Hillary Clinton (L) at her Indiana Primary Night party.
(AP Photo/Elise Amendola)
Has Obama left Clinton behind?
What happened
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama won the North Carolina Democratic primary by a 56 percent to 42 percent margin, and narrowly lost the Indiana primary to rival Hillary Clinton, 49 percent to 51 percent. (Los Angeles Times, free registration) Obama increased his delegate lead by about 19, and expanded his lead in the popular vote by 200,000. Clinton is very unlikely to catch up with Obama in pledged delegates, but neither candidate will win enough to earn the Democratic nomination outright. Obama has nearly caught up with Clinton in superdelegates—the 795 party officials who will almost certainly decide the race—even as he dealt with controversial remarks by his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. (Bloomberg) “We now know who the Democratic nominee will be,” said NBC’s Tim Russert. “The Clintons have a big decision to make in the morning.” (The London Telegraph)
What the commentators said
Clinton won one primary, albeit “narrowly,” and Obama won one, said Adam Nagourney in a New York Times analysis (free registration), but “in this case, a split was not a draw.” Clinton was given an ideal “second chance to turn this campaign around,” with Obama slogging through a “brutal period” in his campaign, but she came up short. Now she needs Obama to be fatally damaged by some “big development” that will sway superdelegates toward her en masse, and she will push for Michigan and Florida to have their barred delegates reinstated and their votes counted in the total popular vote count.
She’s already tried that strategy, and it failed, said Steve Kornacki in The New York Observer’s Politicker blog. The superdelegates won’t “overturn ‘the will of the people,’” and Clinton won’t overtake Obama in either the delegate count or the popular vote. Clinton’s “longshot” strategy needed momentum to work; it didn’t, and won’t, get it. The results in all the primaries so far have been predictable based on demographics, and North Carolina and Indiana were no different. That also means we already know the outcomes for the last six races: Obama will win three, Clinton takes the other three. Nothing will change. If she keeps going now, “it will be for show.”
Obama “can certainly breathe easier” now, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But ironically, his “giant step” toward the Democratic nomination comes “just when Hillary Clinton has finally exposed his potential weaknesses as a general election candidate.” He relied heavily on African-American voters, lost among white Democrats, fared poorly among rural voters, and split the independents with Clinton. Democrats are choosing their latest in a string of “unknown and untested” candidates, and we’ll find out in November if Obama is “more like the Jimmy Carter of 1976—or Michael Dukakis.”
With her hopes of winning the nomination now “a fond wish wrapped in a desperate hope,” said Roger Simon in Politico, Clinton might want to consider her “endgame.” She has “options” still—if Obama loses, he won’t get a second chance in 2012, but she might also run for Senate majority leader or New York governor—but she needs to plan carefully. She’ll ruin her “political future” if she “becomes known as the candidate who was willing to destroy her party in order to gain the nomination.”
