A couple of weeks ago, David Corn had a really interesting item about Barack Obama’s highest hurdle on Feb. 5. It’s not necessarily Hillary Clinton, it’s the way in which the timing of Super Tuesday moves the campaign away from his strengths as a candidate.
“With Obama, it’s not about his career highlights, it’s about him,” Corn argued. “To buy his case, a voter must believe in him, have faith in him, place hope in him — must have (or feel) a connection with him. And this is where the problem kicks in.”
As I argued at the time, I think Corn’s analysis is largely right. Obama seems to excel when he has time. In Iowa, for example, voters got to “kick the tires and look under the hood” of a large Democratic field. Candidates showed up at their homes. They got to ask questions, get answers, and interact with the field the way voters in other states can’t. These folks, after getting up close and personal with all of them for almost a year, and looking each of them in the eye, preferred Obama to Edwards and Clinton in a big way.
Come Tuesday, the dynamic is reversed — so long retail politics, hello wholesale. For Obama, this creates an even more daunting challenge. First, he faces a candidate with all the benefits of an incumbent in nearly two-dozen contests in which she starts out with a lead (Illinois is the exception). Second, as Corn explained, “At this stage, the candidates will be reaching voters mainly through commercials. A television spot is a fine medium for a candidate to share his or her resume, to list his or her accomplishments. It is much tougher to convey the intangibles of hope, faith, and transcendence in a 30- or 60-second spot. The bottom line: advantage to Clinton.”
With this in mind, this front-page WaPo piece was especially interesting.
Sen. Barack Obama has two opponents: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the clock, which is rapidly running down.
With three days to go before Super Tuesday, when roughly half the delegates in the Democratic presidential contest will be awarded, Obama is racing around the country, still trying to introduce himself to voters, speed-dating style.
Whether this will work, or even can work, will probably go a long way in dictating who wins the Democratic nomination.
The WaPo piece seems to reinforce what a lot of observers, including me, tend to think about the state of the race going into Tuesday — Obama has post-South Carolina, post-Kennedy endorsement momentum, but is fighting uphill. Voters tend to like Obama more when they see him more, but the nine days between South Carolina and Feb. 5 make that impossible.
The compressed primary calendar presents a challenge for all of the remaining candidates, as they try to visit as many as possible of the more than 20 states holding elections or caucuses on Tuesday. But the time crunch is particularly acute for Obama, who, for all the hype around his candidacy, remains far less well known than Clinton. Obama vaulted into contention against her by spending week upon week in Iowa before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. He engaged in an intensive grass-roots effort and visited the smallest towns and the most remote county fairgrounds to introduce himself to voters, who rewarded him with a big win over his rivals.
Now, with far less time and broader territory to cover, he must make do with a radically truncated version of that outreach, relying on a single final visit to big cities to win over voters to whom he remains little more than a first-term senator with an exotic name and a reputation for oratory.
His efforts appear to be paying off, as his standing in polls inches closer and closer to Clinton’s. The question is whether he has enough time to make up the gap. […]
If a few extra weeks would help Obama, the opposite is true for Clinton, whose advisers would be happy with just a few extra days, they said in interviews Friday.
So, what are we left with? Going into Tuesday’s 22 contests, Clinton enters as the favorite in most, but the delegate distribution is proportionate, not winner-take-all. Obama doesn’t have to “win” Super Tuesday; he needs to minimize Clinton’s success and keep the race going. Noam Scheiber suggests carrying eight to 10 states and about 45% of the delegates should do the trick.
After Feb. 5, though, the landscape should get even more interesting, and may return to a pace Obama finds more favorable.
There’s not a day on the primary calendar between Tuesday and the convention that has more than four contests scheduled. Even on March 4, which the Post says could be a decisive day, Ohio and Texas are really the only two games in town. (Vermont and Rhode Island also vote that day, but, you know, they’re Vermont and Rhode Island.) And there are two weeks between March 4 and the previous primary day. Since, as MacGillis and Kornblut point out, Obama tends to do better the more time he can focus on a specific state, I see this slightly benefiting him.
Bottom line: It may be to Obama’s advantage to have one massive primary day (Feb. 5) followed by a bunch of two-state affairs, since, if he can just survive the former, he’s got a great shot in the latter. Conversely, it would have been much trickier for him to have several six- and eight-state primaries every week, since it would have been impossible to focus on one or two particular states but, unlike February 5, the press wouldn’t keep giving him a pass.
All of that sounds pretty persuasive, but here’s the catch — if Obama “survives” Feb. 5, but Clinton has a 250-delegate lead on Feb. 6, when does Obama catch up? Given that the rest of the contests also distribute delegates on a proportionate basis, the pressure would be on for him to do very well through the spring.
Stay tuned.