Democratic presidential nomination far from tied up

September 21, 2007

McClatchy’s Steven Thomma suggests the one question hanging over the Democratic presidential race as the party enters the final quarter of 2007 is, “Can anyone catch Hillary Clinton?” I think the answer is yes, but I also think Thomma is right to ask.

The New York senator has combined the party’s most popular brand name with a muscular, disciplined campaign to take a commanding position almost everywhere. She’s opened double-digit leads over her nearest rivals in national polls, as well as in early voting states such as New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida and California. If she runs the tables there, the nomination almost certainly will be hers.

If….

This piece follows on the heels of a much-discussed Slate piece from John Dickerson, showing a forlorn Barack Obama alongside a headline that read, “Time to panic?”

Barack Obama is improving rapidly as a presidential candidate…. This is good news for Obama and his fans, but is it enough good news? While he’s been improving, Hillary Clinton has been improving faster. He was once the Democratic Party phenomenon, but she’s the one with the momentum in the polls. […]

Is it time for Obama to panic? Each day Clinton stays as the strong front-runner locks in her status a little more.

I continue to be neutral, and largely undecided, about the Democratic primary, but I tend to think this talk about Clinton’s “inevitability” is misplaced. There’s absolutely no doubt that she’s the frontrunner; the nomination is hers to lose. But if I were the Clinton campaign, I’d work hard to tamp expectations down. A big lead in September just doesn’t mean that much.

I’ve mentioned this before, but data from 2003 is pretty illustrative.

* With four months to go before the Iowa caucuses, a national Zogby poll showed John Kerry running fifth with 7% support. John Edwards was in seventh, with 3% support (slightly behind Al Sharpton).

* With six weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, a national ABC News/Washington Post poll showed Howard Dean with more support than his three closest competitors combined. He went on to lose every primary in which he competed.

* With four weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses, a national AP poll showed John Kerry in sixth place — with half the support Joe Lieberman enjoyed.

Granted, I suspect voters are paying closer attention now than in 2003, but not much more. For one thing, Dems were pretty desperate to beat Bush at the time. For another, there’s some evidence to suggest Dems are still a little confused about some of the candidates’ policy positions, even on the number one issue (Iraq).

What’s more, Iowa votes first, and can establish some momentum for the winner(s). Right now, Clinton’s lead is huge on the national level, but it’s a three-way race in Iowa, where Clinton, Obama, and Edwards are all very competitive. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman noted that more than two-thirds of the Democrats who voted in the 2004 Iowa caucuses didn’t decide who to vote for until a month before the caucuses. Four in 10 decided in the last week. (Note to Obama: move to Iowa. If you win, the momentum shift will be huge.)

And that’s one of the principal reasons I think Clinton’s campaign may need to worry a bit about expectations. Races narrow; they almost always do. If Clinton’s national lead shrinks from 20 to 10, the media will likely go nuts talking about the senator in “freefall,” when in fact, it’s just a natural tightening that happens in most campaigns. With all this talk about “inevitability,” part of me wonders if Clinton is looking too strong right now.

I’ve also seen quite a bit of talk that Obama and Edwards need to do something shocking and/or groundbreaking in order to shake up the race. I’m not even convinced that’s necessary. Kerry and Edwards excelled in 2004 as the Iowa caucuses drew close, not with hail-mary passes, but by sticking to their game plans.

Look, Hillary Clinton is a tremendous candidate running a terrific campaign. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see her do extremely well in the primaries and get the Democratic nomination. Given all the factors, it’s foolish to suggest she’s anything but the frontrunner, a position she may very well never relinquish.

But for a lot of voters, the race is just getting started. Can we put the “inevitable” talk on hold for a while?

September 21, 2007 at 2:55 pm

Look, Hillary Clinton is a tremendous candidate… who voted for the Patriot Act.

I’m glad that the Corporate Military Industrial Media has such a staunch supporter of their back-assward polling methodology as The Carpetbagger. Wouldn’t want to break the vicious cycle that brought us George W. Bush now would we?

Mr. Burns, erm, I mean Mrs. Clinton, your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Why are you so popular? 🙂

Two words: Howard. Dean.

Well said, CB, well said…

(And I know that, technically, you’re correct that Dean didn’t win in any primary in which he competed. But, I always think it’s interesting to note that he won the Vermont primary with almost 60% of the vote — after formally leaving the race.)

Anybody can win. Who ever heard o Jimmy Carter?

However, Clinton is about a 2-1 favorite to win. Obama is 5-1 and Gore is in third place, just ahead of Edwards at about 12-1.

