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The online reaction to Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad has
ranged from analytical
to rebutting
to outright mocking.
But what were people thinking as they watched it for the first time?
There’s a new “Damned Spot” video
up on Slate V that shows an audience's real-time reaction to the ad. Of the 554 viewers, the Clinton supporters are
generally approving. Undecided voters and Obama supporters are neutral and
vaguely disapproving, respectively, for most of the ad. But notice how their
opinions plummet the second Hillary’s mug appears onscreen at the end. It looks
more like visceral instinct than rational response.
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By Christopher Beam and Chadwick Matlin
By everyone’s account, March 4 is a fork in the road. But it’s a fork with all sorts of twisted, intersecting prongs. And because the primary has gone on so long, everyone from voters to pundits to the candidates themselves will be hypersensitive to every datum that emerges from the day’s four primaries. What does it mean if Obama saps Hillary’s strength among Latinos in southern Texas? How should we interpret a Clinton surge among Vermont’s Ben and Jerry’s-swilling college population? And what of the all-important left-handed female Catholic immigrants who voted between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m.?
We could spend all day dissecting all the mini-scenarios. Instead, let’s take a look at some of the broad situations that might play out over the next few days.
Scenario 1: Hillary wins Texas and Ohio.
a) She wins both big. Clinton would be back in the game, even if Obama wins Vermont. “Momentum” narrative would swing back her way, catapulting her into the long the stretch until Pennsylvania on April 22 (even if she loses in Wyoming and Mississippi next week). Her campaign may also prove it can pull off the decisive victories needed to make up Obama’s delegate lead.
b) She wins both narrowly. She would stick around, but pressure to exit the race would build. Much would depend on whether superdelegates swing toward her or Obama after the race—if Edwards or Richardson endorsed her, she’d still here to stay. If they went to Obama, Hillary could bow out. Still, her victories would raise questions about Obama’s ability to win big, Democrat-rich states in the general election.
c) She wins Ohio and Texas primaries, but loses Texas caucus. We would see another battle of semantics. Clinton would claim to have won Texas and would raise hell about the system being unfair. (Lawsuit, anyone?) Obama would argue it’s “about delegates.” Clinton would likely stay in the race, but the next few weeks would be long and bloody.
Scenario 2: Split decision: Clinton loses in Texas, wins Ohio.
If Obama's judgment-over-experience narrative works in Texas but the NAFTA flap dooms him in Ohio, things get messy very quickly. Clinton has the money to stick around, but with the GOP race settled, Democrats will be hankering for a nominee. Odds are she'll leave us within a week. But if she convinces superdelegates to resist Obama, she may have bought enough time to survive the span between Mississippi (March 11) and Pennsylvania (April 22). In that case, she could assume John Edwards' middle-class avenger mantle and campaign hard on a populist message. However, her biggest obstacle could be her own husband—Bill said Hillary had to win both Ohio and Texas or the gig was up.
Scenario 3: Obama beats her—twice.
a) Obama wins big. By "big," we mean a margin of seven or more points. Confronted with Obama's come-from-behind victory, daunting delegate math, and likely superdelegate defections, Clinton would have to ring her own death knell. We may even see a full concession speech Tuesday night. Even Bill would start endorsing Obama—and he’s a superdelegate.
b) Obama ekes out two wins. If it's a squeaker, Clinton will probably meditate on things for a bit. The delegate math will still be overwhelming, but she may be able to spin the narrow losses as ties that got out of hand. The press and Democratic Party officials won't buy this argument, but her supporters may. If she doesn't drop out quickly, look for previously sheepish superdelegates to flock to Obama as all of his high-profile surrogates start calling for Clinton to bail. Once that happens, it's only a matter of time—whether or not Clinton admits it.
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A lot of people have replied to Friday’s “Fuzzy Math” item about the Obama campaign’s claim that if there’s a tie on March 4, Clinton would have to win 75 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to catch up with Obama’s 162-delegate lead. The general feeling was that Plouffe meant to say she would have to win 75 percent of the popular vote rather than 75 percent of pledged delegates.
