by Michael Tackett
That loud, annoying sound you keep hearing is coming from all that Democratic hand wringing about the length and tenor of the race for the party’s presidential nomination.
The longer the race goes on, the more it increases the likelihood that presumptive Republican nominee John McCain will somehow win the White House when the two central themes of his campaign so far–support for an unpopular war and a largely hands off approach to the economic mess–are at odds with about two thirds of American voters.
Or so the hand wringers keep telling us.
HIllary Clinton, whose only true impediment to the nomination seems to be that stubborn math that says she can’t win enough delegates, continues to slug it out with Barack Obama. They are seeing parts of the country that Democrats haven’t seen since Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy were still in the race in 1968. Hello Anderson, Indiana! Muncie, great to see you!Several Obama supporters have made calls for Clinton to get out of the race. Too bad for them, Clinton doesn’t seem willing to take her cues from the senior senator from Vermont, Patrick Leahy. So there goes the Ben & Jerry’s vote.
And why should she? She is right that she has generated an incredible energy among women voters, and those very voters will be key to a Democratic victory in the fall. She is right that Democrats need to do well in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Obama can’t walk to the White House through the precincts of Wyoming and Idaho.
She is right that the Democratic nominee needs to win the votes of working-class white men, which is why Obama has pivoted so quickly from a high-minded poetry to beer-swilling, bowling-alley populism.
The consequences so far seem pretty clear. Each Democratic candidate has proven an ability to raise well north of $100 million, making the Republican McCain look like the guy with a tin cup on the street corner. Each person who donates money, even in the smallest amount, gets added to a database of potential voters in November.
In almost every state where they have campaigned, the number of registered Democrats has increased. In Pennsylvania alone, there will be more than 100,000 new potential Democratic voters in the fall. States that previously were thought to be safely Republican, like Virginia and Georgia, could be in play for Democrats in the fall, particularly if Obama is the nominee.
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The ratings for their televised debates continue to set ratings record even though neither of them has said anything particularly new in the last 10 of the 20 they have held.
And who is making the front page or the nightly news? McCain launched his so-called biography tour on Monday in Mississippi. Try finding that story. Obama can get on the front page throwing a gutter ball in a Pennsylvania bowling alley. Team Clinton, Hillary, Bill or Chelsea, provide endless fodder for the cable networks. McCain would have to sky dive out of his campaign plane to get equal treatment.
The Democratic contest will end at some point, and it is highly likely that point comes well before that — all together now — brokered convention begins. This is a country with a very short attention span. Clinton and Obama have held it longer than anyone could have imagined. Whatever fights they are having now will be forgotten on the late-summer night in Denver when one of them delivers the acceptance speech.