WHEN Hillary Clinton started running for president, Sue Whitney, 54, was on
her side. “I thought, Yeah! I’m all for her, but now I’m getting a little
scared.”
Whitney turned up to see Clinton, 60, at a rally at a school in Virginia last
week in the hope of rekindling her enthusiasm. “I guess I’m scared about the
way Barack Obama is moving ahead and taking the lead. I want a candidate who
will be elected and I’m worried some people won’t vote for her either
because she is a woman or they just don’t like her.”
She noticed that on Super Tuesday, when 22 states voted last week: “A lot of
white males went for Obama. It made me wonder whether it is harder to elect
a woman than a black man.” The audience at the school was almost exclusively
made up of middle-aged women, together with a number of polite students who
were quietly for Obama.
Whisper it softly, but Obama, 46, might be heading for victory in the race for
the Democratic presidential nomination. Voters have already thumbed their
noses at most predictions, but Tad Devine, a leading political consultant
who advised Al Gore and John Kerry on their presidential campaigns, said:
“If you ask me who has the advantage today, I’d say Obama.”
The jug-eared senator for Illinois, once derided as a political novice,
battled the year-long frontrunner to a dead heat on Super Tuesday, winning
13 of the 22 states, even though Clinton carried California, the biggest
prize. He is expected to win the crucial “Potomac” primary contests in
Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC (so called after the Potomac river
which splits the region) in two days’ time.
A Time magazine poll showed Obama beating John McCain, the all-but-confirmed
Republican nominee, by 48%-41% because of his strength among independent
voters, whereas Clinton drew even on 46%. “It is hard to run against a
movement,” Vernon Jordan, a veteran ally of the Clintons, sighed.
Peggy Noonan, President Ron-ald Reagan’s former speech-writer, noted in The
Wall Street Journal that Republican professionals could recognise a winner
in the “brilliant young black man”, even if some Democrats had not cottoned
on yet.
“Mrs Clinton is losing this thing. It’s not one big primary, it’s a rolling
loss, a daily one, an inch-by-inch deflation. The trends and indices are not
in her favour,” she said. “She doesn’t have the excitement, the great whoosh
of feeling that accompanies a winning campaign.”
The danger for Clinton is that she could fall into the trap avoided by Obama
over race. She is at risk of becoming the Hallmark Channel candidate - the
women-friendly station she paid to run her eve-of-election rally last week -
who is admired by women, but spurned by men.
The biggest shock was that she had to lend her own campaign $5m (£2.56m) in
January after Obama raised $32m seemingly effortlessly from small donors
that month. She kept the news quiet before Super Tuesday lest it gave the
impression that her candidacy was floundering. Her rival, whom she chided in
a debate for keeping an untidy desk, had broken the Clintons’ mighty $118m
money machine.
The plane flights where she mingled with journalists, pretending to be their
stewardess and serving them peach cobbler, came about only because she could
no longer afford a separate private plane, it emerged last week. A look at
her financial returns revealed that $18,551.80 had been spent on an “event”
at a Chicago steakhouse, $500,000 on parking fees and nearly $4m on
political consultants in the run-up to Super Tuesday.
Obama’s aides stepped up the pressure this weekend by challenging Clinton to
release her tax records and reveal the source of her personal $5m loan. “For
someone who claims to be fully vetted, hiding a campaign loan from voters
until after Super Tuesday and refusing to release your tax returns until
after the primary doesn’t seem like the best way to prove that there are no
surprises for the Republicans to find once they start digging,” said
spokesman Bill Burton.
Obama warned last week that Republicans would find a new “dump-truck” of
allegations to unload on her should she win and said: “I’ll just say that
I’ve released my tax returns.” The Wall Street Journal has already drawn
attention to the peculiar deal whereby Bill Clinton is set to receive a
payoff of up to $20m from his friend Ron Burkle, his West Coast bachelor
buddy, for severing relations with the Yucaipa group of companies, which are
partly linked to the ruler of Dubai. Clinton believes that Obama will be
“swiftboated” by the Republicans if he wins – a reference to the campaign to
denigrate John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, at the last election. So far,
investigations into Obama’s drug use as a young man have produced few shock
revelations. The New York Times reported yesterday that university friends
regarded him as a model of moderation.
Vinai Thummalapally, a former student friend said: “If someone passed him a
joint, he would take a drag. We’d smoke or have one extra beer, but he would
not even do as much as other people on campus. He was not even close to
being a party animal.”
However, Obama faces ethical difficulties over Tony Rezko, his long-time
patron in Chicago, who is scheduled to stand trial on March 3 for attempting
to extort money from companies in return for political favours. The
all-important Texas and Ohio primaries, where Clinton’s support among
Hispanics and blue-collar workers should work to her advantage, take place
the next day.
According to an internal memo “inadvertently” leaked by Obama’s campaign, the
race could be tied to the very end. It predicted that Obama would win 19 of
the remaining 27 primaries and caucuses but lose the biggest states of
Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, leaving him just 17 delegates ahead. In
theory, it would then be up to the superdelegates, the 796 party notables
who are entitled to a free vote at the Democratic National Convention in
August, to decide on a presidential nominee.
Devine, the political consultant who participated in the last brokered
convention in the 1980s, believes they should “cool their heels” for now.
“If we signal to voters, particularly young first-time voters, that the
process is dominated by insid-ers, that could be very disillusioning,” he
said. “It would be a terrible signal to the millions of people who have
voted that their voices don’t count.”
