a probable loser who just refuses to lose.
