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Two Candidates, Two States and One Big Day
By Shailagh Murray and Perry Bacon Jr.
The Washington Post
Tuesday 06 May 2008
Indiana and North Carolina shape up as
big pieces of the Democratic puzzle.
Evansville, Indiana - On a final, fevered day of campaigning, Sen. Barack Obama looked
to voters in Indiana and North Carolina to reverse a string of defeats in key
states, while Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton fought to keep her improbable comeback
hopes alive with a pair of strong showings.
Sensing momentum in a state she was once expected to lose handily, Clinton
spent part of Monday campaigning in North Carolina, where she championed her
proposal to suspend the federal gas tax for the summer, promised to take on
oil companies over alleged price gouging, and pledged a return to the economic
progress of the 1990s, when her husband was president.
"I'm running a campaign on a simple belief: This election is about jobs,
jobs, jobs," Clinton told a crowd at a train station in High Point, N.C.
At an event later in the day in Indiana, Clinton took on the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries as part of her pledge to deal with high gas prices.
"We're going to go right at OPEC," she said at a firehouse in Merrillville.
"They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every
couple of months" and "decide how much oil they're going to produce
and what price they're going to put it at."
"That's not a market," she said. "That's a monopoly."
Obama also split his time between both states, an indication that he, too,
sees a tightening race in North Carolina and a close contest in Indiana. He
hit on many of the same economic themes as Clinton, in particular dismissing
her proposed gas tax holiday as a gimmick that would amount to a mere $30 per
voter while costing highway construction jobs.
The pace of both campaigns underscored an urgency to exceed expectations in
the two biggest contests left on the Democratic calendar.
For Obama, the Indiana and North Carolina primaries provide a chance to end
two months of difficulties that peaked last week when his former pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., held a controversial news conference in which he
defended earlier statements that Obama had denounced. The senator from Illinois
broke with Wright, terming the news conference "outrageous" and "destructive,"
but it remains to be seen how voters will react.
Obama has also struggled at the polls, not winning a single large state since
his Wisconsin rout of Clinton on Feb. 18. Losses in Ohio in March and Pennsylvania
in April showed him struggling to connect with working-class white voters, who
will figure significantly in both North Carolina and Indiana. Obama went out
of his way to court the group Monday, making a quick detour to Indiana's southwest
corner to meet with small gatherings of working-class men.
"This is going to be a tight election here in Indiana - every poll shows
a dead heat. We need every single vote," Obama told a group of AFL-CIO
members in Evansville. "You guys are pretty persuasive. I need you to tell
your membership this is something worth fighting for."
A loss in Indiana, which neighbors Obama's home state of Illinois and where
his campaign once expected to win easily, could raise anew questions about his
ability to beat Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, in November.
The Clinton campaign has labeled Indiana a must-win and is also hoping for
a stronger-than-expected finish in North Carolina, if not an outright triumph,
to maintain the momentum she has built in the past several weeks.
Public polls show Clinton trailing in North Carolina, where about a third of
voters are expected to be African American, but both campaigns have detected
volatility over the past 10 days as Wright has reemerged as a campaign issue.
Clinton's schedule reflected a dynamic that both campaigns seem to agree on:
She remained behind but has gained ground over the past two weeks in North Carolina,
while Indiana is essentially a dead heat. Clinton aides said Monday that the
candidate, along with former president Bill Clinton and their daughter, Chelsea,
had logged more than 100 events in Indiana since mid-March.
Obama returned to Indianapolis for a rally Monday night with Stevie Wonder,
but otherwise his campaign style was more casual and smaller-scale. He showed
up at dawn at an Evansville construction site, greeting about 50 workers in
hard hats as they filed through the gate. During his swing through North Carolina,
he held a modest town hall meeting in a high-tech factory and then dropped by
a coffee shop in downtown Durham.
Only six primaries remain after Tuesday, and only one - Oregon - is considered
competitive, though polls suggest Obama is favored there. The Puerto Rico primary
on June 1 offers the largest haul of pledged delegates, with 55 up for grabs
in the U.S. territory. The other contests - in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon,
Montana and South Dakota - represent a total of 162 pledged delegates.
By comparison, Indiana's 72 pledged delegates and North Carolina's 115 represent
Clinton's best chances to close the delegate gap with Obama, who leads 1,745
to 1,607, according to the Associated Press.
"These are states where Senator Obama started out with substantial advantages,"
said Clinton strategist Geoff Garin.
But Obama advisers are confident that the landscape has stabilized in recent
days, and that a split decision is the most likely outcome - leaving Obama
with a firm lead in pledged delegates and popular votes. They believe his objection
to the gas tax holiday will resonate with voters who are fed up with quick fixes
to complicated problems. "Everybody feels good about this close,"
said David Axelrod, Obama's chief political strategist. "We are delivering
the message we want to deliver, in the way we want to deliver it."
Clinton continued to defend her gas tax proposal, although she cast it in different
terms, suggesting it was part of a broader strategy to reduce oil prices in
the short term, while suggesting that Obama and other critics are out of touch
with American voters.
"My opponent, Senator Obama, he disagrees with me.... And he's always
going on TV, and he's always saying, 'Oh, you know, that's just like $20,'"
she said in Merrillville. "Well, you know, for a lot of people $20 is something,
right? Twenty dollars means something."
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Bacon was traveling with the Clinton campaign.
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