This is the second half of a two-part post. In the first post, I took stock of the race. This post is my humble attempt to read the tea leaves, and discern where we're headed.
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There's an old truism about presidential candidates: they never give up, they just run out of money. By that measure, we're a long way from the finish line. The Obama campaign has said it's presently pulling in more than $1 million each day, and just revised its January haul up to $36 million. (My own guess is that they'll handily top that amount in February, but that David Plouffe has belatedly realized it's not wise to goad Hillary's supporters into donating ever more to her campaign by trumpeting his daily totals.) The Clinton folks were proud to announce that in the fifteen days since Super Tuesday, they've pulled in $15 million. So both campaigns will be amply funded through March 4, and likely well beyond.
That said, I'll stand by my earlier prognostication. In making the case for her continued viability, Hillary wrote off the contests in February, and placed her chips on the March 4 contests. There's a general consensus in the party that she ought to have a fair crack at those elections, a final chance to prove that she can turn the race around. When the results from the four March 4 states are tallied and the delegate hauls projected, it won't take CNN's nifty touch-screen or any complicated math to explain to voters where the race stands. Shortly thereafter, we'll see the superdelegates begin to close ranks around Obama, in an effort to build consensus and shift the focus to the general election.
So the question that concerns me this morning is this: What sort of a campaign will unfold over the next two weeks, as Hillary prepares to make her final stand? We already have some inkling that the answer will be, "Increasingly ugly."
There are, if you will, three commandments that ought to be equally binding on both candidates as the race enters its final phase.
Thou Shalt Not Slander:
It's already apparent that this race is taking a dive into increasingly negative territory. Clinton's advisers couldn't wait to tell reporters that she'll adopt "a tougher line" in an effort to redefine her rival. Obama, meanwhile, intends to harp on Clinton's support for free trade. That's fine, even healthy. I happen to believe that this vigorous contest for the nomination has proven, well, invigorating for the Democratic Party. Voters are listening to the candidates debate the issues, donating and volunteering in record-shattering numbers, and turning out to vote at rates rarely seen. The more the candidates engage with each other, the more their supporters engage with the process.
But that's only true to the extent that the contrasts being drawn are truthful. When a candidate stoops to distorting a rival's record, it harms the attacker's credibility, the victim's approval ratings, and the party's chances in November. We've seen some of this already. Obama is way out of line when his mailers claim that Hillary thought NAFTA had provided a "boon," placing quotes around the word. The Clintons were wrong to suggest that Obama was a Reagan fan, much less that he supported his policies. And we're going to see more of it, simply because these attacks tend to work. No correction ever erases the damage done by the initial claim. This primary race ought to be won on the merits. Both candidates have the chance to draw fair, meaningful contrasts based solely on the public record. Let's hope they do.
Thou Shalt Not Challenge the Legitimacy of the Process:
When the party chooses its nominee, it is vital that all Americans believe that the process used to select the candidate was fair and transparent. As I've noted, there are abundant flaws with the process. The important thing, for this cycle, is that we recognize that it's the only process that we've got. It's well worth revising for future cycles, but challenging the rules half-way through the game is corrosive.
The Obama campaign isn't blameless here. Various campaign advisers have suggested that the superdelegates ought to follow the expressed will of voters in their districts, their states, or the nation. There's a fine line between making a case to superdelegates that they ought to vote for Obama, and suggesting that a failure to vote for the man constitutes a perversion of the process, and the campaign has occasionally strayed across it.
That said, there's simply no question that the prime offender here is the Clinton campaign. The candidate herself has challenged the legitimacy of the caucus results. Of the scheduling rules and related penalties approved by the DNC. Of Obama's victories in states with large black populations, or in those which routinely vote for Republicans. Her surrogates and supporters are now suggesting that we might attempt to discern the will of only those voters who self-identify as Democrats. This is pernicious, it's destructive, and it's wrong. It also happens to be petty, and I suspect that, far from sustaining the rational for her candidacy, it has undermined her credibility with large segments of the electorate.
We started this primary process with a badly-flawed set of rules, but that's how it is. Both candidates need to refrain from challenging the rules; the most these attacks can accomplish is tainting the victory of the eventual nominee.
Thou Shalt Not Use Race or Gender as a Wedge:
Black voters (who overwhelmingly support Democrats) and women (who trend more modestly Democratic, but compose more than half of all voters) are the twin pillars on which the party is built. Alienate either constituency, and the prospects for a win in November grow decidedly gloomy.
In an ideal world, both candidates would make their appeal to the voters by transcending identity politics. But we don't live in that world. Obama's dominance among black voters is a political phenomenon, virtually without precedent, and it presents a terrible temptation to the Clinton campaign. Without hope or prospect of making inroads among African Americans, there's very little to restrain the Clintons from exploiting the racial divide that afflicts our nation, other than their own moral judgment. The dynamics, as it happens, work differently with gender. Obama needs to tread very carefully around the issue, as he woos women to the polls, but he enjoys a healthy lead among male voters that has propelled him to many of his victories. Here, it's more of a positive commandment than a negative injunction - Obama must do more than he already has to reach out to women voters, particularly those left feeling embittered by Hillary's loss, and convince them that he can be as effective an advocate for the issues they care about as she has been.
I suspect that, after South Carolina, the Clinton campaign resolved not to raise the issue of race explicitly. But there's no question that it's still being deployed with regularity on the ground level, particularly in states with substantial Hispanic populations. The key example is Texas, where the Clinton campaign has been decrying the primary system as stacked against Hispanic voters in favor of large, urban districts - a construction of the issue that suggests black and brown voters are in a zero-sum game, and that Hispanics are losing their fair share of the delegates to African Americans. That's a particularly shameful argument to make, in that it violates both the second and third of our commandments.
Without temptation, commandments would be unnecessary. But both candidates need to resist temptation: Obama, the temptation to take women for granted, and Clinton, the temptation to write off black voters and (however subtly) exploit racial divisions. Let's hope they're equal to the challenge.
Arbiters of the Rules:
We needn't rely on goodwill or luck to enforce these three commandments. Both candidates, for the moment, are beholden to the Democratic establishment for support. Without superdelegates, neither can realistically win the nomination. We've already seen efforts among the uncommitted superdelegates to agree upon a common metric for determining the winner. I'd like to see those efforts expanded to include some clear ground rules about how the contest ought to be waged.
And then there's the invisible man - DNC Chair Howard Dean. The candidates are supposed to be focused on winning the nomination; Dean is supposed to have the interests of the party at heart. He should be taking forceful action to ensure that the candidates behave, and that their campaigns are making the party stronger, and not tearing it apart. There's a chance here to keep this primary relatively clean, and to make it the most remarkable and effective organizing tool we've ever seen. Let's not blow it.
If you've enjoyed this, please share it with other readers by clicking the 'recommend this' link. You can find more analysis, including the first part of this post, on my blog. As always, I welcome comments and corrections. And thanks to all who have responded.
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