HOME / politics: Who's winning, who's losing, and why.

The West Virginia PastingIs Obama's lead durable enough to withstand Tuesday's rout?

By John DickersonPosted Tuesday, May 13, 2008, at 10:41 PM ET

When a stunt man falls from a skyscraper, it's hard not to draw a short breath even if you know he's going to land on a puffy air bag. Barack Obama lost West Virginia by 41 points, which looks like an enormous fall. Clinton was favored to win the state, but Obama is the all-but-named nominee. Shouldn't that have prevented such a rout?

RSS

Whether Obama suffered any damage will be determined by the behavior of the superdelegates in the next few days. Will any of them embrace Clinton after her victory? Right now, Obama's cushion seems intact. Even after the West Virginia loss, he leads Clinton in all the metrics that matter: He's ahead in pledged delegates, the popular vote, and states won. This week he overtook Clinton among superdelegates, who continue to march toward him at a regular clip. Unless Clinton can get the delegates from Florida and Michigan seated in her favor—a big longshot—she must reverse the math by convincing more than 70 percent of the remaining superdelegates to initiate Party Armageddon by denying Obama the nomination.

This bad math for Clinton is what made the days before the West Virginia blowout victory seem darker and darker. Her campaign is reportedly $20 million in debt, and she's dipping regularly into her own bank account. The tide of opinion in her party is moving against her. John Edwards warned her hardball tactics risked damaging the party. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, officially neutral, suggested Obama had the nomination all but locked up. So did Clinton supporter James Carville. Former DNC Chairman Roy Romer came out for Obama and said: "There is a time we need to end it and direct ourselves to the general election. I think that time is now." This echoed former presidential candidate George McGovern, who dropped his support of Clinton in favor of Obama.

So, the Democratic race may supply us with the kind of headline you'd expect to see in the Onion: "Clinton Wins in Landslide, Drops Out of Race." Obama is not without flaws. It's just that Clinton can't exploit them in a way that helps her. In the wake of West Virginia, Clinton will claim more evidence for the already overwhelming case that Obama can't win among white working-class voters. Clinton is suggesting Obama is fundamentally dead to these voters and therefore can't compete in the general election against McCain, but the evidence isn't there. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, Obama performs only a little worse among white working-class voters than Hillary Clinton does in matchups against McCain. More broadly, in other surveys, such as a recent Washington Post/ABC poll, he is still running as well or better than Democrats have in the past with white voters. Unless white voters are lying to pollsters consistently and in huge numbers, Obama's problems in the primary don't seem to translate into the general-election campaign.

As the debate plays out with remaining undecided superdelegates, the Obama campaign has other arguments against the big Clinton win. Clinton won impressively in a swing state, but Obama crushed her in the swing states of Colorado, Minnesota, and Virginia.

Obama's problem with white working-class voters does suggest that his powers of persuasion have real limitations. Throughout the campaign, he has touted his ability to reach out to people and to bring them together. His rallies, fundraising, and huge army of volunteers prove he can mobilize many Democracts and some independents as well. But he's been trying to woo working-class whites for months and months—arguably since the start of the campaign—and he can't get a handle on them. This is not an electoral problem, perhaps, but it's a governing problem. How can he make the case for his special ability to rally all Americans of diverse backgrounds and interests, yet have such a big problem with one group? For a while, Obama's supporters said that the more voters got to know him, the more they were disposed to vote for him, which suggested a powerful ability to sway people of all types. They don't make that case any more.

In her Tuesday victory speech, Clinton didn't sound like a candidate who is giving up. She made the case for including the Florida and Michigan delegations and continued to draw sharp contrasts with her Democratic opponent. She didn't mention Obama by name, but argued that he couldn't represent the party's core values and win in swing states.

The Obama team, by contrast, was praising Clinton's win everywhere. None of his advisers, even with the protection of anonymity, were making the case that she'd won by playing the race card or were trashing her in any other way. They know that the best way to keep her in the race is to appear that they are trying to force her out of it. There was no visible sense of tension and urgency in their response. It almost seemed as if they were relaxing on a giant air cushion.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at . Follow him on Twitter.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Something nobody seemed to notice last night. Barack Obama won the Nebraska primary on the same night West Virginia voted. Like West Virginia, Nebraska is a mostly white, mostly rural, mostly working class state; and also like WV its primary was totally irrelevant to the outcome of the Democratic Party nomination.

Watching the talking heads over analyze the Dem primary is like watching a constantly looping episode of the Twilight Zone. A freshman senator is beating the most famous woman in the world and wife of a former president in an intra party election and somehow it's the new guy that's falling short because he's not winning 100% of the vote?

