WITH days to turn around her presidential campaign or face defeat, Hillary
Clinton swung through Pennsylvania last week on a crash tour to squeeze
every last vote out of the state after being outshone, outspent and
outmanoeuvred by Barack Obama in a bloody campaign.
For a moment, it appeared that the Clintons would stop at nothing to block the
Illinois senator’s ascent to the nomination Hillary once regarded as
rightfully hers. Chelsea Clinton appeared on a college stage with her mother
and seemed to be hinting at a shock announcement. “As someone who is
thinking of having my own family in the not too distant future . . .” she
began.
Chelsea, 28, extended the riff about her “children” for so long that it seemed
possible she was about to declare herself engaged or perhaps even pregnant,
but a campaign aide explained later that she was merely teasing Hillary who,
like any mother, would love her to get on with marriage and a family.
After Hillary Clinton threw everything including the kitchen sink at Obama
last week, one last wild move to boost supporters’ spirits would have
surprised nobody – because nothing, so far, has been able to prevent the
Democratic presidential nomination from slipping out of her grasp in the
run-up to Tuesday’s Pennsylvania primary.
If it is too late for Clinton, 60, to turn the race around, she has only
herself to blame, according to Karl Rove, the architect of George W Bush’s
two presidential election victories. Democrats regard him as the master of
the art of negative campaigning.
“Her problem is not the attack on Obama, it is the timing,” he told The Sunday
Times. “She was complacent at the beginning and took him for granted.”
Clinton has adopted Tom Petty’s I Won’t Back Down as one of her campaign
songs. It blasts from giant speakers at rallies and reinforces her message
that she will not be driven prematurely from the race by the young
pretender. Nobody had heard of Obama, 46, when she was first lady, yet a
Newsweek poll this weekend gave him a 19-point lead over the New York
senator.
Democratic party leaders are itching to draw the race to a close and let Obama
take on John McCain, the Republican contender, yet nobody dares to close the
book on Clinton yet. Obama had the chance to finish her off during the Ohio
and Texas primaries last month – and fluffed it.
On Hillforce One, her campaign plane, and on her bus last week, she showed no
sign of tiring of the race. She smiled and charmed her way through a
succession of rallies, and still had the stamina to share a drink in the
hotel bar with journalists at the end of a long day.
Her skills as a campaigner have strengthened considerably during the war of
attrition with Obama. There is enormous enthusiasm for her in parts of
Pennsylvania, a populous, must-win state not only for Clinton in two days’
time, but also for the Democrats in November’s general election.
Outside a silver diner in a white, working-class corner of Philadelphia, fans
wore T-shirts with the message, “We’ve got your back, Hillary”, but it is
not a good sign when your own admirers are on the defensive.
Clinton feels her rival is finally being properly vetted after last week’s
televised debate, in which he was challenged about his relationship with the
Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his radical pastor, and his more casual
association with Bill Ayers, a former leader of the Weather Underground, the
domestic terrorist group of the 1960s and 1970s.
The debate went extremely badly for the thin-skinned Obama, who was irritated
by questions he regarded as personal trivia. Voters are more likely to
perceive them as important matters of character and judgment.
Yet Clinton is still waiting for a moment equivalent to Howard Dean’s scream
after his defeat in Iowa during the 2004 presidential election, when the
cheers of his supporters turned to “What were we thinking?” and his campaign
imploded.
Clinton’s assault on Obama’s alleged lack of patriotism and electability may
be repelling as many voters as it is attracting.
“She would have a better chance of winning if she had been saying these things
much earlier,” Rove said, although he does not rule out the possibility of
victory.
Two polls last week found that more than 50% of voters considered her
dishonest and untrustworthy, although Obama’s unfavourable ratings have also
risen from 28% to 36% in the past month and there could be more damage to
come from their recent clashes.
Some loyal Democrats complain that her battery of Obama is merely laying the
ground for McCain to win the White House. “She’s turning me off. I used to
kind of like her,” said James Pender, 48, a welder among the 35,000 people
who turned up to see Obama at a gigantic rally in Philadelphia on Friday
night.
Obama is preparing his own final onslaught on the state, blitzing the
television screens with $2m worth of advertisements in the closing days of
the campaign and outspending the cash-strapped Clinton by five to one in
Philadelphia, where he is hoping for a landslide to counter her strength in
rural and industrial parts of the state.
Losing Pennsylvania would almost certainly be a knockout blow for Clinton but
Obama’s supporters believe he can scupper her chances simply by preventing
her from scoring a double-digit victory.
With race and class playing such an important and divisive role in the state,
the result is difficult to predict. However, Clinton needs a spectacular
victory to retain any credible prospect of overtaking Obama in the total
popular vote, and to persuade superdelegates – the party leaders with a
casting vote – to break her way. Most of the traffic has been in the
opposite direction and she currently has 141 fewer delegates than Obama.
