From tonight's Nelson Report:
McCain is the big winner last night, but not just because he nailed down the GOP nomination.
With the Dems seemingly sentenced to at least two months of circular firing-squad, the Republicans get to see Clinton rehearse attack lines on Obama, and vice versa, free of charge.
For the Dems, Hillary suddenly has her own "momentum" with the big win in Ohio seeming to guarantee a big win in Pennsylvania...but that's an agonizingly long 7 weeks away....who knows what the universe will look like then?
Can she raise the money? Can she settle staff morale and performance issues?
(And Obama is expected to re-gain some semblance of "momentum" with wins in the next two primaries...Mississippi and Wyoming in the next week.)
But here's her major difficulty: last night Clinton also "won" in Texas but actually lost, since Obama's team played the caucus game better (as usual) and he seems headed a net gain of at least 3 delegates there, while only losing 7 or 8 overall in the national total.
Today's analysis is mostly questions...but one thing for sure, "attack politics" is working this year. No big surprise, alas. Obama today whacked Clinton firmly, but not with a jarring screech, for not releasing "Billary's" taxes.
NAFTA was the proxy for a trade debate in Ohio. Will be repeated by Hillary in Pennsylvania, for sure. The big question is, will Obama conclude that since his whole campaign is based on the future, why go down the drain trying to out-flank Clinton on the "populist" right?
If high-tech and exports and its supporting infrastructure are the future, isn't that where he should be too? Certainly he can't be out-flanked on the right by McCain on trade.
Speaking of which, Senate Finance has a "trade agenda" hearing tomorrow morning, with USTR Schwab. We will postpone other recreations and attend.
"Perspective" tonite...and a primer for Obama? An excellent Baltimore Sun piece by steel wire manufacturer Drew Greenblatt on how US manufacturing is doing in the real world, as opposed to "NAFTA-land".
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POLITICS...e-mails flying fast and furious all night, as Obama supporters rally their spirits, and Clinton folks work to translate her re-gained momentum into two critical things she must do right now:
First, re-kindle the campaign contribution flow, which had badly lagged Obama, reportedly because she's already maxed-out most of her Big Money sources;
Second, her campaign management hierarchy was clearly in disarray, and winning last night can't substitute a rush for the re-organization which seems badly needed.
While her "throw the kitchen sink" attack ad/press release barrage of the past two weeks clearly caught Obama and his team off balance, and does seem to have forced more negative press coverage of Obama than might otherwise have been the case...the overall atmosphere engendered was one of frenzy, approaching panic.
At a certain point Clinton risks the real message becoming "desperation", and you have to think that the Democratic Party "elders", including the Super Delegates, are not going to be won-over to Clinton by a Karl Rove-style scorched-earth policy which makes the Republican task that much easier in the Fall.
For sure, however, Clinton hit resonance with a real issue when she ran the "red phone ad" challenging Obama's "experience". While the ad itself is "unfair" in that she has no more hands-on foreign policy experience than he does...that's not her fault, and Obama must do a better job of countering it.
OK, he's nailed her fairly and squarely on her vote for the Iraq War, but the issue is more fundamental and he knows it.
The voters clearly DO worry that Obama's relative youth, and relatively recent national-level experience is a fair matter to be examined and resolved...and this obviously is a major advantage on "national defense" for Sen. McCain, so we'll continue to look at how its being developed.
One of the more interesting concerns raised today comes from the NY Times' Maureen Dowd, certainly long-opposed to Hillary...deploring Clinton's embrace of the Gloria Steinem "women as victims" approach as "a retro battle of the sexes..." while Obama more explicitly plays the race card:
"With Obama saying that the hour is upon us to elect a black man and Hillary saying the hour is upon us to elect a woman, the Democratic primary has become the ultimate nightmare of liberal identity politics. All the victimizations go tripping over each other and colliding, a competition of historical guilts..."
"...as it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It's all about the past....and meantime, the conventional white man sits on the Republican side and enjoys the spectacle of the Democrats' identity pile-up and victim lock."
For Obama, the clear consensus is that he can't let Clinton's "throw the kitchen sink" attack ads set the agenda for media coverage, and voter attitudes...and, he has to be pro-active, not just re-active.
Obama's emotional appeal is positive, not attack-dog negative, and he can't fall into the trap of throwing mud-balls...clearly his independent and Republican voters will not support "just another politician".
Obama seems off to a good start in parsing the boundary of a "fair attack" this morning, with tough talking points for the media, asking why "Billary" continue to refuse to release their joint-tax records.
(Clinton's risk? The longer her stonewalling goes on, the more likely it is that the media, not just because of Obama's questions, will demand to know where the Clinton's $5-million "personal loan" to the Campaign really came from.)
OK...a million more questions on style and content, but we'll restrict them for tonite to the trade debate in the next section.
For now, let's take a look at why, despite Ohio and Texas, Obama supporters continue to maintain that history is moving their way. To quote one close observer, in a private e-mail:
"There are 10 state primary/caucuses, and two territories, remaining. Obama is the favorite in 7 of the 10, or 9 of the 12 if you count the territories. There are 750 delegates at stake in those races. The states/territories where he is favored have about 60% of the delegates (Wyoming, Mississippi, Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon, Montana, South Dakota, Puerto Rico, and Guam).
Hillary is favored only in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia, with 40% of the remaining delegates. So if form continues -- and I saw nothing last night suggesting that it won't -- he wins more pledged delegates than she does from now on."
[Editor's note...the possible exception or fly in the ointment to this is whether, and if so how the Democratic National Committee decides to bring Florida and Michigan back into play, as now seems likely.