Two things. First, Plouffe was pretty explicit in the original conference call that he was talking about pledged delegates, which an Obama spokesman later confirmed. Second, and more important, I wanted to clear up a misconception about popular votes vs. delegate percentages.
It’s been conventional wisdom here and elsewhere that the bizarre Democratic delegate-selection system means that in the primaries, large leads in the popular vote often produce small leads in terms of delegates. But if you take a look at the Democratic primary results so far, the percentage of the popular vote a candidate wins is usually within a couple points of the percentage of pledged delegates they win. (Note that this doesn’t include caucuses, where you can only estimate turnout.)
Take CNN’s numbers. (These counts, on the individual state pages, include pledged delegates only.) In Georgia, Clinton won 31 percent of the popular vote; meanwhile, she won 30 percent of the state’s pledged delegates. In California, she won 52 percent of the popular vote and 56 percent of the delegates. In Massachusetts, she won 56 percent of the popular vote and 59 percent of delegates. The numbers in just about every other state follow the same pattern.
In some states, the percentage of delegates won was even larger than the percentage of the popular vote won. In Arkansas, for example, Clinton won 70 percent of the popular vote and 77 percent of the delegates.
I was a little surprised to discover this, given all we’ve seen and heard about how the Democrats’ proportional-allocation system makes it impossible to open up a wide delegate lead. Also, keep in mind that caucuses work differently, so Texas, with its oddball primary/caucus hybrid, is likely to produce different numbers in the popular vote and delegate count. But the general trend debunks claims that Plouffe was talking about popular vote rather than delegate percentages. (Plus, even if he had been, there’s no formula for converting popular vote to pledged delegates anyway.) The fact is, if Clinton won roughly 75 percent of a state’s (or a group of states’) popular vote, she would win roughly that percentage of their delegates, too.
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Barack Obama has a problem.
After reams of denials, it turns out that his top economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, did in fact meet with officials of the Canadian Consulate in Chicago. The substance of that meeting is still in dispute—according to a memo written by a Canadian official, Goolsbee cautioned them that Obama’s strong opposition to NAFTA “should not be taken out of context and should be viewed as more about political positioning than a clear articulation of policy plans.” Goolsbee, who has written for Slate, says he “certainly did not use that phrase in any way.”
The problem is not so much that Obama has said one thing about NAFTA to Ohio and another to Canada. As we argued last week, it was always implicit that he doesn’t hate free trade quite as much as he now claims. (Also, Goolsbee is right that Obama has emphasized reforming labor and environmental standards more than overhauling the entire agreement.) What disturbs most about the whole affair is the pattern of blanket denials issued by the Obama campaign—denials that were at the time implausible and now, in retrospect, borderline indefensible.
When confronted with questions about the specifics of Goolsbee’s communication with Canadian officials, Obama spokesman Bill Burton repeated that “the story is not true”—as if denying everything would excuse him even if some details turned out to be true. Goolsbee himself told the Observer’s Jason Horowitz that “[i]t is a totally inaccurate story. I did not call these people and I direct you to the press office.” Saying that he “did not call these people” could be an example of fine-tipped parsing—“these people” could be referring to the Canadian embassy, not the consulate in Chicago; he could also be saying that he did not “call” them, but he did meet with them. Either way, it is, by any reasonable human being’s definition, extremely misleading, if not a downright lie.
It’s impossible to know how much the campaign knew. Perhaps professor Goolsbee wasn’t totally straightforward with them about who he met with and what he said. And maybe Goolsbee is right that the memo mischaracterizes his remarks. But by initially denying the story flat out, the Obama campaign allowed the press to poke small holes in the blanket which have now been teased into large ones. Obama didn’t need a bad press day 24 hours before polls open. But one thing his campaign can’t deny is that they brought this on themselves.