You can make some money if you bet on anyone but Clinton and they win the nomination

Despite her “antiwar” stance, she’s the Dem candidate that is acceptable to the higher powers than run much of the MSM today. They want to crush all the other viable candidates before the actual campaign begins.

Look at her Healthcare Plan. Or her votes on Bankruptcy reform. Or her votes on the Patriot act for that matter. Doesn’t strike me as courageous leadership in action.

I guess we’ll have to see how it all plays out.

Things turned around even more than this. I recall one poll in the fall of 2003 where Kerry was even behind Sharpton.

Kerry won by concentrating heavily on Iowa, but that might not work out the same in 2008 with so many primaries soon afterwards. If Obama were to stop campaigning in other states it is possible that Clinton might build up an advantage so great that even a bounce from Iowa might not be enough to clinch the nomination.

JKap, I got the impression Steve was discussing her merits as someone campaigning not, necessarily, her substantive positions. Looking solely at the skill of her campaign, she has run one of the better campaigns to date in a long time.

It is, however, still early (alas, us Dean supporters know this well) and no matter how disciplined she is, there is always the chance of a gaffe. She seems to have gotten through the worst of the Hsu bit without too much harm.

The biggest thing HRC has going for right now, however, is that Obama – after a very strong start – has lost some steam. His radical approach to skipping all debates for a few months is with some key folks in Iowa. I can’t find it now, but Newsweek’s Howard Fineman did an immediate “review” of the candidates’ performance at the 12,000 person Harkin Steak Fry and reported that Obama was “flat,” and didn’t do much to help his cause.

Edwards is well organized in Iowa, but has ever so slowly lost ground to HRC in polls here – the inability to land SEIU hurts (more because of the lost opportunity for a good bump).

Everytime Richardson starts to get a little fire, he sticks his foot in his mouth.

Yes, its early, but it is going to take someone elevating their game a fair bit to change the dynamics. Otherwise HRC will be pretty tough to beat.

I’m with Former Dan. And the MSM likes her because she’ll be so easy to crucify later on. We’ll reprise everything from “Clinton caused that problem” to “isn’t she a lesbian?” so that the Dem candidate is so busy defending herself she can’t take advantage of the Rethug party’s weakness.

(sorry – missed a close tag. here is the site: http://blogs.dmregister.com/?cat=33)

There also seems to be this prevailing notion that Hillary Clinton is running a flawless campaign…as a result, whenever something does come up (and it happens often), it gets ignored, rather than mainstreamed and repeated and re-enforced. Just some examples:

-Her inexplicable defense of lobbyists as “real people”, followed up by an assurance that they’re real people she would never listen to ever

-Her insistence that nominees do not discuss their foreign policies out in the open (too raucous boos at the AFL-CIO debate)

-Her puzzling remark that America is safer now than we once were, a mistake compounded by her spokesman than trying to explain it by noting that the majority of Americans and Dems agree with her (only feeds the “finger in the wind” meme about here and is factually incorrect, as polls indicate she is out of step with the Dems on that one).

-Her reversal on how open one should be about the option of using nuclear weapons in general.

I could go on, as there are myriad more, but, I think the point is clear enough. None of those registered as “gaffes”, and as such, were discarded to the dustbins of the 1st and 2nd quarters as unimportant campaign information, while Edwards spending $400 on a haircut or Obama stating that he’s right in line with American foreign policy on al Qaeda in Pakistan are somehow “gaffes” that help define their great strategic weaknesses as candidates.

In a lot of ways, the expectation that Clinton would run a flawless campaign has given way to the reality as such, because no matter how much she does make mistakes, they don’t stick, as the press doesn’t make them stick. They aren’t re-enforced or mainstreamed by being repeated over and over as signs of doubt or worry in any column about her, they aren’t over-covered, and as such, never end up becoming gaffes.

It’s interesting.

Leiberman was polling at 9% in November 2003, according to the poll you linked to.

Iowa will certainly mean a lot to Edwards, but you can already hear the media ready to spin “Well, you know, Edwards won Iowa, but it really doesn’t mean much with all those other primaries coming up — he didn’t win by enough, so it’s really not a win for him”

There’s a real wild card coming up as well, and that’s Al Gore. No, I don’t think (anymore) that he’s going to run. He’s hinted strongly recently that he will endorse someone. I think you can safely bet it won’t be Clinton, and I can’t see him endorsing Obama. The person who’s speaking his language of economic disenfranchisement is Edwards.

Just for fun, can you imagine what would happen to the race if, in January, Al Gore stood up and endorsed Edwards?

