Obama and Clinton: Don't Count on Disunity in the Fall

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton made clear last night that they are on the same page when it comes to turning out their voters for the Democratic ticket in November’s general election.

Obama, celebrating a resounding 14-point victory in the North Carolina primary, spoke first in defying the skeptics who say the protracted primary warfare is polarizing voters and strengthening Republican chances of a November election.

“Many of the pundits have suggested that this party is inalterably divided—that Senator Clinton’s supporters will not support me, and that my supporters will not support her.
“Well, I’m here tonight to tell you that I don’t believe it,” he said. “Yes, there have been bruised feelings on both sides. Yes, each side desperately wants their candidate to win. But ultimately, this race is not about Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John McCain. This is election is about you—the American people—and whether we will have a president and a party that can lead us toward a brighter future.”

Clinton, speaking soon afterward from Indiana where her onetime double-digit lead ultimately was cut to 2 percent, also made nice.

Commending Obama and his supporters in North Carolina, she said, “we are, in many ways, on the same journey. It’s a journey begun long before we were born. It is a journey by men and women who have been on a mission to perfect our union, who marched and protested, who risked everything they had to build an America that embraces us all.”

She then went on to appeal for more help, including financial help. That may be meeting with limited success. It became known Wednesday morning that she loaned herself $6.4 million so she could continue her campaign. And, after hearing that cable commentators basically were writing her off after her failure to capitalize on Obama’s political troubles of the past two weeks, her campaign scheduled a campaign appearance for Wednesday in West Virginia.

She, too, however, was laying down a marker for the analysts who said her continued presence in the race risked exacerbating racial tensions within the Democratic Party, let alone between the GOP and the Democrats. She was committing herself to healing damage done in the primaries come the general election.

“It is important that as we go forward in this campaign that we recognize we are all on the team,” she said.

“I know that people are watching this race and they’re wondering, I win, he wins; I win, he wins. It’s so close. And I think that says a lot about how excited and passionate our supporters are and how intent so many Americans are to really take their country back.”

No matter what happens, she said, “I will work for the nominee of the Democratic Party because we must win in November.”

She didn’t say what that would mean, and whether Bill Clinton would be as energetic for Obama in small-town America as he has been on her behalf.

But both Obama and Clinton had moved, with their victory statements, to commit themselves to curb the polarization of the primaries. Exit polls document the problem.  In both Indiana and North Carolina, about a quarter of the primary voters said they either would vote for McCain or not vote if their primary candidate was not chosen as Democratic nominee.

Another exit poll question asked if voters would be satisfied if either Obama or Clinton were the nominee. In Indiana, 38 percent of primary voters agreed with that, including 51 percent of Obama voters and 49 percent of Clinton voters. The overall figure was slightly higher in North Carolina but the breakdown was different:  61 percent of Obama voters but only 37 percent of Clinton voters agreed that either would do in November.

The exit questions also showed how deeply the controversy about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright affected voters. Nearly half the primary voters in both states thought his inflammatory statements were important—and in Indiana, 70 percent of those people sided with Clinton; in North Carolina, 57 percent did the same.

Obama’s convincing victory in North Carolina appeared to signal that he had regained his footing, if not having put the Wright issue to bed for good. He said he knew there would be hard knocks to come. Here, again, a promise by Clinton of strong backing this fall could have far-reaching consequences in combating a Swift Boat attack built around Wright.

In retrospect, Clinton may have handed Obama a golden opportunity to get beyond Wright, to get back to his core campaign message of judgment trumping experience.
His “judgment” campaign message appeared to have taken a significant hit from the Wright controversy (how could he not have know what the pastor thought if he’d been in that church for two decades, how come he didn’t walk out, as Clinton had said she would have done).

When Clinton followed McCain’s lead in suggesting federal taxes on gasoline be lifted for the summer, Obama seized on that as political pandering: it might get votes but it wouldn’t cure the problem and it made no economic sense.

Nearly all economists agreed with him, putting Clinton on the defensive and injecting new juice into his campaign promise of better judgment on the broad-strokes issues that matter.

The Tuesday election results showed that gamble paid off: he pulled even with her with voters suffering from the economic downturn.

Polls showed almost no gender differences among Indiana voters, where Clinton won white women by a 60 to 40 edge and white men by 58 to 42. Black men voted 91 to 9 for Obama and black women supported him 89 to 11. In North Carolina, the only sizable difference was among white voters: white women supported Clinton by a 65 to 33 margin while white men voted 55 to 42 for her. Obama won the vote of black women by a 90 to 7 margin and black men by 91 to 7. In both states, women turned out in greater numbers than men: women were 57 percent of the electorate in North Carolina and 56 percent in Indiana.