Illinois senator Barack Obama easily won the Mississippi primary Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote, to 37 percent for opponent Hillary Clinton. It was the second win within a week for Obama, who triumphed in the Wyoming Democratic caucus last weekend.
Vote totals for the two main contenders were: Obama, 253,441 (for 17 delegates); Clinton, 154,852 (for 11 delegates).
Below is a verbal snapshot of how the situation in Mississipi — and in the presidential campaign overall — looked just before the vote:
“I don’t know how somebody who’s in second place gets off
offering the vice presidency to somebody who’s in first place,” said Barack
Obama to one of his typically Woodstockian throngs at Jackson State University
Monday night. It was an elaboration of what he’d said earlier to a crowd at
Columbus in a day of campaigning in Mississippi, a new mantra for his campaign
that already had several, and a crowd-pleaser.
It was Obama’s version of what General Anthony McAuliffe,
commander of encircled airborne troops at Bastogne, had said to a German
military delegation seeking his surrender at the height of The Battle of the
Bulge in December 1944. “Nuts!” McAuliffe had responded – a brush-off that
expressed his contempt both for the suggestion and for the logic behind it.
Candidate Obama’s thinking was likewise. In Mississippi as
at that beleaguered outpost in Belgium, it must have seemed obvious that
immediate help was on the way. Just as McAuliffe had reason to believe that
General George S. Patton’s tanks would shortly be relieving his encircled
troops, so did the Illinois senator have reasonable expectations of winning the
Mississippi primary on the basis of the state’s large African-American voting
population.
And, beyond that, Obama – like General McAuliffe before him
– saw an end-game that inexorably favored him, whatever his adversary’s
short-term successes might seem to be. Yes, New York senator Clinton might have
achieved breakthroughs in Texas and Ohio, but, as numerous analyses by the
established political punditry have pointed out, those triumphs had barely
dented Obama’s lead in delegates. Nor would another win next month in
Pennsylvania be likely to do so.
“Somebody’s trying to hoodwink you,” the Illinois senator
told the crowd in Jackson, and maybe that was the explanation for Hillary
Clinton’s dangling of a vice-presidential offer, made three days earlier to a
crowd in Canton. Or maybe it was simple chutzpah or – more favorably to
Hillary, metaphor-wise – a shrewd evocation of the underdog ethos. David vs.
Goliath. Or, closer to home, maybe she, like Mississippi’s own Eli Manning, had
begun to spark enough lightning to kindle a miracle fourth-quarter finish that
could put her over, after all.
WELL, THERE ARE METAPHORS, and there is Realpolitik, as practiced by the likes
of, say, Karl Rove, the all-too-literal-minded steward of George W. Bush’s
political fortunes during his rise to – and maintenance of — power.
And there was Rove, writing in the Wall Street Journal
last week. Taking note of Hillary Clinton’s wins in Texas and Ohio, as well as
the long-term odds favoring Obama, the man whom Bush had famously nicknamed
“Turdblossom” got down to some bottom-line calculations, linking the fortunes
and strategies of the New York Democrat to those of Arizona senator John McCain,
the Republican who has already secured a lock on his party’s presidential
nomination.
“So what must Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton do, especially in
the seven weeks before Pennsylvania?” asked Rove rhetorically. That got answered
in his next paragraph: “Both need to focus on Mr. Obama’s biggest weaknesses….”
And in the next: “Mr. McCain and Mrs. Clinton also need to continue highlighting
Mr. Obama’s lack of experience…”
No sooner said than done. On Thursday of last week, the
very same day that Rove’s Journal piece appeared and on the eve of her
appearances in Mississippi, Senator Clinton had this to say at a widely noted
press conference in Washington:
“I think that since we now
know Sen. McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security
will be front and center in this election. We all know that. And I think it’s
imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the
commander-in-chief threshold. I believe that I’ve done that. Certainly, Sen.
McCain has done that and you’ll have to ask Sen. Obama with respect to his
candidacy.”
And, as they say on those
late-night TV offers, Wow, that’s not all! Clinton went on. After
calling McCain “a distinguished man with a great history of service to our
country,” she presumed to say (on what basis she did not fully spell out) that
she, like the former naval aviator and Vietnam War P.O.W., had crossed the
aforesaid commander-in-chief threshold.