Personally I prefer the racism that comes from ignorance to that which masquerades as intellectual discourse.

--kaizergrande

(To reply, click here.)

The story of the nomination has been Barack Obama beginning strongly, but then losing his Jimmy Carter-like ability to make people think he was saying the right things to them. Hillary Clinton made a comeback. Then, quietly, in caucuses and not especially prominent elections, his organization gathered enough votes to put him in the lead while the public waited for the contest to begin again. And then, with the country paying attention, he lost badly, dramatically in almost every major contest. His reaction: somberly, I have the votes, she can't hurt me.

And there's Hillary Clinton, campaigning while the press gloats over Obama, shouting at the Democratic electorate the race is over, your vote doesn't matter unless you vote for Obama and end the primaries. Low on money, without a good image except for her determination in difficult circumstances, she wins again and again.

Are these votes for her? Yes, to a degree. But a public which has been described as treating politics like a horse race instead of an expression of beliefs and principles, these people are shouting back at the race callers We don't want Obama. You won't force him on us while we can vote.

And so the super delegates will move to Obama against the highly visible trend in Hillary Clinton's favor, making the nomination look like a back room deal ignoring the most dramatic elections. Barack Obama will stand before the general electorate with his wife and his pastor (visible or invisible) and his lapel bare of a flag pin and he will announce: I will unite the country. And those who wanted another candidate, those who wanted someone inspiring rather than a drab player of ordinary politics will wonder where he got that idea.

The press will applaud, the self-righteous elite will speak of the triumph of the country that a black candidate represents. But how many in the public will consider the election already a failure from the Democratic side?

Barack Obama's substantial defeats piled one atop the other are the image of the reaction to his character. And when some people have begun to wonder whether he even likes the US, he has a huge challenge becoming a viable candidate.

--Philidor

(To reply, click here.)

If Hillary were Mike Huckabee, we democrats would definitely be "supporting" his decision to stay in the race, because we would know that it would make McCain look bad. But at the same time, we'd also be able to acknowledge that McCain was going to be the nominee. Moreover, I'm pretty confident that no one would say that Huckabee was doing a "good thing for his party," or even that "he's got game." We'd all be wondering what the heck he was thinking and why nobody was stopping him.

Are Hillary's supporters really willing to say that this year's "identity politics" contest trumps all other values: supporting our party; wanting a democrat in the White House; hoping for change in Washington; hoping to restore America's position in the world; hoping that Americans will remember that we are all citizens of the same great country? Do Hillary's supporters really believe that if the superdelegates reversed the results of the primaries, Obama supporters would just "fall in line"? Those exit polls the MSM keep spouting off about are a canard. Obama's supporters are able to be magnanimous because they trust that he will be the nominee. If they felt the election was "stolen" from them, I think those numbers would change quickly and dramatically.

It's easy to see why Obama didn't want this contest to be about "identity politics," because when you focus on something so volatile and divisive, it's bound to explode and divide. Is that REALLY what we want?

--zebra

(To reply, click here.)

Yes-the Democrats-especially under Obama-will not win in West Virginia. Just as no Republican will win in Massachusetts. Sometimes you need to accept that you cannot win them all and move on. Obama was smart not to waste time in West Virginia and Hillary may have found an easy win here-but come November that may not have been the case either. McCain is military and West Virgnia loves their number one export.

--The Real RML

(To reply, click here.)

Of course, there has been massive discussion about how Appalachia votes different from the rest of the country over the past few weeks. Mapping Appalachia over the state boundaries, we see how that affected Ohio, Pennsylvania, and states further south, which all CONTAIN parts of Appalachia. But WV is squarely inside this mountainous region. There have also been very useful discussions about how we can offer to help this isolated and impoverished region out of their doldrums by making them central to a new green energy and green technology enterprise. It would afford a cultural revolution to this inward-looking enclave of mainly white residents, helping to engage them in a global effort and global economy.

Anthropologists tend to study mountain regions because they preserve themselves, seemingly immune to outside cultural forces, because of their geography. But this population has not had the educational and labor opportunities that could release them and their region culturally, and provide a contribution of labor and skills for the upcoming energy programs of the 21st century. Their attitudes remain remarkably ugly towards anyone not like them culturally, racially, and economically. This involvement in a broader national and global picture, and a renewed sense of pride in themselves, would be one of the main avenues to allow them to catch up with where the rest of the country is moving or has already moved.

--nickyhartzell

(To reply, click here.)

(5/14)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES