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How McCain Lost in Pennsylvania
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 27 April 2008
It's a nightmare. It's the Bataan Death March. It's mutually
assured Armageddon. "Both of them are already losing the general to John
McCain," declared a Newsweek columnist last month, predicting that the
election "may already be over" by the time the Democrats anoint
a nominee.
Not so fast. If we've learned any new rule in the 2008 campaign, it's
this: Once our news culture sets a story in stone, chances are it will crumble.
But first it must be recycled louder and louder 24/7, as if sheer repetition
will transmute conventional wisdom into reality.
When the Pennsylvania returns rained down Tuesday night, the narrative became
clear fast. The Democrats' exit polls spelled disaster: Some 25 percent
of the primary voters said they would defect to Mr. McCain or not vote at all
if Barack Obama were the nominee. How could the party possibly survive this
bitter, perhaps race-based civil war?
But as the doomsday alarm grew shrill, few noticed that on this same day in
Pennsylvania, 27 percent of Republican primary voters didn't just tell
pollsters they would defect from their party's standard-bearer; they
went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though
ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday,
open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining
that party's nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their
total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more
numerously, Ron Paul. That's more voters than the margin (215,000) that
separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.
Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November.
Mr. Huckabee's religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout
the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic
ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000
votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially
since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in
Pennsylvania. (These figures don't even include independents, who couldn't
vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats
since 2006.)
For such a bitterly divided party, the Democrats hardly show signs of clinical
depression. The last debate, however dumb, had the most viewers of any so far.
The rise in turnout and new voters is all on the Democratic side. Even before
its deathbed transfusion of new donations, the Clinton campaign trounced the
McCain campaign in fund-raising by 2.5 to 1. (The Obama-McCain ratio is 3 to
1.)
On Tuesday, a Democrat won the first round of a special Congressional election
in Mississippi, even though the national G.O.P. outspent the Democrats by more
than double and President Bush carried this previously safe Republican district
by 25 percentage points in 2004. A Gallup poll last week found Mr. Bush's
national disapproval rating the worst (69 percent) for any president in Gallup's
entire 70-year history. For all his (and Mr. McCain's) persistent sightings
of "victory" in Iraq, the percentage of Americans calling the
war a mistake (63) also set a new record.
"I'm thrilled to be anywhere with high ratings," Mr. Bush
joked on Monday night, when he popped up like Waldo on the NBC game show "Deal
or No Deal" to root for an Army captain who was a contestant. But it
turns out that not even cash giveaways to veterans can induce Americans to set
eyes on this president. "Deal or No Deal" drew an audience 19
percent below its season average. The best deal for Mr. McCain would be for
Mr. Bush to disappear into the witness protection program.
But surely, it could be argued, the mud in the Democratic race will be as much
a drag on that party's eventual nominee as the incumbent president is
on the G.O.P. ticket. The counterargument, advanced by Mrs. Clinton in justifying
her "kitchen sink" attacks on Mr. Obama, is that the Democrats
are better off being tested now by raising all the issues the Republicans will.
It's a fair point. The Wright, Rezko, Ayers, "bittergate"
and flag-pin firestorms will all be revived by the opposition come fall. Voters
should indeed see how Mr. Obama deals with them, just as Democrats also need
to gauge how the flash points of race and gender will play out in the crunch.
The flaw in Mrs. Clinton's refrain is her claim that she, unlike her
challenger, has already been so fully vetted that her candidacy can offer no
more unpleasant surprises. "I have a lot of baggage, and everybody has
rummaged through it for years," she says. Perhaps the delusion that she
has a get-out-of-scandal-free card comes from her unexpected endorsement from
Richard Mellon Scaife, the nutty Pittsburgh newspaper publisher who once spent
a fortune trying to implicate the Clintons in the "murder" of
Vince Foster. Or perhaps she thinks Fox News will call off the dogs now that
her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, is appearing in network promos endorsing
its "fair and balanced" shtick.
But the incessant praise for Mrs. Clinton's resilience as a candidate
by Karl Rove, Pat Buchanan and William Bennett reveals just how eager they are
to take her on. The dealings of the Bill Clinton post-presidency, barely alluded
to by Mr. Obama in his own halting bouts of negative campaigning, have simply
been put on hold while the Democrats slug it out. Close observers of The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Post and Fox News can already read Rupert Murdoch's
tea leaves, and not just those from China. "Clinton Foundation Secrets"
was the title of The Journal's lead editorial on Friday profiling a rogues'
gallery of shady donors.
Mrs. Clinton's supporters would argue that she's so battle-tested
she could fend it all off. She's unlikely to get the chance. For all
the nail-biting suspense being ginned up, the probable denouement remains unchanged.
When the primary juggernaut finally ends - following picturesque day
trips to Puerto Rico and Guam - the superdelegates will likely succumb
to the math of Mr. Obama's virtually insurmountable pledged-delegate
total.
There's also a way that two super-superdelegates, the duo on the Democrats'
last winning ticket, could trigger a faster finale. Bill Clinton could do so
by undermining his wife once more with another ill-timed, red-faced eruption.
Al Gore could possibly do so with a well-timed endorsement before his party
gets mired in yet another Florida recount.
There's only one way this can end badly, no matter how long it lasts.
That would be if the loser, whoever it is, turns sore and fails to rally his
or her troops around the winner. It's all about "the way the loser
loses," as the Illinois Congressman Rahm Emanuel, who is neutral in the
race, likes to say. While the Clintons are capable of such kamikaze narcissism,
their selfish desire to preserve their own political future, if not the party's,
may be a powerful check on those impulses.
On the way to the finish line, the prolonged primary race, far from destroying
the Democratic candidates, may do more insidious damage to the Republican nominee,
lulling his campaign into an unjustified complacency. The Democrats should "take
their time - don't rush," the McCain aide Mark Salter joked
last week. Yet his candidate, as the conservative blogger Ross Douthat pointed
out, keeps bumping up against a 45 percent ceiling in the polls even now, when
the Democrats are ostensibly in ruins.
Mr. McCain is not only burdened with the most despised president in his own
71-year lifetime, but he's getting none of the seasoning that he, no
less than the Democrats, needs to compete in the fall. Age is as much an issue
as race and gender in this campaign. Mr. McCain will have to prove not merely
that he can keep to the physical rigors of his schedule and fend off investigations
of his ties to lobbyists and developers. He also must show he can think and
speak fluently about the domestic issues that are gripping the country. Picture
him debating either Democrat about health care, the mortgage crisis, stagnant
middle-class wages, rice rationing at Costco. It's not pretty.
Last week found Mr. McCain visiting economically stricken and "forgotten"
communities (forgotten by Republicans, that is) in what his campaign bills as
the "It's Time for Action Tour." It kicked off in Selma,
Ala., a predominantly black town where he confirmed his maverick image by drawing
an almost exclusively white audience.
The "action" the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches
may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain
vowed that he would not "roll out a long list of policy initiatives."
(He can't, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring
back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as The Birmingham News reported,
this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn't
prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers:
inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private
fund-raiser.
The Democrats' unending brawl may be supplying prime time with a goodly
share of melodrama right now, but there will be laughter aplenty once the Republican
campaign that's not ready for prime time emerges from the wings.
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