Obama's Electability Problem

The results in Pennsylvania have probably taken the starch out of a lot of superdelegates who were waiting for a good opportunity to jump on the Obama bandwagon. Dick Polman in Philadelphia looks at the current state of the race and sees nothing good for the Dems:

Six weeks of bowling and Bittergate and Pastorgate and nonexistent Bosnian snipers....and for what? The Pennsylvania results have essentially changed nothing. There is seemingly no cure for the chronic Democratic migraine - and the fear, among so many members, that they are tearing themselves asunder.

Memo to the voters of Indiana and North Carolina: Take these candidates, please!

Now that Hillary Clinton has secured her solid Pennsylvania victory, we know two things - both of which we basically knew before:

1. She will slog onward against increasingly heavy odds. (And why shouldn't she, given the fact that she just won another big state and again demonstrated that she is the preferred candidate of the working-class whites who will be crucial to Democratic hopes this autumn?)

2. Barack Obama can't seem to seal the deal, thereby torturing the sizeable number of exhausted Democrats (including many unpledged superdelegates) who yearn for closure.

Obama's attempt last night to spin the defeat was empirically absurd. Hewing to the loser's ritual of flying to the next state while the bad news is still being tallied, Obama shared this assessment of the Pennsylvania race with a group of Indiana supporters: "We rallied people of every age and race and background to the cause."

Problem was, he lost all the older voter categories, starting at age 45. He lost white people, both genders. And with respect to every background, he lost the working-class folks, the union members, and the non-college educated. He lost suburbanites (including two of the suburban Philadelphia counties, Montgomery and Bucks, that he needed to win by comfortable margins), small-town dwellers, and rural residents. He lost the white Catholics and he lost the Jews. He lost the culturally-conservative Democrats on Bob Casey's home turf, Lackawanna County, by a 3 to 1 margin.

And let's return to the racial factor for a moment, because there is a jarring and highly sensitive finding that showed up in the exit polls. Thirteen percent of white voters statewide said that the race of the candidate was important to them; of those voters, 74 percent cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton. This is arguably a warning sign that Obama may face a higher racial hurdle than many observers have generally assumed.

That last paragraph goes hand-in-hand with yesterday's post, The Race Vote. There was a time when I was convinced that the Bronze Messiah could beat anyone the Republican party threw up there and was sure that the only way the GOP could win was for Hillary to win the nomination. My thinking has changed.

Hillary has proven to be a formidable candidate and could be really tough in the Fall, but thankfully her candidacy is probably doomed due to the mathematics of the Dem process and the fearfulness of the superdelegates who don't dare take the nomination away from Obama. Therefore, her considerable political talents will be expended beating Obama about the head instead of taking on the GOP. Will she be involved in the Fall campaign as an Obama surrogate? Probably, but her heart won't be in it and I doubt she'll be very effective. She also won't get the press coverage she's been used to and there's no telling what her idiot husband will do.

And, there's no way she'll accept the VP slot, so you can rule out the possibility of her being on the ticket. By staying in the campaign she has assured that Obama will be damaged goods by election night and won't be running as an incumbent in 2012. The way will be clear for her and whatever group of aging Dem white guys that decide to run against her.

So, what is the optimal outcome for the GOP? The Dem battle continues for weeks to come. More and more information comes out about Obama's lefty associates, the Rev. Wright continues to make statements that taint Obama by association, Barack and Michelle keep walking around with their noses in the air offering occasional condescending comments about the common man, and the Bronze Messiah loses his aura of superiority. We've already seen some of this. After all, when was the last time there was a report of someone fainting at an Obama rally? He still gets big crowds, but he's not getting the breathless worship he once did.

In the general election campaign Obama finds himself pitted not against a conservative Bush clone, but the anti-Bush somewhat liberal maverick against whom he cannot make many of his Bush-bashing arguments stick. McCain is seen as an experienced senior statesmen while Obama is the young, inexperienced phenom who once burned brightly but is now a faded shadow of his former greatness. McCain eats Obama alive in the debates where the great orator doesn't have a teleprompter to fall back on and can't even stammer out his prepared answers. Obama's overwhelming fundraising superiority cannot buy him the votes he needs, and like in Pennsylvania, he outspends McCain in exponential terms but cannot close the deal.

On election day McCain rolls to an easy win as voters display maturity that was missing in the Dem primary and finally realize they can't trust this country to the Bronze Messiah.

And in New York, Hillary Clinton sits in her New York mansion watching the returns, planning her 2012 campaign, and filling out the divorce paperwork.