The NYT’s Adam Nagourney explains today that the Clinton campaign is looking at the landscape, and sees a difficult path to the nomination. The campaign does, however, have some key metrics in mind that, they hope, could make matters easier.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton needs three breaks to wrest the Democratic presidential nomination from Senator Barack Obama in the view of her advisers.
She has to defeat Mr. Obama soundly in Pennsylvania next month to buttress her argument that she holds an advantage in big general election states.
She needs to lead in the total popular vote after the primaries end in June.
And Mrs. Clinton is looking for some development to shake confidence in Mr. Obama so that superdelegates, Democratic Party leaders and elected officials who are free to decide which candidate to support overturn his lead among the pledged delegates from primaries and caucuses.
Some of these points seem far more plausible than others. Winning Pennsylvania shouldn’t pose too difficult a challenge for Clinton; in fact, the Obama campaign expects to lose the state and has already begun campaigning in post-Pennsylvania contests (his schedule today, for example, includes stops in Oregon and West Virginia).
It’s those other two breaks that get a little tricky.
On the popular vote, as we recently discussed, Obama already enjoys a rather healthy lead, which is likely to prove insurmountable. The NYT piece noted that
Mr. Obama’s edge over Mrs. Clinton is 700,000 votes out of 26 million cast, excluding caucuses and the disputed Florida and Michigan results. About 12 million people are eligible to vote in the remaining contests.
Aides to the two candidates said even with the best possible showing for Mrs. Clinton in the states ahead, it was hard to see how she could pass Mr. Obama without Michigan and Florida.
It creates the awkward dynamic in which Obama will probably enter the convention with more delegates, votes, and states, and the Clinton campaign will insist that superdelegates back her anyway.
Which segues nicely to the third point: shaking confidence in Obama.
To a certain extent, the Clinton campaign has already been at least partially successful in this. With the “kitchen-sink strategy” before the Texas and Ohio contests, Clinton was able to boost Obama’s negatives for the first time since, well, ever. Party insiders who had begun to think of Obama as the inevitable nominee after 11 straight February victories suddenly started to look at him as vulnerable.
But it’s the Jeremiah Wright controversy that matters.
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers had hoped that the uproar over inflammatory remarks made by Mr. Obama’s longtime pastor that has rocked his campaign for a week might lead voters and superdelegates to question whether they really know enough about Mr. Obama to back him. […]
Mrs. Clinton’s aides hope that disclosures about Mr. Obama’s past like the one involving Mr. Wright could give superdelegates’ pause. […]
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said they had spent recent days making the case to wavering superdelegates that Mr. Obama’s association with Mr. Wright would doom their party in the general election.
That argument could be Mrs. Clinton’s last hope for winning this contest.
It’s a tough road. If the Clinton campaign is seen as taking advantage of the Wright controversy, the backlash among Democrats would likely be intense. Former Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel said yesterday, “Many liberals like myself, who would be happy to support Hillary Clinton if she earned the nomination, would abandon her if her campaign seeks to exploit the Wright controversy either in the remaining contests or with superdelegates.”
But does she have any choice?