It has not stopped “first daughter” Chelsea Clinton, 27, from pursuing
superdelegates at home and on their mobile phones, asking them to support
her mother. Sharon Mast, a superdelegate from Washington state, who received
a call, was not swayed. “For some people, it may be very important to get
that personal touch. She’s a very pleasant and poised young lady, but at
this point, I’m uncommitted.”
Celebrities such as Whoopi Goldberg have also had Chelsea on the line. A
television presenter was suspended on Friday for suggesting that the first
daughter was being “pimped out in some weird sort of way” by her family.
Husband Bill is back, if a little chastened, after his controversial role as
attack dog backfired in South Carolina last month. He campaigned in Virginia
yesterday and vowed to carry on “promoting” his wife - while recognising
that as a former president, it was difficult for him to act as her
“defender”. Oddly enough, the message that Obama is winning is being spread
in a subtle but persistent way by Clinton’s own aides in the hope that her
“underdog” status will spark a sympathy vote.
After proclaiming Clinton as the “inevitable” victor of the Democratic
primaries, Mark Penn, her chief strategist, changed track last week and
labelled Obama the “establishment” candidate. Her rival, correctly, saw a
trap. “I’m always the underdog,” Obama insisted.
It was Bill Clinton who first spotted that there was mileage in presenting
Hillary as the “insurgent” in the New Hampshire and Nevada contests,
enabling her to win the postmatch spin. Clinton emerged from Super Tuesday
narrowly ahead last week, winning 50.2% of the popular vote to 49.8% for
Obama. On the night, he won a slim majority of delegates, but lagged behind
her when superdelegates were factored in.
That gap could close after last night’s contests in Louisiana, Nebraska,
Washington state and the US Virgin Islands and this week’s Potomac primary
votes.
The cash crunch was brushed off by some Clinton aides late last week as
nothing to worry about. Indeed, they seized on it as an opportunity to
demonstrate her fundraising prowess with ordinary voters as opposed to her
fan club of millionaire busi-nessmen and celebrities.
The appeal for sympathy worked. In a stunning reversal of fortune, Clinton’s
camp copied Obama’s internet fundraising tactics and claimed to have raised
$10m from 75,000 donors since the beginning of February - $8.4m of which
arrived after Super Tuesday. Ruth Sandoval, 51, a single mother who was at
Clinton’s rally in Virginia, gave her campaign $50 last week. “I donated to
her for the first time. When I saw she had put her own money in, I said,
‘You know, it’s time to get off the sidelines and send her some money’. I
wish I could give her more. It’s that important to me.” For some however, it
was a worrying sign that Clinton might not be as competent on day one in the
Oval Office as she relentlessly claims. “It makes you wonder, how did she
spend it all? She’s responsible for her own campaign,” said Whitney. “The
buck stops here. You wonder if it’s a reflection of what’s going to happen
to the federal budget.”
Main donors are troubled. Morris Reid, who threw a lavish fundraiser for
Clinton in the exclusive beach resort of the Hamptons last summer but has
also donated to Obama, said he could not go back to her old donors as they
were “maxed out”.
“She relied too much on the high-powered consultants. She was running a
full-scale general election campaign and had that level of staff on the
payroll when she should have been running a primary campaign,” Reid said.
When John McCain ran out of money for a similar reason last summer, Bill
Clinton said: “I’ve never seen a man more abused by his support staff than
McCain was.” McCain went on to recover by fighting an insurgent campaign -
as Clinton’s team has duly noticed - but there are warning signs for Hillary
ahead.
Obama has been expanding his base of support, while hers has been shrinking to
white women and Hispanics, loyal though they are. As women provide over 55%
of Democratic voters, her support from her own sex has hitherto been a
powerful source of strength.
According to CNN’s exit poll of Super Tuesday voters, 53% of women supported
Clinton as opposed to 42% for Obama. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic women
supported Clinton (64%), while 59% of white women voted for her as opposed
to 35% for Obama. However, Obama beat Clinton among men by 50% to 44% and
was supported by white men by 47% to 45%.
Dick Morris, Bill Clinton’s former polling guru - no admirer of Hillary -
believes she remains the frontrunner because women will propel her to
victory. “Obama may inspire, but it is Hillary who quietly wins the . . .
women who struggle at minimum-wage jobs and desperately need public schools,
mass transit, day care, health insurance and public services.”
Clinton believes that voters will eventually choose her to battle with the
Republican she calls “her friend”. At the rally in Virginia, she said: “Who
would be our best candidate to stand on stage with Senator McCain and talk
about national security and the economy?”
Whitney is not so sure. “As a woman, I’m certain she’s capable of being
commander in chief, but the men in my family agree she is smart, but say
they won’t vote for her because she’s a woman,” she said. “It’s too bad, but
she’s got a fight on her hands.”
Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia said: “For
so long she played it just right. Being the female candidate was the
subtext, not the text of her campaign, but it has become more explicit and
that does have an effect on men.”
When John Edwards, the former senator for North Carolina, withdrew from the
race, much of his support among white men migrated to Obama. “Some dropped
out altogether and are not voting,” said Sabato. “They could end up voting
for McCain. He’s regarded as a man’s man.”
Video: Obama Opens
Office In Maryland
Video: Obama,
McCain dissect their wins
Video: Romney's
withdrawal speech
