It’s hard to escape the sense that a lot of Democrats these days are feeling like a guy who bought a car that looked all showroom sparkly and pristine in the photos on eBay, only to have it arrive covered with all sorts of dents and scrapes and spewing oil like an Oklahoma gusher. From the time of Ms. Oby’s grudging admission that she was finally proud of her country to the revelations about Pastor Wright to what seemed to be a fairly condescending analysis of why beaten-down and bitter working-class whites become gun-toting religious fanatics who oppose free trade to the thorough working-over the Illinois senator took from Mrs. C and the guys from ABC during last week’s debate, the once shiny and powerful Obama-mobile seems to have morphed into a rusty, rattling Ford Escort badly in need of a ring job.
From the Obama perspective, the nine-plus points separating him and Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania look pretty good compared to the twenty-point spread of a month ago, but not nearly so sweet as the three- to five-point gap pollsters were reporting as recently as last week. Although his lead over the Billarys has actually stretched out to eight points among Democrats nationally, the most recent Rasmussen poll pitting Oby against John McCain shows his three-point lead in another poll last week has now evaporated into a three-point deficit, putting him in roughly the same position as his Democratic opponent in a head-to-head matchup with the GOP’s forgetful old warrior.
Thanks in no small measure to the extended Chinese Fire Drill that passes for the Democrats’ nominating system, Oby still enjoys what amounts to a commanding lead in pledged delegates, but Hillary’s protagonists are right to point to the fact that her suddenly merely mortal opponent has harvested much of his earlier hay in fields where few Democrats actually graze. More than two-thirds of Oby’s 151 pledged-delegate advantage comes from wins in five Southern and seven Western and Midwestern “fly-over” states where the Democrats lost by margins ranging from 14 to 45 percent in 2004 and where, for the most part, their current prospects appear to reside somewhere between Slim and None, with Slim reportedly on his way out of town.
Hillary, meanwhile, gathered most of her nuts and berries in more traditionally Democratic electoral powerhouses like California, New York, and Pennsylvania, and when she won a Republican state, such as Ohio, she at least picked an important one. In current polls, she actually leads McCain in Ohio, while Obama trails. The same is true in Florida. The demographic breakdown of who backed whom in Pennsylvania looks much as it did in January. Oby’s got blacks and more educated whites while Hillary’s gang consists of blue-collar white men, white women, and old white coots in general. Perhaps suggesting that we, the long-suffering public, have by now enjoyed about all of this campaigning foolishness we can stand, the unfavorable ratings of all the candidates have gone up noticeably in recent weeks, but none have risen more sharply than those of Commando Clinton. Among much-courted Independent voters, over a three-month span she has gone from a 59 percent favorable rating to 58 percent unfavorable. If this keeps up, she’ll soon be dodging real sniper fire in this country.
Although this trend has doubtless long been apparent to the poll-obsessed Clintonistas, Hillary’s willingness to make herself even more of a She-Beast in order to scorch at least some of the Teflon off her opponent’s butt has clearly had some effect. The Barackster meanwhile, has done himself no favors. His response to an increasingly rough-and-tumble campaign has been to appear both whiny and patronizingly weary of it all, impatient to be done with a tedious and protracted process that exposes him to questions he can’t believe anyone would ask and to people who clearly make him uncomfortable.
Apparently, the Billary pitch to the Superdelegates— “We’d like to believe him when he says he isn’t an America-hating Muslim, but he still has a big downside that most folks who voted for him or were coerced into caucuses in his behalf three months ago just couldn’t see”—hasn’t gained much traction at this point. Reduced to pure political calculus, the Super-D’s decision comes down to something like this: ” Do we risk alienating a huge chunk of our most loyal constituency, blacks, because we think that Hillary Clinton is more likely to attract our most-needed but least predictable constituency, blue collar whites?” Even with Democratic voting in the 90 percent-plus range among blacks, southern states have remained effectively unattainable and are likely to remain that way, regardless of the nominee, so it comes down to whether Hillary ‘s greater popularity with working class whites in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio might offset losing the 5 to 7 percent of the total vote that defecting blacks might represent in those states. Unless I really miss my guess, there’s too much “if” in this proposition for the Democratic insidership to chance turning their upcoming convention in Denver into a horrific flashback of what happened in Chicago forty years ago. Slightly more than forty years ago, when pressed to remove F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, LBJ was said to have responded that he would rather have Hoover “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” If the Dems do decide to turn a deaf ear to Hillary’s entreaties, I’d definitely suggest that they get themselves a waterproof tent and keep the flaps pulled tight.
