Beyond Pa., a Weakened Clinton
By Dan Balz
The polls suggest that Hillary Clinton is headed for victory in Pennsylvania on Tuesday. If that happens, it will add to the string of big states where she has defeated Barack Obama. Depending on the margin, a Clinton victory will raise fresh questions about the Illinois senator's general election prospects.
But Pennsylvania is not Ohio, and the Clinton who is making her final push in the Keystone State is not the candidate who barnstormed through Ohio early last month. No less determined, she is nonetheless a more weakened candidate than she was on the eve of the Ohio and Texas primaries.
This is evident at many levels, from the atmosphere around her traveling entourage, to the financial disadvantage she faces, to the fact that her victory could be discounted unless the margin is even bigger than it was in Ohio.
Arguably, the past seven weeks have been far rougher for Obama than for Clinton. He lost Ohio, and he lost the popular vote in Texas (but did recoup by winning more delegates because of the caucuses there). Then came the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the uproar over his comments about the bitterness of small-town voters and the interrogation in last week's ABC News debate.
Yet Clinton appears to have been weakened more by the long interregnum between primaries. Her most significant missteps came over her repeated mischaracterizations of her trip to Bosnia in 1996. Those, along with additional turmoil in her campaign, and occasional mistakes by her husband, have left her with an image problem of significant proportions.
Her campaign has the aura of a march toward inevitable disappointment. Obama's campaign has been skillful in keeping the focus on his nearly insurmountable lead in pledged delegates -- and the math has helped them with that argument. Obama also has continued to narrow Clinton's once-hefty lead among superdelegates. Exhaustion with the race among Democrats on both sides of the nomination battle adds to her obstacles.
Clinton's lifeline to the superdelegates remains the popular vote, the one remaining marker where her advisers believe she might be able to overtake Obama. If she did that, she would have one last argument to put before the superdelegates that she is the stronger candidate for the fall election.
The Web site Real Clear Politics charts the popular vote in multiple ways: total votes; total votes with estimates from some caucus states that do not actually report the popular vote; total votes with Florida's unsanctioned primary results; total votes with both Florida's and Michigan's primaries.
Obama leads in every one of them at this point, but depending on the calculation, his margin is as high as 827,000 (without Florida and Michigan but with a number of the caucus states) and as low as 94,000 (with Florida and Michigan but without those caucus states).
Obama owes much in these calculations to his home state of Illinois. There, on Feb. 5, he rolled up a victory margin of 650,000 votes over Clinton. She, in contrast, won her adopted home state of New York by 317,500 votes. Without the two home states, Obama would still lead in the popular vote, but the margin would look less insurmountable for Clinton in the coming contests.
Obama's recent problems have caused some Democrats to worry about his chances of winning the general election. His performance in Ohio, they argue, where he won only a handful of counties and lost some by huge margins, will make his prospects there difficult, they say. Michigan, too, could be formidable for him, and depending on the outcome Tuesday, so could Pennsylvania.
All of that should have played to Clinton's advantage in this time between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Instead, her rising negatives among Republicans and especially among independents have made it all the more difficult to argue that she is stronger for November.
The most recent Washington Post-ABC News poll charts Clinton's decline from a high point just after her victory in New Hampshire to a new low point this spring. In that time, her favorable rating underwent a 40-point swing among independents. In mid-January, 59 percent of independents said they had a favorable impression of her, compared to 39 percent unfavorable. Last week, it was the reverse: 39 percent favorable and 58 percent unfavorable.
Her decline among Republicans was minimal, although she started at a very low point. Jennifer Agiesta, The Post's polling analyst, said the drop among Republicans is attributable almost entirely to declining ratings from women.
Clinton may have been artificially high in her public image after her New Hampshire comeback, and so the comparison between then and now may overstate the trouble she has encountered. But there is no question that the victory in Ohio and the popular vote victory in Texas, two events that reinvigorated her candidacy and extended the Democratic race, had little lasting impact on how voters -- especially independents who are crucial to Democratic hopes of winning in November -- see her.
All that colors her campaign on the eve of Tuesday's vote. To her credit, Clinton soldiers on, but with new limitations because of the damage to her public image. Fairly or unfairly, the bar for her now is higher than ever.
Posted at 12:40 PM ET on Apr 21, 2008 |
