CLINTON RUNNING HARD AS WEST VIRGINIA VOTES (Patrick Healy, New York Times) Sizable victories — the Clinton camp believes it could win West Virginia by 25 points or more — might put pressure on Mr. Obama to agree to her demands to seat the disputed delegates from Michigan and Florida, some of her advisers say, which would let her claim a victory on a battle she has fought for months. Accumulating victories this late in the primary season — as Mr. Obama looks so strong — might also bolster a bid for the vice presidency, should she decide to seek it. (Whether Mr. Obama would ask her, however, is very much in doubt.)… But advisers acknowledged that even if she won those states by wide margins, it was probably too late to change the dynamic of the nominating contest in her favor. “Obama is so far ahead at this point, it is hard to see anything we do, even big wins, being a game-changer at this point,” said one senior adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to assess Mrs. Clinton’s political fortunes. Mrs. Clinton plans to spend the day after the West Virginia primary meeting with advisers and top fund-raisers to discuss the future of the campaign. Aides said they believed she was likely to remain in the race until the Kentucky primary next Tuesday.
5 THING TO WATCH IN WEST VIRGINIA (Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico) Even if Hillary Clinton beats Barack Obama in Tuesday’s West Virginia primary by the huge margins predicted by polls, the victory won’t go very far towards chipping away at Obama’s lead in pledged delegates in their race for the Democratic presidential nomination. It could, however, give Clinton’s sputtering campaign one last chance to alter – or at least mute – the prevailing narrative that Obama’s nomination is inevitable. And, perhaps more importantly, a massive margin of victory could bolster Clinton’s central argument to the superdelegates who will ultimately decide the nomination. Her campaign contends that Obama has serious problems with the blue collar and elderly whites who dominate West Virginia’s voter rolls – and who Team Clinton asserts will be key in a number of states if Democrats are to defeat presumptive Republican nominee John McCain.
MORE: Obama’s Long Country Road (David Mark, Politico) As Clinton noted this week, Obama’s lagging vote totals among white, working class voters in broad swaths of culturally conservative territory continue to feed doubts about his ability to expand his electoral base in Appalachia — a region which, according to one’s definition, can stretch from the cornfields of western New York all the way through the deltas of northern Mississippi. That’s territory that includes states — Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — that will be key to a Democratic victory in November. And some Democrats are already worried that John McCain is poised to scoop up crucial votes in the region if Obama is the Democratic nominee. “McCain’s going to camp on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border” in Appalachian regions, said Democratic strategist Dave “Mudcat” Saunders, of Roanoke, Va. “He knows if he wins those states he can’t lose.”
RACIST INCIDENTS GIVE SOME OBAMA CAMPAIGNERS PAUSE (Kevin Merida, Washington Post) For all the hope and excitement Obama’s candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed – and unreported – this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They’ve been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they’ve endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can’t fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president. The contrast between the large, adoring crowds Obama draws at public events and the gritty street-level work to win votes is stark. The candidate is largely insulated from the mean-spiritedness that some of his foot soldiers deal with away from the media spotlight.
MORE: The Big Race (John Judis, New Republic) In recent years, scholars have been combining experimental findings with survey data to explain how race has remained a factor in American elections–even when politicians earnestly deny that it plays any part at all. In 2001, Princeton political scientist Tali Mendelberg summarized this research in a pathbreaking book, The Race Card. Her provocative analysis is hotly debated and far from conclusive; political psychology, after all, is not a hard science. Still, her ideas and those of other academics help to shed light on what has happened so far in the primaries and what might unfold once Obama wraps up the nomination. Their findings suggest that racism remains deeply embedded within the psyche of the American electorate–so deep that many voters may not even be aware of their own feelings on the subject. Yet, while political psychology offers a sobering sense of the difficulties that lie ahead for Obama, it also offers something else: lessons for how the country’s first viable black presidential candidate might overcome the obstacles he faces.
IN WEST VIRGINIA, WOMEN FOR HILLARY HAVEN’T (QUITE) GIVEN UP THE DREAM (Faye Fiore, Los Angeles Times) “It looks pretty bleak,” Hamrick said at a crafts fair here. “It’s sad that it’s got to turn out that way. I wish it didn’t.” Hamrick, 51, is part of a female army that is watching a dream fade with the Clinton campaign, a page of history that might not get written now after all. Women like Hamrick can’t get over the irony that Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) seems to have lost her race with Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) right when she looks to be at the height of her game. Clinton is expected to trounce Obama in West Virginia tonight, after which she’ll doubtless bound onto a stage in Charleston to roaring cheers, bobbing signs and a sea of hats. It is sure to look like a victory in every sense, except one: Few people believe that a Clinton victory here would alter the arithmetic that seems to be guiding Obama to their party’s presidential nomination. Two candidates are vying for the same moment in history. For every point of pride welling up in those who hadn’t thought they might see a black man become president, there is a counterpoint of disappointment for those who thought it was finally a woman’s turn.