Another way of putting it is that something is only a gaffe is the press makes it a gaffe by repeating it over and over, describing it as a mistake, and wondering if it will hurt candidate X’s campaign. A campaign can say something completely in the mainstream of his or her primary or the general electorate, and if the press decides it’s a gaffe, the candidate will be blanketed with negative coverage that then drives down numbers and legitimizes the earlier coverage. On the other hand, a candidate can say something completely out of step with the entire country and his/her base, but if the press decides that’s not a gaffe, it won’t generate a lot of negative coverage and, as such, will not stall momentum or drive down poll numbers.

As such, the positions are irrelevant; the key is to play the media, and that is what Hillary is done better than anyone else. By creating the expectation that she would run a flawless campaign, she seems to have guaranteed herself good coverage throughout.

re: #2 l

why I didn’t know this was going to turn into a charged political debate. a tough question but a fair one. why maybe its my honesty and intregrity or my uncorruptability!

Nominating Hillary Clinton is a good way to get the Democrats to lose the presidential race and create a tailwind against Dem candidates in Congress.

I’m hoping that the current polls are simply evanescent and that people will see that she’s a lot more trouble than she’s worth if the Dems truly want to get a Dem President and a filibuster-proof Congress.

zmulls–

I don’t know why you can’t see Gore endorsing Obama. They both have very similar approaches to government reform, as they’re both systems- and process-oriented. Ryan Lizza makes the point in an article about Gore in TNR: Obama’s campaign is animated by the type of process reform that is a natural out-cropping of all of Gore’s criticisms of politics and arguments in The Assault on Reason:

But, again, he pulls back from what is obviously a slap at the Democrats running for president. “I don’t want to be critical of the candidates. That’s not my intention,” he says. “I don’t think the modern campaign process facilitates a genuine exchange of ideas. It’s multiple overlapping games of gotcha, and who can read the polls and the focus groups most skillfully and discern some new manipulative option that can be quickly parlayed into a couple of percentage points in the next poll and parlay that into greater fund-raising totals by the end of the next reporting period.” It’s almost as if he feels sorry for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and the others, as if they are hamsters locked in the cage of a broken political process, a cage that Gore is all too familiar with and does not seem to miss.

But will he reenter the cage nonetheless? The great challenge that Gore will face if he chooses to run for president is how to make the wrenching transition from outside critic of the political system to inside participant. Obama, another systems analyst with a powerful indictment of politics, has been trying to make a similar conversion and has achieved mixed results.

The New Republic

Great comment, #10.

I try not to go in for conspiracy theorizing. But it’s really amazed me what a smooth ride the press has given Lady Triangula. The fundraiser she did this week, raising bundled thousands from homeland security contractors, was beyond disgusting; it was the sort of stunt I’d expect from Tom DeLay, not a so-called progressive. But aside from Joe Trippi’s response to it–criticized, and fairly so, because it was itself a fundraiser–there was very little attention paid.

I oppose Hillary Clinton because I think she has an authoritarian temperament and will wield with relish many of the powers that the Bush Gang have appropriated for themselves, and because I think she’s all too comfortable with many of the animating premises of this current presidency: executive supremacy, our right to lead with force rather than principle, an economy primarily for, by, and of the rich.

I don’t doubt that she’ll be a considerably better president, by virtue of being exponentially smarter than Bush and surrounding herself with at least a few legitimate progressives. But she also represents the perpetuation of the miserable and silly politics of the last 20 years. We need to do better, and as Democrats we should demand better.

“I oppose Hillary Clinton because I think she has an authoritarian temperament and will wield with relish many of the powers that the Bush Gang have appropriated for themselves, and because I think she’s all too comfortable with many of the animating premises of this current presidency: executive supremacy, our right to lead with force rather than principle, an economy primarily for, by, and of the rich.”

I couldn’t have said it better. HRC is simply another version of Bush, only this time from the left. I’ve had enough of people who pretend to know better than everyone else. I’m ready for a president who listens, takes actions, takes responsibility, and on occasion, apologizes for mistaken actions and justifies the action instead of saying essentially “trust me.” Screw that.

dajafi @16

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy so much as her campaign, more than anything else, has been very good at simply manipulating the press. I think Karl Rove and Co. showed us how powerful that skill can be. So in that sense, it’s been a strong campaign. But in the sense that she’s actually made a great case to progressives or partisan Dems, I just don’t see it. She loses debates in focus groups and online polls, but says the things the Beltway crowd like, and as a result, gets good coverage out of it. If a million people watch a debate in May and think Edwards and Obama looked good, but 14 million people read news coverage saying Clinton looked awesome, who “won” that debate? That’s what she’s done well: sell herself to pundits. And then the pundits do the heavy lifting for her.

I just don’t know how well that will work when people decide to actually watch debates themselves. As we’ve seen in Iowa, where the candidates are much more able to get their message through to the voting public without using the media as an intermediary, she’s not doing nearly as well.

