It seemed endless. It got nasty. (Babies were invoked, but so was bin Laden.) What will Tuesday's vote finally bring for the Democratic race?
Mike Madden
salon.com
April 22, 2008
McKEESPORT, Pa. -- Barack Obama doesn't expect to win Pennsylvania's primary on Tuesday, but why let that get in the way of a few more huge rallies? After all, if things go the way he expects them to, he'll be back in the fall, courting the state's 21 electoral votes instead of its 188 Democratic delegates. The polls show Hillary Clinton maintaining the lead she's held in the state for months, but it was Obama and his supporters who seemed like they were ready to celebrate Monday night.
He walked into a rally here straight from taping a "Daily Show" interview full of easygoing jokes. "I am so sorry we're late," Obama told the few thousand people crammed into a stuffy, hot gym. Most of them had waited at least three hours by the time he showed up and started speaking. They didn't care. "O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!" the room erupted when he walked in. The ovations kept coming throughout the speech as Obama promised, with a staple part of his stump speech, to change politics in Washington and end "business as usual."
Obama may have reason to party; even a Clinton win will leave her with one fewer state remaining to close a delegate gap that puts her, every day, under pressure to get out of the race. But the path to this point has certainly been strange. By now, you could be forgiven for thinking that Pennsylvania had already voted, maybe two or three times. The nearly two-month campaign here has been so full of dramatic twists that fizzled after a few days of breathless coverage on cable news, so caught up in minicrises for each side, that it now seems like its own universe, detached from the rest of the race for the Democratic nomination.
For all that, though, on the night before the election, not much had changed from when the candidates first landed here. Clinton still leads in most polls, by at least six or seven points. Obama is still struggling to win over the white working-class voters who make up the swing bloc in statewide elections here. Sandwiched between contests in two other large, industrial Rust Belt states (Ohio and Indiana), Pennsylvania's primary may stand out mostly because, after an exhausting battle with record levels of TV advertising and massive voter interest, the race here is likely to produce a result predictable back on March 5: Clinton wins, but Obama still leads the delegate count.
The main difference between the end of the Pennsylvania campaign and the beginning was how nasty it got along the way. Clinton's final ad features images of Pearl Harbor, the stock market crash, the 1970s oil embargo, Osama bin Laden and Hurricane Katrina. A voiceover says, "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. Who do you think has what it takes?"
Clinton aides declared in a conference call Monday that the commercial wasn't negative; it merely made the case that Hillary, not Obama, is most qualified to be president. Her campaign's phone calls to voters also accused Obama of lying about his position on gun rights.
Obama wasn't sticking to the high road, as he previously sought to do. "She is a hardworking public servant, but Senator Clinton does not understand the need to fundamentally change how Washington works," he said Monday night in McKeesport. "We can't have lobbyists and special interests setting the agenda in Washington." His campaign was running ads implying Clinton was using "fear and calculation to divide us" and making its own harsh phone calls to prospective supporters. ... ( more )
Copyright ©2008 Salon Media Group, Inc.
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