Wait, Clinton Does Have a Shot?
Hillary Clinton is screwed. Oh wait, she has a chance.
Actually, she’s screwed again. Hold up, she’s about to win!
The media can’t seem to make up its mind. Now, in the
post-Pennsylvania lull, journalists are deciding that in fact Clinton can
win. Over at The Fix, Chris Cillizza maps
out her path to the nomination. The
Wall Street Journal’s A1 proclaims,
“Clinton Win Stirs Doubts on Obama.” The New
York Times discusses
Obama’s “struggle to win over key blocs.”
Here’s what I don’t understand about all this: Clinton
was going to win Pennsylvania all along, just
as she was always going to win Ohio and Obama
is going to win North Carolina.
The only huge upset in this race has been New Hampshire. Otherwise, demographics have
decided everything. Sure, Obama is having trouble winning over “key voting blocs”
like seniors and the white working class. But that has been the story of this race
all along.
To be sure, the fact that voters aren’t coalescing around
Obama might worry some superdelegates. What
does it mean that he can’t “close the deal”? Democrats are used to having
the nominee decided early in the race, so the ongoing split is seen as a
weakness. The biggest concerns center on the fear that Clinton voters will ditch Obama for McCain. But
there’s evidence that abandonment cuts both ways. The Times piece points out that Pennsylvania
exit polls show “69 percent of white Democrats would vote for Mr. Obama in a
general election campaign over Mr. McCain; 73 percent of black Democrats said
they would vote for Mrs. Clinton over Mr. McCain.” That’s not a huge
difference.
But more importantly, the landscape is guaranteed to change
by November, and supers know this. McCain will make some dumb comments, as
would Clinton
were she to win the nomination. For superdelegates to shift to Clinton now on vague “electability”
grounds despite the delegate count would require a supreme lack of confidence in Obama, not to mention some serious
chutzpah.
Clinton’s
“path
to the nomination,” meanwhile, does exist. She could win Indiana,
raise truckloads of money, find some way to count Florida in the popular vote, and get Obama
to shoot himself repeatedly in both feet. All the while, she needs to run a
perfect campaign. But even then, superdelegates will have to look themselves in
the mirror and justify overturning the presidential victory of the first black
presidential nominee. If, after that, Clinton
somehow lost in November, would Obama’s base ever forgive them?