By Wayne Brown
There’s an enervating, ‘dog-days’ air about this phase of the race for the White House. There’s a lot going on, but nothing is happening.
The Democratic contest – which by now seems so interminable, comedian Jon Stewart has taken to bannering it the ‘Bataan Death March to the Democratic Nomination’ – has in reality been over for some time; except that it isn’t.
Speculation about the candidates’ potential choice of running mates has been swelling – this, even while the Clinton campaign pursues a scorched-earth campaign to force their defeated candidate onto Obama’s ticket.
There’s no coherence – only a sort of subterranean tidal drift (disguised by the spreading flotsam of ancillary issues slow-circling on the surface) towards some eventual resolution and clarification at some indeterminate point in the future.
Among US commentators, most civic souls expect that as soon as the primaries are over on June 3 the remaining uncommitted superdelegates will move as a bloc and ‘officially’ deliver the nomination to Obama, whereupon Hillary will at last withdraw. (This columnist thinks that, to the contrary, the Clintons mean to take their lost cause, ruinously, all the way to the convention floor.)
Saturday, however, all eyes (that haven’t yet closed in boredom or drugged satiety) will be on the Democratic Party’s Rules Committee hearing, being held to decide what to do about the disqualified delegations from Michigan and Florida. To this end, Hillary Clinton was in Florida last weekend, likening their disqualification – which she herself endorsed, until it occurred to her campaign that they might be her last, best hope of staving off defeat – to the Supreme Court’s 2000 ‘theft’ of Florida for George Bush. A couple of days later, three Florida state senators, Democrats, sued their own party to reverse its decision.
Last week, too, the Clinton campaign withdrew its recently stated willingness to compromise over the delegation from Michigan, where, obeying the party’s debarrment ruling, all the candidates bar Clinton had taken their names off the ballot. They now demanded that in awarding delegates the Michigan vote total for Clinton should be counted in full, and the 40 per cent protest vote for ‘Uncommitted’ scrapped.
On the stump in Florida, Clinton repeatedly cast herself as the champion of the state’s ‘disenfranchised’ voters, and the party – and by extension Obama – as bent on depriving them of their right to vote. She also resumed rallying her troops – disenchanted, older white women – with sudden, amply-aired complaints that she’d been the victim of ‘sexism’ all along.
Few commentators doubt her intention is to threaten the Rules Committee when it meets on Saturday. ‘Seat the full delegations in my favour,’ Clinton was telling them, ‘or I’ll see to it you lose not only these states but older white women en masse to McCain in November.’
What bewildered many observers about such demagoguery was the maths. Even if the full Florida and Michigan delegations were seated, they wouldn’t give Clinton the pledged delegates lead. And even the popular vote victory she would then claim – assuming that next Sunday Puerto Ricans behave like Hispanic Americans, not Caribbean islanders, and vote overwhelmingly for Clinton – would only stand up if the anomaly of the caucus states were ignored and their numbers taken at face value. (In the caucuses, which Obama almost uniformly won, a few thousand caucus-goers represent the wishes of what in a primary might be a million or more voters.)
Then, mid-week, Time magazine reported that Bill Clinton was campaigning hard behind the scenes for the Veep spot for his wife. Hillary had “earned” her right to be Obama’s running mate, Clinton was arguing.
The point of Hillary’s demagoguing in advance of the Rules Committee meeting became clear. She wasn’t really hoping any more to be awarded the nomination, but trying to increase the cards with which to bargain for the Veep spot.
Since Tuesday’s primaries, the steady trickle of superdelegates to Obama has slowed – a signal, some commentators think, that the yet-uncommitteds are pressuring Obama to take Hillary on board. (An Obama-Clinton ticket is what those focusing on November see as a ‘dream team.’
Those focusing instead on a subsequent Obama administration see it as a nightmare. )
The likelihood is that it will all be in vain – Obama is nobody’s pushover – and that Hillary will wind up having to settle for a seat on the Supreme Court – if not, indeed, for the Court of St James.
But for now the sound and fury continue, unabating…
Worth noting:
Last Tuesday’s ‘split decision’– Kentucky was another Clinton blowout, while Obama comfortably won Oregon – left experts scratching their heads. The two states’ demographics were similar: small African-American populations, very large percentages of rural po’whites.
Obama won 46 per cent of the latter in Oregon yet only 22 per cent in Kentucky. Why the difference?
“What’s it about Appalachia?” this columnist asked an American friend. (Kentucky is Appalachia country.)
“They’re really, really poor,” he said.
…and not very smart. That, I took to be his politically-incorrect implication.
(Case in point: while exit polls showed that rural working-class whites in Indiana and Oregon had largely dismissed Clinton’s ‘gas tax holiday’ bait, their counterparts in both West Virginia and Kentucky enthusiastically embraced the proposal, one that at best would have wound up saving them the princely sum of 30 cents a day for three months.)
On Tuesday evening, too, NBC’s numbers-cruncher Chuck Todd produced a startlingly simple explanation of the two states’ very different outcomes. Primary results so far, Todd pointed out, showed Obama had won virtually all the states where African-Americans comprised either under five per cent or over 15 per cent of the population. Clinton had won the states in between.
To Todd, these stats were so unequivocal, “We really didn’t need to poll, or even to hold primaries. Just check the census for each state and you have the winner.”
(Kentucky, which went to Clinton by 35 points, is 8 percent African-American; Oregon, which Obama won by 18 points, only 4 per cent.)
Todd’s interpretation was that in the over-15 per cent states, black turnout had delivered the outcome for Obama, while in the under-5 per cent states, the white working class had never had to compete with African-Americans for jobs and therefore lacked any reflexive hostility to them/Obama. It doesn’t contradict his analysis to add that the populations of the Appalachian states are not only poor but old, the more enterprising of their younger generation having routinely quit them in search of a better life elsewhere; and ‘old’ versus ‘young’ has been one of the defining demographics separating the supporters of Clinton and Obama.
Lastly: Kentucky’s exit polls reported 32 per cent of Clinton supporters saying they would crossover to vote for McCain if Obama were the Democratic nominee. The talking heads were already in full cry about Obama’s ‘big problem’ when someone produced the 2004 Kentucky presidential election polls. They showed that 32 per cent of Kentucky Democrats had abandoned Kerry to vote for GW Bush.
Revelation! That 32 per cent were and are in fact Reagan Democrats. Culturally conservative po’whites, they’re likely to back any guns-’n-churches Republican over the ‘elitist’ Democratic candidate.
Nothing to do with Obama’s race, then, after all?
