WHEN Barack Obama spent his last evening before the Nevada caucus addressing a
rally at the Nevada University student union, he was conforming to the
caricature the Clintons have painted of him as the candidate of the
well-educated liberal elite, rather than the sons and daughters of toil –
or, as Americans prefer to call them, the hard-working middle class.
It did not help when he told voters that he had bought his wife a glass of
champagne the night before on her 44th birthday. “I didn’t realise you could
pay that much for a glass of champagne in Las Vegas,” he joked. “If I had
known how much it would cost, I'd have had a sip.”
Obama proved, however, that he was just as determined to fight for votes in
Nevada as Hillary Clinton. The battle unleashed some of the dirtiest
politics of the election, leaving the two candidates spattered with mud and
Clinton triumphant as they hurtle towards the Democratic primary in South
Carolina this Saturday.
There were rowdy scenes at Caesar’s Palace and other casino sites as the
caucuses began. The acrimony spilled into accusations of voter intimidation
and name-calling, disputes over President Ronald Reagan’s legacy and charges
of inexperience on both sides, with a nasty racial undertone perilously
close to the surface.
Clinton reached out to blue-collar voters in their workplaces and shored up
her base among women by appealing for their sympathy over the scandal of
Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern who had an affair with her husband
Bill when he was president.
“I never doubted Bill’s love for me ever,” she claimed on daytime television,
adding that she respected the right of every woman to make her own decision
about how to respond to an unfaithful husband.
After her victory in Nevada, she hopes to wrap up the presidential nomination
by Super Tuesday on February 5, when more than 20 states go to the polls.
The candidate of the “beer-drinkers” traditionally beats that of the
“wine-drinkers” – as her two victories in a row have shown – but the old
rules could still be upended by the injection of race into the debate.
When Obama won the backing of the Culinary Workers Union, which organises the
housemaids, waiters and bell-hops on the gaudy Las Vegas casino strip, he
proved he had some unexpected muscle among working-class and Hispanic voters
– key voting blocs in big states such as California, which supplies
one-tenth of the delegates to the Democratic party’s nominating convention.
The union’s preference for Obama was a threat to Clinton’s election machine
that she dared not leave unchallenged. She hit back with claims that the
union had been intimidating voters into supporting Obama and complained
about a union-funded Spanish language advertisement that called her
“shameless” and disrespectful towards Hispanic people.
One cook alleged that a union representative took away her voter registration
card when she said she was supporting Clinton, although she later admitted
her English was poor and it might have been a misunderstanding.
Clinton instantly went on the warpath, claiming that voters had been told,
“they shouldn’t come or can’t support the candidate of their choice”. She
further alleged that workers were threatened with the sack if they did not
back Obama, but did not provide any examples.
An irascible Bill Clinton claimed to have personally witnessed voter
suppression by union officials with daughter Chelsea and lost his temper
when challenged about the lawsuit brought by his wife’s supporters to
prevent casino workers voting at their workplace.
Obama sharpened his own critique of the Clintons by mocking Hillary’s claim of
having more experience than him. In an interview with the San Francisco
Chronicle, he said he presumed it was “through osmosis, as a consequence of
having been first lady” because he saw “no management experience” on her CV.
The Clintons’ attacks served to remind voters that they are fighters – a plus
when it comes to taking on the Republicans – but also evoked unpleasant
memories of how divisive they can be. They forced Obama to spend less time
on inspiring rhetoric and more on the warpath, undermining one of the chief
sources of his appeal to moderate Democrats and independent voters.
He was pilloried by Clinton for drawing on Reagan for inspiration in an effort
to extend his appeal beyond his party. “Reagan changed the trajectory of
America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and Bill Clinton did not,” he
said. He added that Republicans had been the party of ideas in the past 10
to 15 years. Incensed by the slight to her husband as well as Obama’s
ideological heresy, Clinton retorted: “That’s not how I remember the last 10
to 15 years.”
She also dismissed Obama’s credentials to lead the country after he admitted
in a televised debate that his biggest weakness was a messy desk. But he
turned the tables on her by deriding her claim that “my biggest weakness is
I’m so impatient about bringing real change to America”.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the question was about your biggest weakness,” he
said. “That’s what happens when you’re in Washington too long. You don’t
speak English any more.” David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist who is
steeped in the tough politics of Chicago, blamed the Clintons for the
negative tone of the contest. He said he was disappointed to see the former
president “descend from the high place he’s been and become an attack dog”.
He also alleged that anonymous leaflets were circulating at the university
rally calling Obama the candidate of the “casino bosses”.
In the crowd Sean Hobart, 37, an Obama supporter and stay-at-home father,
said: “I used to be a big admirer of the Clintons but they’ve been dirtying
the pool. I’m seeing them do things I used to defend them over when they
were in power.” But he was pessimistic about Obama’s long-term prospects of
winning the nomination: “We’re seeing the same old political machine at work
that used to wag the dog.”