If these large states get "do-overs" and Hillary does about the same as she did the first time, one estimate is that she could have a net gain of 60 just in those states. That would get her to within about 75 delegates overall of Obama, depending on the results of the remaining states. Obama will win some, but so will she. And the biggest one, Pennsylvania, is similar to Ohio, but it's also a closed primary, so no independents or Republicans to help Obama.
So you can see why the Clinton calculation is that if she ends up the primaries less than 100 pledged delegates behind, and with all the momentum at that point, and with wins in all the big states plus the key swing states of Ohio and Florida, then the superdelegates might feel at that point in late June, that she'd be the strongest candidate.]
OK, now back to our Obama campaign observer:
"In the meantime, on 'momentum'....Clinton's momentum gets stopped dead with losses this Saturday and next Tuesday in Wyoming and Mississippi. Some media may dismiss those as 'expected' (like Ohio wasn't 'expected' for Clinton?). It's critical that the Obama campaign not allow the media to fall into the lazy trap the Clinton people have set by suggesting that it's all about Pennsylvania.
North Carolina has 134 delegates (some 20 less than Pa.). That's a big state. The media people should be reminded that every time they say 'Pennsylvania' they should say 'North Carolina' in the same sentence.
Superdelegates? I continue to believe the superdelegates issue will work out OK, so long as Obama wins where he is expected to win in the remaining primaries."
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TRADE...the thing that struck us from listening last night to MSNBC's excellent coverage, especially of the Ohio exit polls, is the number of times the characterization "scared" was used.
The critical difference for Clinton, it was repeatedly suggested, came from white men and elderly voters who are frightened, mainly whose jobs and communities are threatened by, or are already seen as having lost to "globalization".
"Scared" usually translates to "unthinking", although we certainly don't mean these folks, especially in the Rust Belt, shouldn't be scared, and shouldn't be demanding more from their political leadership.
The problem is that since "facts" are apparently irrelevant, the "demands" being made do not meet reality, which means that current and would-be policy makers seem to fear they run the risk of political suicide if they try to talk sense.
Obviously, if you don't win, you can't help. And although you have to ask if Obama could do a better job of making the positive case, he clearly concluded he dare not risk that in Ohio.
But since pandering obviously did not work, and since he seems to have no realistic chance of winning in classic rust-belt Pennsylvania, it seems fair to ask how far Obama could go in the direction of being "the candidate of the future" without also putting at risk his apparently "sure", and absolutely "must" win in N. Carolina, for example.
Does he really want to see the often mis-leading NAFTA "debate" became the proxy for a serious, honest look at what needs to be done to educate, invest, re-build infrastructure, get real on national health...all of the components of a rational, forward-looking policy for the future?
Isn't this a major "plus" for Democrats over Republicans, who so often get caught-up in their outdated "tax and spend" rhetorical attack on the Dems that they forget how much Americans love, and depend upon, government expenditure on such things?
Both Democratic candidates have good positions on economic revitalization elements, of course, but the "debate" never got there, and Obama shot himself in the foot, courtesy of a perhaps-naive supporter, and that really damaging leak from the Canadians.
On that, by the way, Prime Minister Stephan Harper today moved to try and deflect what otherwise is a real problem for his relations with a Democratic US government, come 2009:
Harper said his government was mounting an "internal security investigation" to find out who leaked the information, which suggested Obama's campaign had said not to pay too much attention to his protectionist rhetoric on NAFTA.
"This kind of leaking of information is completely unacceptable and in fact...it may well be illegal," the prime minister told Parliament.
"It is not useful, it is not in the interests of the government of Canada, and the way the leak was executed, Mr. Speaker, was blatantly unfair to Sen. Obama and his campaign."
Let's conclude for tonite with a cris de cour from a Loyal Reader who happens to be a Democrat, with a life-time of involvement in foreign trade:
"The Ohio Democratic campaign was pretty awful, as Ohio campaigns tend to be. The shrieking, pandering, and casual sloganeering about trade and international economics in particular made both candidates look dumb and patronizing at the same time.
Can't someone point out that the economic uniltateralism and self-destructive economic nationalism espoused by both candidates in Ohio is contradictory to the professed desire to re-establish US respect in the world by turning America's back on Bush-style uniltateralism?
What can be done? Pennsylvania would seem to portend more of the same -- and more of the same promises, putting the next president, if it is a Democrat, in the same old position of spending the next several years discovering where reality lies in international affairs and digging out of the hole that he/she dug while pursuing the job in the first place.
George Bush took seven years to begin to discover that (though he prevented worse disasters with China); do we have to look forward to that with a Dem in the White House?
I know I'm venting, but this is going to hand McCain a million shots. If we reopen NAFTA and make new demands, the other countries will have their demands on us as well; you don't just reopen the parts you yourself want to redo. HELLO!!! Are we ready for that?
If the US abrogates this mother-of-all plurilateral trade agreements, what are other countries now in, or contemplating, barrier-lowering trade agreements with the United States supposed to think? Can they have any confidence in the sustainability of economic agreements with the United States?
Moreover, McCain will point out that, if you thought illegal immigration was bad to date, wait 'til you see it after we unilaterally throw a zillion Mexicans out of their home-country jobs. And so on.
What is needed is pushback from within the Democratic constituency. Is that doable? High-tech, international finance, etc. Internationalist businesses need to be getting on their hind legs. Who's doing it? Can it be politely suggested? Op-Eds? TV? Advice from funders? What?
Without pushback within the Democratic constituency, the candidates -- unfortunately, both of them, as the Ohio paradigm drags them deeper and deeper into the swamp -- will wind up defining their presidencies in politically and internationally counterproductive ways, and possibly compromising their chances of victory, between now and April 22, and especially between April 22 and November."
Rick Perlstein has a different perspective, here. [1]