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LITTWIN IN PENNSYLVANIA: Someone will win, but win what?

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published April 22, 2008 at 12:05 a.m.
Updated April 22, 2008 at 4:06 p.m.

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Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama rally outside City Hall in Philadelphia during today's Pennsylvania presidential primary.

Photo by Mike Mergen/Bloomberg News

Supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama rally outside City Hall in Philadelphia during today's Pennsylvania presidential primary.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, greet supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh on Monday.

Photo by Elise Amendola / Associated Press

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Clinton, greet supporters at a rally in Pittsburgh on Monday.

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PHILADELPHIA — Our long national interregnum - you can look it up; I did - is over. And now, six weeks after the last time the Democrats voted, they finally get to vote again.

And, after all this time, the most likely outcome of the long-awaited Pennsylvania primary is that the two sides won't even be able to agree on what the outcome is.

Certainly, everyone is lining up his/her talking points. As of today, the issues up for grabs include:

* Who wins.

* How you decide who wins.

* How you decide - once you've decided who wins - what, if anything, the win actually means, with the possibilities ranging from everything to, uh, nothing.

The Clinton campaign - trailing in delegates, trailing in the popular vote, trailing in money raised, trailing in money spent, trailing in every category except that of the time-honored 11th-hour scare-tactic campaign ad - has said that any win is a win and that the pressure is all on Obama, who has outspent Clinton here by more than 2-to-1.

Clinton adviser Howard Wolfson put it this way in a conference call Monday: Any Obama loss raises "serious questions."

The Obama campaign's response is basically this: Like, what questions? (Sometimes, the Obama folks mean that literally. According to The Chicago Tribune, Obama hasn't taken any questions from the traveling media in 10 days. That's one way to avoid, say, more Bill Ayers discussion. Myself, I just wanted to ask what kind of hors d'oeuvre Bernadine Dohrn serves.)

In any case, the polls put Clinton ahead by around five to seven points. Would five points constitute a victory?

Here's one take.

If Obama wins here, the race is essentially over. No one, by the way, actually expects him to win here. The thinking is, there are too many blue-collar, bitter people (also sometimes called, working-class white people) in Pennsylvania.

If Obama comes close, it seems that the race stays pretty much as it is today, which would mean a loss for Clinton, because Pennsylvania is the last big state left to vote. And any smallish victory here translates into an insignificant delegate uptick. And what exactly do you tell those remaining uncommitted superdelegates when you're losing the pledged-delegate count and the overall popular vote count and almost every other count?

If Clinton wins in a rout, well, that shakes everything up - at least until May 6, when Indiana and North Carolina vote, at which time the shaking could be entirely unshaken.

Until then, the game gets played out because, at this point, there's nothing else really to do.

And so Obama has been on the attack - asking voters to "declare independence from the type of politics we'd seen over the last 15, 20 years" (read: Bush and Clinton eras) - because even though his entire campaign is built on the new politics of not attacking, he's not exactly a pacifist, either. And the polls - it's always the polls - show that when there's mud thrown, more of it sticks to Clinton.

And he's hoping that new voters - there are over 300,000 newly registered Democrats - will break heavily his way. (Late-breakers, by the way, have broken heavily for Clinton recently. Either way, it's a lot of breakage, which may have led to Obama's line about throwing the china.)

Clinton, meanwhile, has been attacking Obama for being on the attack, and then releases the latest scare ad, which the campaign announces as an entirely positive ad.

In this entirely positive ad, we see, in less than 30 seconds, clips invoking most of the dangers America has faced over the last 100 years - stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, Katrina, the Cold War, and, yes, footage of Osama bin Laden.

The announcer says of the presidency - in that voice-of-God, NFL films-style baritone - "It's the toughest job in the world." And later: "Harry Truman said it best. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen."

The Truman-kitchen line is the line Clinton has been using about Obama for complaining about the questions he got at the last debate.

And then the ad ends this way: "Who do you think has what it takes?"

It's a try at repeating the impact of the who-do-you-want-answering-the-call-at-3 a.m. ad, although my guess is, people are going to miss the red phone.

The Obama campaign responded almost immediately with a YouTube video of Bill Clinton, from an earlier presidential campaign, saying that a Clinton rule of politics is to choose a candidate offering hope and not fear. But, hey, this is 2008, and the rules, I guess, change.

There are some new Hillary Clinton rules, and for which you can't really blame her. These are the kinds of rules you make when you're behind.

If Clinton wins - by any amount - she will argue that Obama can't win the big swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Florida. Yes, the Clinton campaign continues to insist Clinton won Michigan and Florida.

