Challenges for Obama After Pennsylvania Primary by Peggy Simpson
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| Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Some rights reserved. |
April 23, 2008
Hillary Clinton's supporters roared their approval Tuesday night when she talked about her refusal to be pushed out of the Democratic primary race.
"Some people counted me out and said to drop out," she said, and the crowd drowned her out as she added that Pennsylvania voters thought otherwise, giving her a solid 10-point margin in the primary over Barack Obama and pummeling him by 50 percentage points in blue collar towns and small cities across the state.
She reinforced her image as a fighter who can take a punch—and can give some, too.
In her ads, she sharpened her allegation that he wasn't up to the challenge of battling many foreign policy crises, including against Al-Qaida, complete with a photo of Osama bin Laden.
On election eve, she contended that if he outspent her 3-1 and still couldn't convince Pennsylvania voters to back him, he'd be a risky nominee for the Democrats in the fall race against John McCain.
With her third big-state victory in a row, Clinton in essence is goading Obama into stepping up his own negative attacks against her, to see if he has the ability to seal the deal with Democrats or if many key voting blocs will remain aloof—and receptive to her, in the end.
Her negative ads come at a cost, of course. They raise not only her already-high negatives but this time, they also raised the ire of one of her prominent media backers, the New York Times.
The Times condemned the Pennsylvania primary as "even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate and more filled with pandering" than the contests that preceded it. And it held her largely responsible for that and said it is past time for her "to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election."
The editorial said Clinton's negative attacks "ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead."
She talked around questions about that in a network interview Wednesday morning, saying she was happy with her campaign and the primary result—and on to North Carolina and Indiana.
Obama can opt to run out the clock, hanging onto his lead in elected delegates and popular vote with the expectation that the estimated 350 undecided super-delegates will continue to drift toward him.
Or he can take up Clinton's challenge and throw the kitchen sink at her. And do it in less elevated tones than he has used in the past, even on election night when he criticized her without naming her as a candidate who was captive of special interests.
Negative ads carry their own risks for Obama. For starters, they might benefit Clinton rather than hurt her. She is a known commodity—warts and all—with backers who are vociferous in defending her from attacks. They might rally around in even larger numbers.
The larger problem for Obama is that voters are just now getting to know him. Negative attacks get him further from his core message, to go beyond politics as usual, "to shed our cynicism, to be willing to believe in what's possible again."
He already was thrown off course in the weeks leading up to the vote by controversies about his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and by remarks in San Francisco that voters in the economically distressed areas of Pennsylvania are "bitter" and "clinging" to religion and guns. This drowned out his statewide bus tour to meet-and-greet these voters with a key supporter, Senator Bob Casey.
Casey is a prominent anti-abortion Catholic. Catholic voters were 37 percent of the total in Tuesday's primary and exit polls showed they voted 69-31 percent for Clinton.
Clinton led strongly with women, 57-43, and eked out 13 percent of the votes of black women to Obama's 87 percent. Black men went for Obama by a 93-7 margin.
White men backed her by a 56-44 margin. But Obama improved his standing with white men compared to Ohio, where he got 39 percent of white men compared to her 58 percent.
Seven percent of the primary voters were Jews and, despite some allegations of a "Jewish problem" for Obama, he took 43 percent to her 57 percent, nowhere near the blowout for her as with Catholic voters.
Obama also improved his margins with over-65 voters. She still held a commanding lead, 63-37, but in Ohio that bloc had sided with Clinton by a 72-26 vote.
That makes it unclear whether voters agree with Clinton's core assertion that Obama would be a weak general election candidate. It also muddies the assessment as to whether he has a "Wright problem" that will resonate in the fall.
And it puts super-delegates even more on the spot: as Clinton pleads with them to stay neutral so she can continue to show her stuff in the remaining primaries, making the case that she's more electable than Obama against McCain.
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