When Gerald Ford took the oath of office at the end of the Watergate affair, he declared: “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.” Barack Obama did not use those words in Minnesota Tuesday night, though plenty of his fellow Democrats would have found them apt. The longest, closest primary campaign in US history — a contest that cut deep into some of America’s most neuralgic areas — has finally come to an end. The people of Montana and South Dakota concluded what the citizens of Iowa began exactly five months earlier, putting Obama within touching distance of his party’s nomination for president.
The final hours did not run smoothly. Before the polls closed Tuesday, news agencies reported that Hillary Clinton was ready to accept defeat. But then Clinton officials said the story was wrong, and that their fight goes on.
This is what people mean when they speak about fighting to the bitter end. Besides the mudfest at Saturday’s Democratic rules committee meeting, the last days were marked by Bill Clinton giving an encore of his red-faced act, this time denouncing a journalist as “slimy” and a “scumbag”, later prompting his aides to relay his regret for such “inappropriate” language. The dimming of the former president’s reputation has been one of the sadder consequences of this endurance test of an election season.
And yet, even if Hillary does bow out soon, it is the very opposite of over. Forget how exhausted the key players are after the fight of their lives: The election of 2008 has only just begun. The battle that counts, the one whose reverberations will be felt across the world for the next four years, is the general election on Nov. 4.
Barring a mass defection of Obama delegates to Clinton, that showdown will be between the Illinois senator and John McCain. If the world had a vote, it’s pretty clear who would win: A YouGov survey of British voters this week shows Obama would rout McCain by 49 percent to 14 percent, and it’s a fair guess that the constituencies of Africa North, Europe West and Asia Central would go the same way.
Alas, there will be no such global ballot, and in the country that matters, the race is much tighter. As of now, despite poll numbers showing the Republican Party at rock-bottom and George W. Bush’s presidency with negative ratings north of 70 percent, McCain and Obama are within just a few points of each other.
That this is true in what should be a banner year for the Democrats is not the only reason why several seasoned hands tell me they are “worried” about Obama’s chances. First, they note that the senator has won the nomination on a losing streak or, at best, a mixed streak with too many defeats. The proportional system of delegate allocation has kept him in front even after losses in Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, and thorough beatings in Kentucky and West Virginia. But to stagger across the primary finish line like this deprives Obama of the swagger to which any new nominee should be entitled. He does not have that winner’s sheen that an early, easy victory would have brought.
More tangibly, he begins on the back foot, having failed to win over voters, especially the much-discussed white working class, who backed Hillary and who Democrats need if they are to take the White House. One analysis showed him failing to capture blue-collar voters in 26 of the 29 early primary states, and doing not much better in the later ones. And, of course, Obama must begin the hard work of winning back women, especially older women, who remained so loyal to Clinton when the media had, again and again, counted her out. That will mean more of what he’s been doing in the last few days, lavishing praise on her resilience as a campaigner. He needs female voters to see that he has genuine respect for the woman who has already gone further in US politics than any other. He’ll need to appoint senior women to his campaign team, too, perhaps poaching them from Hillaryland. Naming a woman as a running mate is unlikely: Those I’ve spoken to say privately that putting an African-American and a woman on the ticket might just be too much change for the US electorate to stomach in one gulp.
But for all the efforts to apply healing balm after a bruising race, the Obama camp will strain not to point out that much of his problem is the damage inflicted on him by Hillary.
For the past three months, she has sought to do to Obama what Republicans have long tried, usually successfully, to do to Democrats: To paint him as an “elitist”, an out-of-touch intellectual with radical ideas outside the mainstream of American life. Republicans destroyed Adlai Stevenson that way in the 1950s and famously did the same to George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry, the last with brutal panache. “Hillary Clinton is the first Democrat I can think of to use that same approach against a fellow Democrat,” says Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate.
It means that McCain’s attack lines against Obama are already written for him. He simply has to pick up where Hillary left off, presenting Obama as a black McGovern, pointing to his leftist friends, questioning his patriotism, casting him as the denizen of university towns remote from “the real America” — and with both an intolerance for high-carb breakfasts and a poor bowling arm to boot. Viewed like this, the conventional wisdom that the Clintons have done Obama a favor, by battle-hardening him in time for November, may be too hopeful. They may simply have blown holes in his armor, through which McCain merely has to aim straight.
The shape of the coming contest has changed in another way. At the start of the year, it seemed as if 2008 would pit two ideologically similar figures against each other. Obama was the post-partisan who would reach out to independents; McCain was the maverick Republican with a knack for appealing leftward. Both would end up in the center. That’s not how it looks now. Obama has been exposed as the Democrat with the most “liberal” voting record in the senate, while McCain has sought to secure his conservative base by asserting his tax-cutting instincts and echoing Bush on the economy and healthcare. It means that the general election campaign begins with both sides behind traditional, partisan lines.
Nowhere is the gap between them clearer or wider than on the question that matters most to the global electorate watching this battle: US foreign policy. Just this week, McCain has ramped up the aggressive rhetoric on Iran while still clinging to the faith that made him predict in March 2003 that invading Iraq would be “one of the best things that’s happened to America”. Obama, meanwhile, suggests direct talks with Tehran and a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. McCain calls Obama the Hamas candidate and an appeaser; Obama says McCain offers nothing more than a third term of the Bush presidency.
The result is a contest whose stakes could not be higher and which will hinge on the battle of definition. Can Obama brand McCain as a crotchety, Meldrew-ish version of the discredited Dubya? Or can McCain cast Obama as a naive novice who belongs in the student seminar room? The phoney — if gripping — war is now all but over. The decisive conflict is about to begin.
