Clinton Planning For Life After the Alamo
by Glenn Thrush
COLUMBUS, OH -- The Clinton campaign is no longer counting on a Texas win and is desperately seeking a rationale for soldiering on if they lose the Lone Star State.
(They are still sanguine about Ohio despite a Reuters/Zogby/C-Span poll today showing them deadlocked in both states.)
Back in the good old days (three weeks ago), when she still held a double-digit advantage in Texas, Clinton's brain trust was confidently predicting she would run the table on March 4th and overcome Barack Obama's widening lead in delegates. Privately, they conceded that losing EITHER Texas or Ohio would be fatal. One staffer told me a single loss would create a "death spiral" -- an avalanche of super delegates, a donor revolt, defections from her exhausted staff and the sudden appearance of a delegation of Wise Men and Women pressuring her to quit for the good of the party. Then Bill Clinton more or less endorsed that thesis in public.
Amazingly, Hillary Clinton's top aides -- Mark Penn, Howard Wolfson and Harold Ickes -- are now behaving as if those calculations never existed. The first sign of the shift came last week, when Ickes declared that Clinton would have to reassess her plans only if she lost BOTH Texas and Ohio. Then came a Friday conference call in which Wolfson -- to the utter amazement of reporters listening in -- said the "onus" was on Obama to win all four March 4th states.
Most in the campaign still think she can eke out a win but Wolfson’s comments were clearly a signal that the former first lady intends to keep fighting if she loses the Alamo.
Wolfson is not being delusional. If the campaign doesn't yet have a compelling electoral rationale to survive a loss in Texas it has a financial one -- $35 million in February fundraising from a new base of online donors eager to keep the First-Woman-President dream alive no matter how many contests she loses.
To keep her in the fight, the campaign needs to come up with some way to argue that Texas doesn't matter.
During Friday's call they hinted at a possible strategy based on discrediting the state's bizarre primary-caucus hybrid: If Clinton manages to win the primary part and loses the oddball late-night caucus, she might be able to muster a moral argument case for continuing. Since losing Iowa, Clinton has railed against caucuses as being fundamentally undemocratic.
On Friday, her people in Texas put out the word she might sue to stop the caucus, questioning its complex rules. The Obama camp accused Clinton of using a suit to delay the final Texas results but Clinton spokesman Phil Singer quickly denied she was taking legal action.
Nonetheless, the gauntlet has already been thrown and the Clinton camp is on record questioning the fairness of the process.
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