Nice conversation, but Hillary’s gonna win.

There ya have it folks. Hillary wins the Democratic Nomination. You just saved us all a lot of time and energy and campaign contributions, Haik. Thanks.

Yeah, Hillary’s going to win the nomination and lose the general election.

mop I guess I don’t see Gore endorsing Obama because I can’t see me endorsing Obama *g*

I don’t think Gore will make his endorsement on the basis of who would streamline or reform government better. My read on the situation is that Gore will look for someone who has the passion and fierceness to fight the battles that he’d like to see fought. He endorsed Dean in 2004 and I see Edwards as a candidate in the same mold (should be obvious that I’ve settled on him as my pre-primary favorite).

I’m not sold on Obama, and the more I’ve seen of him the less sold I am. I don’t think he’s been knocked around enough yet, either in politics (like Clinton) or in life (like Edwards). He’s extremely charismatic and he has the not inconsiderable ability to articulate core Democratic values in highly persuasive language. That’s not a knock — that’s a real skill, and he brings that to the table. I haven’t seen him really lay his keester on the line for anything yet, and he always seems a beat behind in wonky matters. I’d like to see him in the Senate, articulating the case for President Edwards’ agenda (and frankly, I’d love to see Clinton as Majority Leader, the perfect job for her).

But as to my original question, I’ll amend it — wouldn’t a Gore endorsement create irresistible momentum for whatever candidate he endorses? And if he does so before Iowa and NH…..it’s a whole new ball game.

and zmulls, some trace the decline of Dean’s campaign to the day Gore endorsed him. while i’m not sure i agree with that theory, i do think it is hard to see where Gore did Dean much good. i’m not sure Gore’s endorsement would have much value to anyone but Clinton (and the Tier II candidates).

zmulls, if you don’t think Obama’s been knocked around by life, I suggest you find a copy of Dreams From My Father.

I would happily enough vote for Edwards if he were the nominee, but Obama is the first candidate of my 34 years who really moves me. The man represents what’s best about America, and in addition to his enormous talents the mere fact of his election would, IMO, undo a significant portion of the damage done by Bush.

Otherwise, I agree that a Gore endorsement wouldn’t necessarily change the underlying dynamic of the race. What probably would happen–and this goes to mop’s point about how the Clinton campaign has leveraged the elite press–is that the coverage would focus on the “longtime rivalry” between the vice-president and the first lady through the ’90s, and how this endorsement is simply payback for some slight or schism from that period.

But Dean doesn’t appear to have gotten much help from the Gore endorsement. (alas.)

Vague? I think Obama has laid out more concrete positions than any of the others (I agree he was the king of vague at the outset) and the Edwards Clinton health plans seem to be virtual clones of the failed 1994 Hilary debacle.

What has me hopeful is that Hilary has not been able to break 40%. She maxed out at 39 and has been meandering sideways. As other candidates drop out, I think their totals will be transferred to almost anyone but Hilary. Anyone sheeplike enough to want to “back the winner” has done so. I suspect a substantial part of that support she enjoys is graham cracker thin. The money is keeping her afloat and if Edwards and Obama stay in the race long enough, that 35-39% she’s getting will sink w 33 and panic wills et in. She’s switch tactics and start to make the mistakes she doesn’t make when her campaign is on cruise control like it is now.

If Hillary is the “inevitable candidate” then it isn’t too soon to see if her campaign will stand up to the kind of attacks the Republicans will “inevitably” plaster her with. I am not thrilled about Democrats backing a candidate that so many people simply refuse to vote for.

Nearly all of the Democratic hopefuls would be able to handle the job – the question is, which one will beat the Republican.

For me – this is the only issue.

The country will not be able to stand up under the weight of another Republican in the White House.

This early out it would seem that the polling data is more accurate reflection of name recognition than of actual candidate preference.

I’ll take the polls more seriously in January.

Wait till the slime machine gets a hold of Hillary’s lesbian dalliances. The polls will suddenly shift.

Oh, is there anything the slime machine hasn’t already thrown at Hillary Clinton? Seriously.

I agree that “inevitable” is a strong word. I do think any serious observer would have to look at all the indicators and conclude that as of now, it’s Clinton’s race to lose. I don’t imagine anything less than a sound thrashing in Iowa would slow even her down much at this point. She could probably shake off even a close third place finish in IA and go on to sweep the rest of the early states, which would probably tend to cinch it for her with so many states following in early February.

But they say that 24 hours can be an eternity in politics so by my count, the Iowa caucuses are still more than 100 eternities away. Spend enough time following politics and you’ll see just damned near everything sooner or later. That’s what I love about following politics.

Comments are closed.