Buyer’s Remorse in Pennsylvania

The results of the Pennsylvania primary are in and with only ten contests remaining, the battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama seems sure to intensify in the coming weeks as each struggles to get the 2,025 delegates needed to win the Democratic party nomination. Hillary Clinton began the primary with enormous advantages: she was ahead in March by 16 points according to a Franklin & Marshall Poll, and she had the support of both Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter.

Clinton dropped six of those points in gaining a decisive 55 to 45 victory over Obama, but her win gives her reason to keep campaigning and to hope that the superdelegates who are thinking of supporting Barack Obama will experience buyer’s remorse before the Democratic convention meets in Denver.

Like her husband, “the comeback kid” of 1992, Clinton is waging a long-shot campaign to get to the White House. But her long-shot hopes now don’t seem as desperate as they did before Pennsylvania. When we look at what the Pennsylvania primary results reveal, we see a set of mixed signals that tell us the following:

Barack Obama can be successfully swiftboated: In 2004, the presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry was stopped in its tracks when an ad by a conservative group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, charged him with lying about his actions as a much-decorated swift-boat commander in the Mekong Delta. Kerry, who emerged from the Democratic National Convention in a dead heat with Bush with each having 48 percent of the voters, never regained his momentum. For a while Barack Obama seemed to have a Teflon-like immunity from such smear attacks. A Wall Street Journal-NBC poll taken at the end of March showed him basically undamaged by his association with his controversial pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. But Pennsylvania revealed that when you take Obama’s association with Wright and throw in his April 6th remarks about “bitter” small towners clinging to religion and guns, the accusations add up. Obama’s momentum can be stopped, and he can be forced off message.

The negativity of the Clinton-Obama campaign damages Clinton more than Obama, but it doesn’t stop people from voting for her: The same Wall Street Journal-NBC poll that showed Obama had not been significantly hurt by the Wright controversy showed a rise in Clinton’s disapproval rating. A 52 percent majority of voters said she does not have the background or values they identify with, and 48 percent had negative feelings toward her. Two weeks later, a Washington Post-ABC poll showed similar drop in Clinton support. She was viewed as “honest and trustworthy” by only 39 percent of Americans, and among Democrats, she trailed Obama by 23 points in that category. Nonetheless, Clinton still did well in Pennsylvania among women, the elderly, and white union members. Her negatives were not as crippling as conventional wisdom said they would be.

Race remains a serious threat to Obama’s political future: In a poll conducted for the television networks and the Associated Press, 16 percent of white voters in forty precincts across Pennsylvania said that race mattered to them in choosing a candidate, and out of this group, only 54 percent said they would support Obama in a general election. In turn 27 percent said that they would vote for McCain, and 16 percent said that they would remain home and not vote at all.

The media will increasingly be criticized when it emphasizes the candidates’ negatives: The decision of ABC newscasters Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos to spend the first fifty-two minutes of the April 16 Clinton-Obama debate in Philadelphia asking questions that ranged from why Obama did not wear a flag pin to how he justified his association with Weatherman Bill Ayers was greeted with scorn. The audience jeered Gibson at the end of the debate, causing him to joke, “The crowd is turning on me.” But the joke did not end Gibson’s problem. In the media, he and Stephanopoulos took an even worse beating from their peers. Tom Shales in the Washington Post called their performance “shoddy.” The Boston Globe called it a “tawdry affair,” and the Philadelphia Daily News labeled it a “televised train wreck.”

The endorsement momentum favors Obama: The power that Bill Clinton once had to pressure political allies to support his wife eroded still further in Pennsylvania. Former Secretary of the Interior Bill Richardson, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, and former National Security Advisor Tony Lake have all endorsed Barack Obama, and they have been joined in their endorsements by a parade of senators, among them, John Kerry of Massachusetts, Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, and Claire McCaskill of Missouri. For the superdelegates, who risk voter disapproval if they swing the nomination to a candidate behind in the elected delegates, the endorsements are especially significant. They eliminate their fear that they will be hurt for siding with Obama.

Obama’s financial juggernaut gives him an expanding safety net: In 2007, the Obama campaign was like the little engine that could. It seemed hopelessly outgunned by the experienced Clinton campaign, which expected to sew up the nomination in early on. But by using the Internet to raise money from small donors, the Obama campaign has put the Clinton campaign, which relied on a small group of wealthy donors to finance her, at a disadvantage. In March, Obama was able to raise $40 million to Clinton’s $20 million, and in Pennsylvania he was able to outspend her on television advertising, $8.1 million compared to her $3.2 million. As the campaign heads into the final primaries, Obama is sure to retain his financial superiority. While many of Clinton’s donors have maxed out on the amount of money they are by law allowed to contribute, Obama’s small donors are no where near their limits, nor are they ever likely to reach them. In Indiana and North Carolina, Obama will once again be in a position to overwhelm Clinton with television and radio ads. Obama is spending 75 cents for every dollar he is taking in; Clinton is spending $1.10.

Obama thus remains the heavy favorite to win the Democratic nomination as the primaries wind down, but he is a weakened favorite from six weeks ago when he and Clinton began campaigning for the Pennsylvania primary. For the moment, the Clinton campaign has gotten a second wind and a reason to soldier on. A New York Times editorial, evoking a Clinton ad that said of Obama, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” has charged her with taking the low road to victory in Pennsylvania. But among the majority of Democrats who voted for Clinton in Pennsylvania, what the Times calls the low road to victory gives every appearance of being viewed as old-fashioned toughness.

Nobody expects Obama to get his bowling score above the pathetic 37 he rolled in trying to prove he can be a regular guy. But he is going to have to show that when asked such silly questions as why he doesn’t wear a flag pin or how he justifies his association with a former Weather Underground leader, he will have more than peevishness to defend himself with. He will have an answer that lets him take the offensive.

Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is the author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower.