When California’s Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, announced his support for John McCain last week, it came as a bit of a surprise. The governor had just said, a couple of days prior, that he would remain neutral in the race, but the results of the Florida primary, coupled with Rudy Giuliani’s departure, led to the unexpected endorsement.
But however surprising Schwarzenegger’s announcement was, that was nothing compared to his wife’s unforeseen endorsement yesterday.
Maria Shriver endorsed Democrat Barack Obama’s White House bid today at a Los Angeles rally.
“Follow your own truth and your own voice,” she told the crowd. With California’s primary just 48 hours away, “We’re at the epicenter of change. We can lead. We can lead this country,” she said.
The California First Lady made a surprise appearance on-stage at the Sunday campaign event, backed by the candidate’s wife Michelle Obama, talk show host Oprah Winfrey and Shriver’s cousin Caroline Kennedy.
The event was televised on C-SPAN, leading one of Ben Smith’s readers to note it was “probably the most exciting thing to happen on C-SPAN in a very long time.”
I haven’t seen any of the event myself, but the NYT’s Andrew Rosenthal said, “Forty-eight hours before the closest thing America has ever had to a national primary, four extraordinary women put on the best campaign rally I’ve seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics.” I guess it was pretty good.
All of this matters, of course, given California’s electoral significance, but the contest in the Golden State is complex enough at this point to make it entirely unpredictable.
Bill Clinton also spent the day in California, making something akin to a mea-culpa tour of predominantly African-American churches, hoping to alleviate some of the tensions of recent weeks.
Bill Clinton embarked on a pre-Super Tuesday tour of African American churches in Southern California Sunday, in what some involved in the organizing claim is intended to let the former president speak directly to African American voters after the controversy that erupted over his remarks in South Carolina.
“This is a wonderful, wonderful election for America. We ought to be able to have a few disagreements without discord,” he told an audience of African American parishioners during his first stop at the City of Refuge Church in Los Angeles. The Clinton campaign says the tour is part of a larger effort to reach out to all California communities.
At his first stop, the former president never directly addressed his remarks in South Carolina, but he appealed to the audience for understanding.
“I’m not against anybody. I’ve never been more proud to be part the Democratic Party in my life,” he said. “I get why this is a hard election. I waited my whole life to vote for an African American for president. I waited my whole life to vote for a woman for president. And sometimes I look up at sky and say, ‘God you’re playing with my mind again.'”
So, who’s going to win this contest? As a practical matter, the race is close enough that the candidate with the most votes won’t be able to celebrate much — California’s delegates will be distributed on a proportional basis, so the “loser” in the state will still likely do quite well.
That said, given that bragging rights and momentum-narratives are on the line, it looks awfully close. The Field Poll, generally considered the gold standard of California surveys, showed Clinton leading Obama by two points, 36% to 34%, with 18% undecided, and 12% responding “others” (this group includes voters who’ve already cast their ballots). The Field Poll showed Clinton with a 15-point lead in California two weeks ago, so Obama is going into tomorrow having closed the gap considerably.
But Nick Beaudrot makes the case that it probably won’t be enough.
These breathless reports of a tied race in California are getting out of hand, as are those suggesting Obamantum will sweep him to a delegate victory on Super Tuesday. Everybody needs to get a grip here … Hillary Clinton had a twenty-four point lead among people who had actually cast ballots as recently as ten days ago. To overcome that sort of head start, Obama would have to have had an unprecedented GOTV operation in California, and all indications are that while he has a large number of committed volunteers, there aren’t enough to effectively canvass the state.
It should be interesting.