February 04, 2008
WH '08: There Goes That Theory
We've been quietly wondering whether John McCain's sudden ascendancy would worry Democrats supporting Barack Obama enough to make them rethink their vote. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been cast as the "experience" candidate, and the veracity of that claim aside, she has been viewed as a safer bet to win against a strong war-on-terror candidate like McCain in the general election.
Remember Obama's victory speech after he won the South Carolina Democratic primary, when he and a stadium full of supporters asked America not to tell them change was impossible? Well, the "believe" mantra you've been seeing on all those campaign signs and hearing in so many of Obama's speeches appears to be taking hold, less than 24 hours before Democratic voters in 22 states go to the polls.
Several new surveys show Obama outperforming Clinton in national matchups against McCain. In one poll showing the two Democrats both beating McCain, Obama does it by an 8-point margin, compared to a 3-point margin for Clinton. Others show Clinton losing to McCain and McCain losing to Obama.
(Mitt Romney, by the way, gets bludgeoned by both.)
It looks as if Democratic voters tomorrow won't have to make a painful choice between following their heads and following their hearts after all.
No wonder Obama is intruding so boldly on Clinton's turf. We're getting anecdotal reports that his ground volunteers vastly outnumber Clinton's in New York City, and then there was the Michelle-Oprah-Caroline-Maria Show in California -- as bold a challenge to Clinton's supposed lock on women voters as he's delivered so far.
"Four extraordinary women put on the best campaign rally I've seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics," crowed Andrew Rosenthal in the New York Times. The media have exhausted the run of adjectives used to describe the size and intensity level of Obama's rallies. Just watch the video if you haven't already.
There are still questions about whether Latino voters will swing for Obama, which could help put decades of tensions between Latinos and blacks more firmly into the past. We won't know until the exit polling comes out tomorrow. There's no evidence yet that Latinos already comfortable with Clinton are peeling away, so for now, California remains a toss-up, and one that could potentially keep us up all night.
We're not the only ones having trouble sleeping: Conservatives are pretty angsty about McCain taking the lead in the Republican nomination race. Some are vowing to stay home in November, one is famously threatening to campaign for Clinton instead, and others are swallowing their doubts about Romney in their "Anyone But McCain" campaigns.
But Romney continues to lose friends and alienate people on the campaign trail. There's little affection between the former Massachusetts governor and Mike Huckabee, but Romney managed to insult both Huckabee and his maybe-soon-to-be up-for-grabs supporters by painting him as the conservative slate's Ralph Nader.
"A vote for Huckabee is a vote for McCain, and if they want John McCain as their nominee... that's exactly what the vote would do," Romney said on FOX News last week.
Huckabee wasn't having any of it.
"Romney's arrogance is offensive to my supporters and serves only to fire them and me up," he said, according to the Washington Post. "We're even more determined to fight and win."
Fired back Romney: Don't be such a crybaby.
"First a couple of rules in politics. One, no whining," he said on the trail today, according to FOX. "And No. 2, you get them to vote for you. And so I want them not to vote for Mike Huckabee and not to vote for John McCain and to vote for me. … That's not voter suppression. That's known as politics.”
It's by now well documented that Romney is disliked by both McCain and Huckabee. After this testy exchange with AP's Glen Johnson, who apparently couldn't resist breaking with usual reporter etiquette at a South Carolina campaign stop, we realized that Romney's own traveling press corps probably doesn't like him either. It's generally not a smart move for candidates to alienate the reporters covering them. Just ask Al Gore. (And John Kerry, to a lesser extent.)
Romney's been attacking Huckabee on his immigration and tax record, but his latest attacks don't gel with his argument. If he wants those evangelicals siding with Huckabee so badly, calling the candidate a whiner and his backers spoilers might not be the best strategy. If his campaign is not aware that these attacks draw up unfavorable comparisons between their guy and the uber-charming McCain, they need to do a better job vetting what comes out of Romney's mouth.
And anyway, it's not even clear that Huckabee's supporters would back Romney. Huckabee does have a strong, natural base in his native South, which will hurt Romney tomorrow. But Jim Geraghty of the pro-Romney National Review observes that polls show at least some of Huckabee's support going to McCain rather than Romney, should the former Arkansas governor get out of the race.
We'll be following Super Tuesday results after the first polls close tomorrow.
Posted at 6:17 PM
Posted to:
Barack Obama, Campaigns, Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Republicans, WH 2008
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