If Clinton wins - by any amount - she will argue that she won despite Obama's huge spending edge, without explaining exactly why he has a big spending edge and why her campaign is now slightly in the red while Obama keeps setting fund-raising records.

If Clinton wins - by any amount - she will argue she has the momentum, and that whatever happened earlier in the campaign, that was before Obama was properly vetted.

And if Clinton wins big, she can say all that stuff a little more confidently.

And Obama, who will be in Indiana tonight - which you can take as a clue that he doesn't think he's going to win here today - is going to move on, confident that the time in this race actually is running out.

But before it ran out here in Pennsylvania, we had bowling and we had bitterness and we had duck hunting and we had Bosnia and we had shot drinking and we had Jay-Z moves and we had, uh, Springsteen grooves. And, oh, we had flag pins.

And on election eve - I got this straight from ABC News - we had Obama and Clinton and even John McCain delivering taped messages for World Wrestling Entertainment's Monday Night Raw. If you don't know what that is, find a kid, any kid, and ask him - and hope he doesn't ask you why you want to know.

Of course, both candidates were scheduling every TV spot available - Clinton with Olbermann; Obama with Jon Stewart - but Raw? Yes. Apparently. Seriously. And here's what you say, apparently, not-so-seriously, when pitching for the wrestling-fan vote:

McCain: "And whatcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiacs run wild on you?"

Obama: "So to the special interests who've been setting the agenda in Washington for too long . . . I've got one question: Do you smell what Barack is cooking?"

Clinton: "Tonight, in honor of the WWE, you can call me Hillrod. This election is starting to feel a lot like King of the Ring. The only difference? The last man standing may just be a woman . . . "

Of course, that's the most important rule of politics: It's all about the smackdown.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

Comments

  • April 22, 2008

    7:33 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Mike_In_Hartsel writes:

    Me thinks perhaps Rush is having an effect with the "crossovers" going to Hillrod. This sets up a nice juicy convention floor fight that the Dems will lose. If Barack doesn't get the nomination there will be unrest in the city streets.

  • April 22, 2008

    7:36 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    JYP3500 writes:

    Mike,
    Hillary should absolutely stay in the race, and she has a better than even chance of winning the nomination. Here’s why. If you count Florida & Michigan, she wins the popular vote. If Obama had been properly vetted at the beginning of the primaries and the voters had known all these negatives about him, Hillary would be leading with delegate counts as well. The super delegates know this! It’s their goal to actually win the presidential race, and why Hillary will be nominated as the most electable candidate, regardless of the shrill Barack supporters.

  • April 22, 2008

    8:42 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    rjnova writes:

    Media people are on a fools mission. You are working to elect Obama because he is black and liberal and then will scream to high heavens when he is passed over crying that this country is too racist to elect a black man. Hillary will probably be the Democrats nominee and she will sink Obama not the Repubs. The man is an intellectual light weight. It is only peripherally significant that he is black. His main problem is that he is devoid of any ideas but those of the Democrats to fabricate a rich/poor divide, which is silly--people are interested in living their life and the fact that Bill Gates makes millions of dollars a year to my few thousands does not bother me in the least.

    I am actually pulling for Obama because he is less electable than Ole Hill. This country is not going to elect Bill Clinton's wife and certainly not going to elect an Osama Obama president.

  • April 22, 2008

    9:04 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    CWW writes:

    I'm totally enjoying Operating Chaos.

  • April 22, 2008

    12:18 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    Lewlew writes:

    rjnove, I assume you want people to call you by your correct name however, you choose to call Barack Obama, Osama Obama. Are you stupid, dumb or racist? Most likely a closet racist.

  • April 22, 2008

    2:37 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    rjnova writes:

    None of the above LewLew but may I ask the same of you? To answer your question I do not trust the man because his liberal/leftist background does not instill any sense of confidence that he will defend this country from Islamist terrorists. He is a talker not a doer. I am sure he will sit down with the terrorists and bemoan the fact that the US has a history of doing bad things and he feels for their grief. To hell with them. They only understand killing and that is what we should give them.

  • April 22, 2008

    3:15 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    notknowitall writes:

    To all of you leaning towards the Clintons-What don't you understand about the theory that it won't be Hillary you will be electing but Billy seeking another term. I don't trust the man and Hillary is even worse of a liar than he is. Dodging sniper bullets??? If you have ever been shot at you never forget the fear you feel.
    I was in Nam and got shot at - to this day I still remember - it isn't something you ever forget and yet make light of. Liar Hillary!