What a mess!
Could it get any worse for the Democrats than what happened last night?
On
the surface, and by the media’s bias, the night went to Barack Obama.
He won North Carolina big and Hillary won Indiana small. The numbers would
seem to indicate that Obama’s pledged delegate lead is insurmountable by
Hillary Clinton, which it was before Tuesday’s primary, but, more
importantly, that because of Obama’s huge win in North Carolina, even
with Florida and Michigan and huge wins in West Virginia and Kentucky,
it would take some tweaking to get Hillary ahead in the popular vote. And
then she’d be ahead by a mere 3,000 votes, a margin of less than one
percent. Whew!
Never mind that Obama’s North Carolina win was predictable, and never
mind that Clinton’s Indiana win was unpredictable, and never mind that
it was Barack Obama himself who said that Indiana was to be his
tiebreaker, all of that has been ignored in the handicapping. According
to Obama-speak and media- speak, this Tuesday’s primary was Obama’s.
But
get past the talking heads and the Obama spinmeisters and all of that
being said, what happened last night is simply more proof that Barack
Obama will prove a catastrophe for the Democratic Party in the general
election.
While the talking heads were putting the nail in Clinton’s coffin and
speaking of Obama’s inevitability and Clinton’s demise even though
absolutely nothing is different today than what anyone expected, the one
thing no one really wants to talk about is the fact that Hillary Clinton
was 100 percent correct that Barack Obama cannot and did not
win that all important blue-collar vote. Once again, Obama’s huge win
was given him by his African-American brothers and sisters.
Barack Obama's
"big win" was in defiance of his electability problem. He lost whites in
North Carolina by 61-37. He lost whites in Indiana by 60-40. He won
African Americans 91-7 in North Carolina. He won African Americans in
Indiana by 92-8.
Obama won North
Carolina because African Americans were 33% of the vote. Obama kept it
close in Indiana because African Americans were 15% of the vote. So, in
terms of the electability problems Obama is facing, nothing changed last
night.
Except the storyline, as it is being written by Senator Obama’s staff
and the news media, that Hillary Clinton is finished.
And
that narrative ignores another detail, which is that according to CNN,
seniors brought it home for Hillary by giving her a whopping 69% of the
vote. This number means something in the general election because
seniors vote, whereas younger voters are less reliable.
Now
check out these stats and you will see that Hillary must go on for the
party’s sake. She won nearly six in 10 white men, only a couple of
percentage points behind white women, in Indiana.
She won white men in 13 states. Obama has won white men in 10 states. At
Obama’s high point, following his victory in Wisconsin, he had won the
white male vote in three consecutive Democratic contests.
When Clinton wins hotly contested primaries, she does so with white men.
Clinton has now won the swing bloc of white men in all of the recent
Rust Belt contests, from Ohio to Pennsylvania to Indiana.
In North Carolina, she also won a majority of white men and maintained
the support of more than six in ten white women.
Now
there are superdelegates such as Donna Brazile who think that the Dems
can win against John McCain with just the African-American vote. She and
others believe that white folks don’t matter to the party any more, and
neither do Hispanics. Senator Clinton needs to tell the Party leaders
otherwise.
Perhaps most troubling for the Democrats is the fact that the backers
of both Clinton and Obama by large numbers insist they will not vote for
the other candidate in the general election. In the case of Clinton’s
backers we’re talking 68 percent of her supporters. Now surely some of
these voters will come back to the Party, but not all and that will be a huge loss to
the Dems. It is a problem that cannot be ignored.
So,
I think Hillary should stay in the race. I think she should take the
high road and build on her successful efforts to show her party that she
is the candidate for the people, that she is a fighter and she will do
what she has to do to get where she has to go.
But
where I differ with others is I think she owes it to the Party and to
her supporters to take her argument all the way to the convention where
maybe someone will actually listen to her and come to understand that
Senator Obama looks real pretty on a stage, and reads a teleprompter
well, but he comes with not just baggage but a trunk load of problems
that again reared themselves in Tuesday’s primaries. Reverend Wright was
also on the mind of many voters.
Maybe, in that old smoke-filled room sharing a cigar and a shot of
whiskey HRC can convince those Superdelegates that she has the cojones
to win against McCain and that they better start taking a closer look at
the facts, because the She-devil is in the details.