Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Way back in February, the math was clear: Hillary Clinton would have to win every remaining primary by at least 10 percentage points in order to catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates for the Democratic nomination. But then it was decided that she would have to win both Ohio and Texas to stay in the race. She won both but ended up splitting the delegates almost evenly in Texas, where there was also a caucus. That could have done it right there.
But then with six weeks of nothing else to talk about, it was decided that if Clinton could win Pennsylvania by 10 points, this thing might be considered almost a toss-up. She won by not-quite-ten-points, and the crowd went wild. She’s closing fast! He can’t put her away! He (Harvard Law) is an out-of-touch elitist, while she (Yale Law) is a regular ol’ gal—who can afford to loan her own campaign a few million bucks. (Apparently all her working-class fans weren’t carrying their weight.)
Oh, and he still had a lead of close to 150 pledged delegates, with more superdelegates sliding his way every day. But by cracky, what a barn-burner!
North Carolina and Indiana: Can he possibly stay afloat? Will Jeremiah Wright remind everybody that Obama is still black and therefore not supposed to be winning? Maybe, but he wins North Carolina anyway by a margin of about 15 per cent that is hailed as a “trouncing” of Clinton. (In fact it is close to his average margin of victory; he has won neighboring Virginia by 29 percentage points.) And Clinton almost loses Indiana in the middle of the night.
And just like that, she’s pronounced toast. Yet all that has happened is that each candidate has won the expected states, and the one in second place has never seriously cut into the front-runner’s delegate margin.
For a while commentators asked each other whether the superdelegates would overrule primary voters and pick Clinton because they bought her argument that she would be the better candidate. Just as quickly, those same commentators would answer “probably not.” Even more seriously, they asked whether Obama could win the general election without the “hard-working white Americans” clinging to Clinton. They did not ask, at least not as seriously, wheteher she could win without the everybody-else who seemed to keep voting for Obama.
As if on cue, all that has pretty much stopped. Maybe the Big Media thought it unseemly to call the fight too soon. Maybe they just got tired of concocting dramatic narratives to string it along. Maybe they feared that if the horse race were declared over they would have to talk about substantive policy. God forbid anyone look too closely at what “working class” voters really want besides a grinning, beer-swigging, pantsuited champion.
The “conversation” changes so quickly and easily—like so many plot twists in a Law & Order” marathon—that you wouldn’t think anything of significance is at stake. And that is the truly scary part. As this race winds down and the contestants begin to line up for the next heat, it is not preposterous to stop and ask ourselves: Are we making a decision that in the end will make any difference?
Delphine Davis
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