MCCAIN’S 7 STEPS TO BEATING OBAMA (Michael Scherer, Time) 4. Claim the High Road Without Leaving the Low Road Almost every day, McCain finds a reason to say that he wants to run “a respectful campaign.” Given the mudslinging that is widely expected from all sides, this is a tenuous proposition. In the final days of the Republican primary, McCain came out hard against Mitt Romney, accusing him of saying that he wanted to set a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, even though Romney had not endorsed such a move. More recently, McCain has not shown that he is willing to lay off hardball politics. He has repeatedly brought up the fact that a Hamas spokesman said positive things about Obama, even though Obama did not reciprocate the compliments. McCain has also tried to tar Obama by his relationship with William Ayers, a once violent anti-Vietnam War activist, by demanding that Obama call on Ayers to apologize for his actions. (Obama has shot projectiles at McCain as well, misquoting McCain’s willingness to have American troops in Iraq for “100 years.”) The real message behind McCain’s call for “a respectful campaign” appears more narrow: As the political debate disintegrates, which is all but inevitable, McCain wants to be seen as a fighter who can float above the fray.
FOR OBAMA, THE GENERAL ELECTION IS CALLING (Peter Slevin and Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post) Sen. Barack Obama will make it clear on Tuesday that he has turned his attention to the general election, traveling to the November battleground states of Missouri and Michigan. Looking past what is expected to be an easy win for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the West Virginia primary, Obama (Ill.) will embrace a two-track strategy that assumes she will continue to campaign aggressively in the remaining five primaries but allows him to increasingly shift his focus to the presumptive GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.). Determined to silence any remaining questions about whether he will be the Democratic nominee, Obama will also make a push in Michigan and Florida, two swing states where Democrats did not campaign this year because of a dispute over the primary calendar. Next week, Obama will spend three days campaigning, raising money and meeting party activists in Florida. His campaign is eager to begin engaging McCain more directly, hoping to etch his profile with the broader electorate before the Republican candidate does it for him.
CARRYING FIGHT INTO CONVENTION CAN BRUISE PARTY IN NOVEMBER (June Kronholz, Wall Street Journal) It was 1976. Gerald Ford, the sitting president, had won 16 of 27 Republican primaries and led in the party’s delegate count. But Ronald Reagan carried the nomination battle into the convention anyway. Why won’t some candidates concede?… Political analysts say office seekers who hang on, even long after the race seems futile, may be hoping to position themselves for a later run or to reshape the party more to their liking. They may be bargaining for the vice presidency, feel pressure from supporters or believe there is an off-chance they will get lucky. But what is clear from 1976 and two more-recent races is that the party took a drubbing when challengers refused to concede and instead pursued the nomination into the convention. “The lesson is that you can make matters much worse for your party and yourself if you push this too far,” says American Enterprise Institute scholar Norm Ornstein.
THE OBAMA RULES (Rich Lowry, National Review) His campaign knows he’s vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law – defining his weaknesses as off-limits. The campaign can succeed in imposing these rules on the race only if the news media cooperate. Newsweek signed up for the effort in a cover story that reads like a 3,400-word elaboration of the “distraction” passage of Obama’s victory speech. “The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968,” it says, through “innuendo and code.” McCain “may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama’s patriotism,” and there’s a question whether he can or wants to “rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate.” Here are the Obama rules in detail: He can’t be called a “liberal” (“the same names and labels they pin on everyone,” as Obama puts it); his toughness on the war on terror can’t be questioned (“attempts to play on our fears”); his extreme positions on social issues can’t be exposed (“the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives” and “turn us against each other”); and his Chicago background too is off-limits (“pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy”). Besides that, it should be a freewheeling and spirited campaign.
SENATORS LAUGH OFF, PONDER, DOWNPLAY VEEP CHANCES (J. Taylor Rushing, The Hill) More than 20 senators say they would seriously consider an offer to be No. 2 on their party’s presidential ticket, while others claim to have little to no interest, according to a survey conducted by The Hill… Senators are always in the mix of vice presidential chatter and this year is no exception, even though members of the upper chamber will be at the top of the Republican and Democratic tickets this fall. Some of the senators who have been mentioned as vice presidential material downplayed their chances. Republican prospects John Thune of South Dakota and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dismissed the possibility, while conservative Sam Brownback (Kan.) expressed concern about how independent voters would react to him. On the Democratic side of the aisle, Sen. Jim Webb (Va.) also dismissed the idea — but with a grin. Sen. Evan Bayh (Ind.), another Democrat whose name has surfaced in vice presidential speculation, was more candid: “I suspect that’s not the sort of thing you say no to.”
CONFRONTING QUESTIONS, OBAMA ASSURES JEWS OF HIS SUPPORT (Larry Rohter, New York Times) Faced with doubts about his support for Israel and American Jews, Senator Barack Obama has stepped up his efforts to reach out to the Jewish community over the past month, giving speeches and granting interviews to confront questions about the militant Palestinian group Hamas and his commitment to Jewish causes and values. The efforts are part of “a very strong counteraction” against what the Obama campaign considers misinformation about the candidate, said Representative Robert Wexler, a Democrat from South Florida who often speaks on Jewish issues for the Obama campaign.
