COLUMNISTS The big winners at the Oscars were No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, prescient choices for what happened in Tuesday’s presidential primaries in the US. John McCain, now the assured Republican nominee, would be the oldest man (he is now 71) to become president; while the Democrats face a choice – whether Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton shed enough blood on the tracks to make an improbable Republican victory in November possible.
By winning the popular vote, there is no doubt Mrs Clinton punctured Mr Obama’s balloon in Ohio and Texas, but she did not deflate it. Facing elimination if she lost both, she has reason to soldier on. But Mr Obama retains enough of a lead in accumulating pledged delegates (awarded in primaries and caucuses) – possibly winning more than her in Texas when the final count is in – that it will be hard for her to make up the gap in the coming contests. He also still has a diminishing edge in the popular vote nationally.
The remaining primaries tilt mostly Mr Obama’s way, based on the electoral geography to date, and are enough to offset a big victory for Mrs Clinton in Pennsylvania in six weeks.
Proportional representation makes it hard for either candidate to claim big chunks of pledged delegates in one bite. And the unpledged ones, known as super-delegates, representing the party establishment, have to be picked off one by one.
In the end it might be necessary, and most fair, if the “invalid” January primaries in Michigan and Florida, which Mrs Clinton “won”, were rerun at the end of the process. Seating delegates on the basis of a January vote – when neither candidate campaigned in the two states and when Mr Obama was not even on the Michigan ballot – would not exactly be kosher. It might suit Mrs Clinton, too, because she fares best in the big states.
This hard maths will absorb the political cognoscenti for weeks, but there is another, and perhaps larger, element in play – the latent fissures inside a Democratic party torn between two such powerful personalities. The Obama-ites and Clintonistas will need each other in the general election, whoever becomes the nominee. Mr Obama will need her white poorer women and Latinos just as Mrs Clinton will need his army of energised young people and the general media approval he has garnered so far.
That should be possible since policy differences between the two are slight, but not if the campaign turns seriously dirty, as it is threatening to do. The candidates themselves may have been mostly civil but the whispering and innuendoes emanating mostly from Mrs Clinton’s camp have been malodorous. A good friend, making telephone calls to Ohio on behalf of Mr Obama last weekend, noticed something disturbing. Three of the first people he talked to asked if the senator’s second name was really Hussein and if it was true he was a Muslim. It is a small anecdote, but it shows that insinuation, plus internet gossip and talk radio slurs, can take hold in a country often surprisingly uninformed about those who would run it.
Thus in Ohio and Texas, as the excellent Jay Cost of www.realclearpolitics. com points out, Mrs Clinton won because those who made up their minds late swung decisively her way. It is a fair bet that most of those were people who had not thought much about their choice beforehand – and were, therefore, more susceptible to whispers and innuendoes.
With the minorities’ vote more sharply delineated between the candidates – with African Americans backing Mr Obama and Latinos, Mrs Clinton – most of them will also have been white. This should be a concern to Mr Obama because it potentially undermines his claim to have transcended the racial divide by the inclusive nature of his campaign and the force of his ideas.
Mrs Clinton also got help from John McCain, who has increasingly been targeting Mr Obama, not her, as the likely Democratic nominee. Charges of inexperience and naivety in foreign affairs may have sounded more credible coming from him than from her, but they also serve a broader purpose. Republicans would rather run against Mrs Clinton in November, as rightwing talk radio reminds its listeners around the clock and as, until now, the polls have said is true.
The Obama-Clinton battle is not necessarily fatal to Democratic chances. Comparisons have been made to 1980, when Jimmy Carter and Edward Kennedy fought all the way to the convention, though with the incumbent president always holding the upper hand. But he was swept aside by a phenomenon of the times, Ronald Reagan, which not even a united party could have resisted.
Until Tuesday, Mr Obama was this year’s phenomenon – and he still may be. Unless, that is, the Oscars had another prescient message. The winner for the best documentary went to Taxi to the Dark Side.
The writer is an FT.com columnist and was bureau chief in the FT’s Washington office twice