Axelrod conceded that Obama faced a difficult road ahead, particularly among
Hispanic voters. “We’re just not as familiar [to them],” he said. “We need
to build a familiarity and it’s a challenge, because we don’t have much
time.”
Rosena Lamell, 25, an African-American who works for a travel company in Las
Vegas, said the Clintons had the same relationship with Hispanics that they
used to have with black people: “She’s been going into their communities
door to door, just as she did with us in the 1990s, but we have our own
candidate now. It’s all a facade. You can tell because as soon as Obama
became a threat, she started to twist and turn every word he said.”
The most poisonous row continues to be about race. The issue blew up when
Clinton appeared to belittle Martin Luther King as a civil rights dreamer
rather than a doer, and was inflamed when one of her leading black
supporters baited Obama by drawing attention to his use of drugs as a young
man.
The Republicans were beginning to dream of waltzing off with the main prize
while the Democrats fell out over race and gender. But if the behaviour of
the two Democrat camps seemed suicidal, it was because the stakes are so
high. African-American voters could still tilt the race in Obama’s favour,
but at the risk of sending anxious white voters in Clinton’s direction.
William Galston, an elections expert at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, said: “There has been a pattern in the Democratic party going
back 50 years between upscale reformers and ‘regulars’, who are more
interested in material issues.” From Adlai Stevenson to Gary Hart, Paul
Tsongas, Bill Bradley and, in 2004, Howard Dean, the reformers have always
lost.
“Barack Obama fits into that tradition with one salient exception,” said
Galston. “African-American voters have always been with the ‘regulars’ but,
if they are with Obama, it changes the balance of power. It is very nearly
an even fight, the most even I have seen in my lifetime. This is going to be
one for the history books.”
Both camps have got out their calculators for Super Tuesday. Clinton’s
advisers believe they are on a clear path to win the greatest number of
delegates and “super delegates”, made up of Democratic party notables, who
wield the voting power at the Democrats’ national convention.
Doug Hattaway, a Clinton strategist, said in Las Vegas: “This is a national
campaign. We like to win and get the momentum, of course, but it is not so
much about that as racking up the delegates at the convention.”
States such as California with 441 delegates and New York, Clinton’s home
state as senator, with 281, traditionally dominate the convention, but their
influence may be partially offset this year by Obama’s increasing strength
among African-American voters in the south.
Larry Sabato, professor of politics at University of Virginia, believes that
Obama has the potential to put together a winning coalition but it is
proving to be too fragile to withstand the Clintons’ attacks.
“Obama has been getting the support of a large majority of African-Americans
and a substantial number of white voters who are a little more conservative
and attracted by the idea of a uniter,” he said.
Sabato suggests that the Clintons have been playing the race card against
Obama in the hope of driving a “wedge” between black and white voters: “It
is so obvious what they’re doing. They’re telling African-American voters,
‘You know an African-American can’t win so vote for us as the next best
thing’, and telling white voters, ‘Look, these people are trying to take
over. Is that what you want?’ ”
There are signs that white working-class voters in Nevada shifted towards
Clinton, including previously Hillary-resistant men. At a rally at a paint
company in Las Vegas, Jerald Connor went to shake her hand. Connor, 42,
voted for Bush in 2004 because he supports the military, but he is now more
concerned about the economy. “My fiancée has just told me that she’s going
to vote for Hillary as well and she used to support the Republicans,” he
said.
Connor drew the line at supporting Obama, repeating the increasingly common
smear spread by viral e-mails that the Illinois senator could be the
“Manchurian” candidate – a reference to the film in which the president is a
sleeper agent for the communists. “A lot of people will vote against him
just because his middle name is Hussein.”
At the same time, some black voters have turned against Clinton because of
perceived slights to their race as well as pride in Obama’s performance.
Nearly half the electorate in South Carolina is composed of African-Americans,
presenting the first important test of Obama’s strength in his own
community. Georgia, a Super Tuesday state with 103 delegates, is another
crucial prize. Polls in the state show Obama with a slender three-point lead
over Clinton. He is due at an Atlanta church service today.
Shirley Franklin, the mayor of Atlanta, has endorsed Obama, but the Clintons
still believe they can win the state. Bill Clinton will be arriving tomorrow
and his wife will speak in Atlanta next week.
The Clintons are supported by powerful members of Georgia’s black
establishment, including Andrew Young, a former US ambassador to the United
Nations. He caused a stir recently when he claimed that Bill Clinton was
“every bit as black as Barack” because “he’s probably gone with more black
women”.
Older black people are more cautious than the young about shifting their
allegiance to the relatively untested Obama.
It is theoretically possible – if increasingly unlikely – that Obama could win
more states than Clinton on Super Tuesday but that she will win more
delegates. That would boost Obama’s contention that he is best placed to win
the support of independents and disaffected Republicans in a general
election, and would be used to tempt the “super delegates” to him.
Clinton’s advisers are having none of that. A win by one delegate is a win,
they say.