She continued: “There are
certain critical issues that voters always look to in a general election.
National security experience (and) the qualifications to be commander-in-chief
are front and center. They always have been. They always will be. I think
you’ll be able to imagine many things Senator McCain will be able to say. He’s
never been the president, but he will put forth his lifetime of experience. I
will put forth my lifetime of experience. Senator Obama will put forth a speech
he made in 2002.”
Ouch! Speaking of
vice-presidential possibilities, a visitor from Mars could be excused for
thinking that Senator Clinton might herself be bucking for a place on the ticket
with McCain, ready for a patriotic crusade against some upstart named Obama.
GIVE HER THIS. Hillary Clinton is nothing if not tenacious.
And, consistent with the warrior-like rhetoric of her D.C. press conference, she
is now — effectively and, it would seem, gladly — carrying the brunt of her
own battle. Husband Bill, chastened by blowback from the media (and, very
likely, from voters) after his own earlier harsh criticism of Obama, seems to
have settled into the role of helpful spouse on the stump.
Heeding the U.S. Weather Service’s urgent warnings – all
too believable, given the amount of snow and sleet that was already coming down
so freakishly and furiously on Friday afternoon – I turned back from a planned
jaunt down to Tupelo for an appearance by the ex-president. The concept of
‘Elvis’-comes-to-Tupelo’ (the entertainer’s name served as a doting Clinton’s
Secret Service code-name) was a powerful incentive, but, alas, this courier did
get stayed – though, according to subsequent press reports, a crowd estimated
at between one and three thousand ended up braving the bad weather.
Those same press reports seemed unanimous and even explicit
that Mr. Clinton said or did nothing out of the ordinary – certainly nothing
contentious. Given that he was in the real Elvis’s birthplace, he paid the
expected homage to the rock icon. And, of course, he had fulsome praise for his
wife. The representative quote that emerged, however, was this one, from a
traveling reporter for the New York Daily News:
“I have loved this election
because I didn’t have to be against anybody.”
And there was daughter Chelsea
Clinton, who made the round of college campuses in Mississippi, eschewing
controversy but, according to what I saw on TV, sounding the same talking
points, more or less, as her mother. Having met Miss Clinton in Memphis back in
January, I had found her to be a remarkably shy individual, but poised
enough to cancel out the downside of that.
As for Chelsea’s DNA…well, visually she is an almost
perfect blend of her mother and father. But once she opens her mouth, her
accents and inflections, even her all-too-sincere way of enunciating broad
slogans, pre-shaped for ready and repeatable delivery, are all Hillary. And
there’s not much rascal in her, either way.
ELVISˆ: IT HAD TO BE SAID that if his facsimile
exists in this election year, it is Obama who is closest to being a clone, who
can transmit real energy to a crowd and extract energy from it. People – and not
just his critics – talk about the fact that Obama’s speech is more or less the
same from stump to stump and from state to state, and, for better and for worse,
that is true.
Just as, it should be said, Elvis himself, in each of he
phases of his career, did more or less the same act from stage to stage. But
Obama has been made sensitive to the charge. And, at Jackson State, he had a
whole laundry list of issues, a la Clinton: higher teachers’ salaries, tuition
credits, middle-class tax breaks, peace corps-like service in return for
scholarships, inflation-pegged minimum-wage increases, fuel-efficiency
standards….
Even: “As commander-in-chief, I will do everything that is
required to make sure that nobody does America harm.”
But, as always, he was at his best ringing changes on his
simple themes of “change” and “hope,” relating the latter word to the sacrifices
and struggles of Mississippians to gain civil rights. “You know about hope right
here in Mississippi. Imagining and then fighting for it, working for what has
been before, that’s what hope is.”
As for change, and his opponent’s own claims to represent
it, he lumped together everything from NAFTA to her support for the 2002 war
resolution to he recent “kitchen sink” strategy aimed at him and said, “That’s
not change, we’re accustomed to that. That’s what got us into the hole we’ve got
now.”
And there was no doubting the power of his close: “This is
our moment, this is our time…And, if you will stand with me…I promise you we
will not just win Mississippi, we will win this whole nation, and we will win
this general election, you and I together, we will change this country, and we
will change the world.”