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LITTWIN: Clinton makes clear that it's not all over, least of all the shouting

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published March 4, 2008 at 11:43 p.m.
Updated March 5, 2008 at 2:53 a.m.

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Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, greet supporters at a rally in San Antonio. Obama suffered a setback in his efforts to drive Clinton out of the race.

Photo by Ben Sklar / Getty Images

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, greet supporters at a rally in San Antonio. Obama suffered a setback in his efforts to drive Clinton out of the race.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrates during a primary election night party in Columbus, Ohio. Jubilant supporters cheered her wins in Ohio and Rhode Island.

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Afp/Getty Images

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrates during a primary election night party in Columbus, Ohio. Jubilant supporters cheered her wins in Ohio and Rhode Island.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, greet supporters at a rally in San Antonio. Obama suffered a setback in his efforts to drive Clinton out of the race.

Photo by Ben Sklar / Getty Images

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, greet supporters at a rally in San Antonio. Obama suffered a setback in his efforts to drive Clinton out of the race.

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrates during a primary election night party in Columbus, Ohio. Jubilant supporters cheered her wins in Ohio and Rhode Island.

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Afp/Getty Images

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton celebrates during a primary election night party in Columbus, Ohio. Jubilant supporters cheered her wins in Ohio and Rhode Island.

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The big question in the Democratic primary has become this:

What do you believe in - momentum or math?

If you believe in momentum, you believe Hillary Clinton still has a chance. She stopped Barack Obama's 11-contest win streak coming into Tuesday by winning in Ohio, by squeaking by in Texas and by winning (squeak-free) in tiny Rhode Island.

It's not exactly Big Mo - but it is, at minimum, some kind of Mo - and, for the first time in a long time, Clinton got to talk about winning.

She needed wins more than she needed delegates. She needed wins to have a chance to convince those superdelegates - and the superdelegates keep getting increasingly super as we get deeper into the race - that she still has a chance.

What she still has to explain, though, is how she plans to turn these popular-vote victories - with the delegate count still undetermined - into the Democratic nomination.

The math is still against her - way against her. Go to slate.com's online delegate calculator. The Obama people like to talk about the "cold, hard reality" of the numbers.

I did the numbers. They're as cold as a primary night in Cleveland.

The Obama campaign expects to win the delegate count here in Texas, in any case. And, more than that, they expect to pick up more delegates in the course of a week - in Wyoming on Saturday and Mississippi next Tuesday - than they lost in Ohio.

"I think Vermont (which Obama won) and Rhode Island are a wash," said Obama communications director Robert Gibbs as Obama spoke to supporters outside the Municipal Auditorium here in San Antonio.

"And by next week, we'll have a bigger lead than we do now. This is a math problem."

Clinton isn't talking about delegate counts these days. What Clinton has to talk about is, yes, hope.

Here's the money line from Clinton's speech in Ohio: "For anyone in Ohio or America who's ever been counted out but refused to be knocked out, for everyone who has stumbled but stood right back up, for everyone who worked hard and never gives up, this one is for you."

This is how much a campaign can change in a single night.

Clinton is now officially the candidate of hope - with the soaring rhetoric, I assume, yet to come. (In his speech, by the way, Barack Obama talked about delegate math first. It is a new day.)

But here's why it may not matter how the rest of us do the math. What really matters, in a sense, is how Clinton - who was an "A" student - does the arithmetic herself. After all, no one is talking about the Texas two-step math anymore. There's a whole new story line. Clinton gets to make the case, with some results to go with it, that she has won the big states. Now all she has to do is, well, win a lot more states.

This was a night when Obama thought he could put Clinton away. But if Clinton thinks she has hope, the race goes on.

If Clinton has hope, she really believes those superdelegates will really vote for her, no matter what the pledged delegate math says.

If she has hope, she plans to go on. And on. And on. (I hear it's beautiful in Scranton, Pa., in April. If Obama didn't stop Clinton here, there's nothing to stop her before the Pennsylvania primary April 22.)

If she has hope, there's even hope that this race could still go all the way to the convention in Denver. Hope is not, however, the only thing in Clinton's message. In fact, her message has gone increasingly negative against Obama.

I can see Howard Dean screaming - for real, this time. What concerns Dean, and every other Democratic leader, is if Clinton continues to go negative, but a wounded Obama emerges as the winner anyway.

And here's an easy prediction, it's going to get nastier. And, given that going negative may have given Clinton the edge on this night, it could get nastier still.

The Obama people have noticed. In what may be a first, an Obama adviser crashed a Clinton conference call Tuesday night with reporters, in which the Clinton campaign was alleging voting irregularities.

This was Obama's toughest night in the campaign since New Hampshire, in which Clinton pulled her major upset. And it showed that Clinton has found a way to get at Obama. There will be more late-night phone calls. We'll hear more about NAFTA and Canada. The Tony Rezko trial will make its own headlines.

And Obama will say something like this, "See, this is what I warned you about. Do you want another eight years of this kind of bickering?"

Nobody could be happier about this line of questioning than John McCain, who clinched the Republican nomination Tuesday night and, in a show of true bravery, goes to the White House today to embrace George Bush - the president with the 30-percent approval rating.

McCain swept the night on the way to the nomination. In the process, he becomes a values tale - of the presidential candidate who wouldn't give up, no matter the odds against him.

I'm sure that nobody is paying closer attention to that message than presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com.

Comments

  • March 5, 2008

    9:10 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    Don_Lopez writes:

    Can Senator Clinton win the Democrat presidential nomination without splitting her party apart or at least alienating those who support Senator Obama?

    I don’t think so either. A shared ticket? When pigs fly!

    Senator Obama still has more delegates than Senator Clinton even after “losing” Ohio and Texas and that is unlikely to change between now and the Democrat’s convention this summer.

    So what should Democrat’s do now?

    It would be nice if Senator Clinton bowed out gracefully but grace is not a quality closely associated with either Clinton.

    What Democrats are facing is a loss this November and an irreparable tear in their Big Tent.

  • March 5, 2008

    3:45 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    samsmargolis writes:

    Huh. I posted a comment here earlier with a direct question to Littwin and actually viewed the comment earlier to see if any replies had posted - nice that you had it removed Littwin. Guess only sympathizers to your point of view are allowed to post a reply, right? Why bother having a commentary area if you're going to pull comments that make you uncomfortable? Please - feel free to continue your editorial leg-humping of Obama (and culling of messages that you find distasteful) from every conceivable angle because you couldn't possibly make more of an ass out of yourself at this point.

  • March 5, 2008

    5:56 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    arby writes:

    Go gettim Sam! I liked the leg humping.

  • March 5, 2008

    8:54 p.m.

    Suggest removal

    BJG writes:

    Littwin:
    I think all reporters should first disclose who they are going to vote for, so that we, the readers, can then know who is trying to brainwash us with their propaganda. Of course Littwin needen't waste the ink as we all know that Obama is his man. And Mike just loves him so.

  • March 6, 2008

    12:01 a.m.

    Suggest removal

    mike_littwin writes:

    Sam,
    Wow, you are one angry guy. Your post was on a previous version of this column. For some reason, two versions were posted on the Web. Go to my column headlined "Momentum, math and the Big Mo" and your post is right there.

    I've never removed a comment. Don't even know how to remove a comment. If you read my column -- as I guess you do - you'd notice that there are critical comments following many (most?) of them. I think it's great that the readers have a forum -- even the angry ones.