Common Sense Political Thought

For Senator Hillary Clinton, the math just keeps getting worse. She narrowly won in Indiana, and lost big in North Carolina. What the New York Times news analysis below didn’t mention is that, between Indiana and North Carolina, Senator Barack Hussein Obama won 1,506,557 votes to Senator Clinton’s 1,296,194, or 53.8% to 46.2%, between those two candidates.

Options dwindling for Clinton
By ADAM NAGOURNEY, The New York Times
Published: May 7, 2008

In this case, a split was not a draw.

Despite narrowly winning Indiana, while losing North Carolina, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton did not fundamentally improve her chances of securing the Democratic presidential nomination. If anything, Mrs. Clinton’s hopes for overtaking Senator Barack Obama dwindled further on Tuesday night.

For Mr. Obama, the outcome came after a brutal period in which he was on the defensive over the inflammatory comments of his former pastor. That he was able to hold his own under those circumstances should allow him to make a case that he has proved his resilience in the face of questions about race, patriotism and political mettle — the very kinds of issues that the Clinton campaign has suggested would leave him vulnerable in the general election.

Beating Mr. Obama in Indiana, a state he had once been confident of winning, was an achievement for Mrs. Clinton. But it was hardly the kind of strong victory she posted in Pennsylvania and Ohio. And when paired with his comfortable victory in North Carolina — which Mr. Obama pointedly described in his victory speech as “a big state, a swing state” — it hardly seemed enough for Mrs. Clinton to convince so-called uncommitted superdelegates to rally around her candidacy.

She needed a convincing win, and she just didn’t get it. Yeah, each candidate won one state, but it wasn’t a split decision; Mr Obama won more than 200,000 more total votes than Mrs Clinton, even after some rather poor weeks for him.

The Clinton campaign will make yet another move based on race, because, once again, Mr Obama won a state decisively due to the large black vote: in North Caroline, 33% of the voters are black, and Mr Obama carried them 91% to 6%. But Mrs Clinton carried white voters, who comprised 63% of the Democratic primary voters, 59% to 36%. The racial breakdown was similar in Indiana, but blacks comprised only 14% of the primary voters there.

It is inevitable. Mrs Clinton’s campaign will point to things like this:

And in Indiana, for example, less than half of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election, while one-third said they would vote for Mr. McCain. About one-fifth of Mr. Obama’s supporters in Indiana said they would vote for Mr. McCain in a general election should Mrs. Clinton get the nomination.

Any way you slice it, that’s a race-based response. Perhaps the following line will give the superdelegates some pause:

Many of those Democrats can probably be expected to stay with their party in the end, but the figures suggest the intensity of the passion dividing Clinton and Obama supporters at the moment and the challenge facing the eventual nominee in uniting the party.

There’s an interesting sideshow building.

Still, in a sign of where the Clinton campaign is going, her aides are asserting that the winner will need 2,209 delegates, not 2,025. That higher number reflects the full inclusion of Florida and Michigan, which held their primaries before the date permitted by the Democratic Party.

I guess that’s why 2 + 2 = 4¼!

But it leaves an interesting problem: for Mrs Clinton to get Florida and Michigan to count, she’ll need to win a floor vote. It’s difficult to see Mr Obama’s people, if they go in with 2,025 or more delegates, allowing the Florida and Michigan delegates’ votes to count if doing so would then give the nomination to Mrs Clinton!

Let’s be blunt here: Mrs Clinton cannot win the nomination without an extremely bitter and polarizing remainder of the campaign, exactly the kind of thing which will cause black voters to stay at home come November. Oh, not all of them, certainly, but enough to worry the superdelegates, who have their own campaigns to consider. And teh Democratic Party can’t stand that.

There’s only one relistic outcome at this point: the superdelegates will get together, probably in June, perhaps by videoconference so that there won’t be a big, public meeting, and they’ll cut the cord, giving Mr Obama the nomination. There will still be a lot of people who want to see Mrs Clinton win the nomination, but it’ll come down to one thing: do these people have greater loyalty to the Democratic Party, or to the Clintons?

In the end, there’s only one possible answer. The only question is: are the Clintons willing to keep tearing apart the party to try to win?