The pressure is mounting on Clinton to bow out after Indiana and North
Carolina have held their primaries on May 6. Superdelegates may force her
hand by lining up behind Obama. So far, Clinton has refused to acknowledge
the possibility of defeat. “We have 10 more contests and I’m going to
compete in each of them as hard as I can,” she told a trade union
conference. She received a standing ovation for her defiance.
The danger is that she will ultimately bequeath the Democrats a wounded
candidate – not the new John F Kennedy, but an effete liberal known as
“Snobama”, the 2008 version of John Kerry, the last election loser. If so,
his image will have been defined not by Republicans but by a Democrat.
Rove argues that it is “superficial” to blame Clinton for behaving like a
Republican towards Obama. “He’s been countering it as best he can by saying
it is unimportant and a distraction, but Americans don’t care if she’s doing
the Republicans’ dirty work for them. They just want to know more about
Senator Obama.”
Obama’s exotic background as the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black
father from Kenya is part of his appeal, but also his mystery. He grew up in
Hawaii and Indonesia, a long way from the American heartland. At a rally for
Clinton on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Georgia Bihlar, 59, said: “She is
born, bred and raised here. I first heard about Obama a year ago. I just
don’t trust him.”
Clinton has made much of her father’s upbringing in the gritty, working-class
town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her grandfather, she tells crowds on the
stump, worked in a lace mill from the age of 11 until he retired, although
like Obama, she is an Ivy League-educated lawyer.
Chris Carney, a Pennsylvania congressman who has yet to declare for either
candidate, said: “This is probably the most stressful situation the two of
them have ever been in and it gives us clues to how they will govern in the
White House.”
He was not impressed when Clinton accused Obama of condescension towards
working-class voters after he suggested at a West Coast fundraiser that
economically deprived, small-town voters “cling to guns or religion or
antipathy to people who aren’t like them”.
“I think it’s a tempest in a teapot,” Carney said. “It’s an indication that
she’s grasping for something here. This is a close race. The fact is she’s
come down from a lead of 22% in the polls to 5% or 6%.”
There are still enough “undecideds” to swing the Pennsylvania race heavily in
Clinton’s favour should the fallout from the attacks on Obama continue. Yet
the speed with which the former first lady has gone from “inevitable” winner
of the nomination to the brink of sudden death is extraordinary.
Rove believes she committed a fundamental error at the outset by allowing
Obama to steal the mantle of change from her. After Clinton spent years as a
senator building bridges with Republicans, Obama breezed in and said only he
could unite “red state” (Republican) and “blue state” (Democrat) America.
“She let him take her natural message from her after she had gone out of her
way to work on bipartisan initiatives,” Rove said. “There is no evidence he
has worked for bipartisan change, but she has.”
In his view, Obama’s hands are no cleaner than hers. “The same claim could be
made that he is doing the Republicans’ dirty work for them. Obama has been
attacking her – subtly, but nevertheless strongly – as a symbol of the past
and someone who has flip-flopped on the war in Iraq.”
After taking the heat in the TV debate, Obama said Clinton was “in her
element” when playing the cynical Washington game of tearing people down
rather than “lifting each other up”. In turn, she accused him of being a
wimp. “He spent all day complaining about the hard questions he was asked.”
Rove is reluctant to call Clinton the stronger Democratic candidate against
McCain this autumn, but he observed: “All her weaknesses are known. There
will not be a lot of surprises if she is the nominee. Americans are now
finding out much more about the Reverend Wright, Bill Ayers and Obama’s
attitude to small-town America.”
An Obama adviser said he had proved his resilience last week. “Yes, he’s been
pummelled and remarkably he is not only surviving he is doing quite well,
thank you very much.”
Obama’s black supporters still find it hard to believe that he can win.
Shehrazad Ali, 59, saw him in Philadelphia with her grandson Hassan, 7.
“Clinton is already pulling the rug from under his feet,” she said.
Ali had some advice for Obama to help him overcome the perceived wimp factor.
“He might want to pick up 30lb or 40lb because we like a big man to protect
us. He needs to be a little more forceful because they’re running all over
him – and we haven’t even got to the Republicans.”
Hassan, in contrast, had the confidence and swagger of a new generation. “Yes
we can,” he said, turning to show off the T-shirt with Obama’s slogan on his
back.
Clips
from Democratic debate
'Jay-Z' Obama brushes off jibes
Barack Obama “dissed” Hillary Clinton with a cool dance move from the rap star
Jay-Z, casually brushing dirt from his shoulder to express distaste for her
attacks on him. Click
here to watch the video.
