CLINTON MAY BE HOPEFUL, BUT OBAMA ROLLS ON (Adam Nagourney and Carl Hulse, New York Times) Have Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s chances of winning the Democratic presidential nomination improved as Senator Barack Obama has struggled through his toughest month of this campaign? After weeks in which her candidacy was seen by many party leaders as a long shot at best, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers argued strenuously on Thursday that the answer was most assuredly yes, that the outlook was turning in her favor in a way that gave her a real chance. Still, despite a series of trials that have put Mr. Obama on the defensive and illustrated the burdens he might carry in a fall campaign, the Obama campaign is rolling along, leaving Mrs. Clinton with dwindling options… Many superdelegates said they were queasy about Mr. Obama and his former pastor, and fearful of how the issue might be used in the fall. Still, they said they were not convinced that that made him a weaker general-election candidate than Mrs. Clinton, or at least not convinced enough to cast a vote that could be portrayed as overturning the will of Democratic primary voters and blocking the effort by Mr. Obama to become the nation’s first African-American president.
MORE: Obama’s Wright Response Wins Him Superdelegates (Sam Youngman, The Hill) While the reverend’s controversial remarks and his widely panned appearance at the National Press Club caused many pundits to wonder if superdelegates would be frozen into indecision, those who moved into Obama’s column this week cited the Illinois senator’s reaction as one of their reasons for backing him.
WHEN BLUE COLLARS ARE A TIGHT FIT (Ronald Brownstein, National Journal) After Hillary Rodham Clinton’s decisive win in last week’s Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama and his advisers quickly offered a series of explanations for her resounding advantage among working-class white voters there. In rapid fire, Obama and his team insisted that he had carried those voters in many other states, was improving his performance among them, and did not need them to win a general election; to the extent he faced a problem at all, Obama declared, the difficulty was age and not class. But exit polls from this year’s Democratic primaries show that almost all of those assertions are debatable and some are flat-out wrong. Together, the arguments from Obama and his aides raise questions about whether his campaign is honestly confronting the challenge he is facing with working-class whites–or whether he is in some measure of denial.
DEMOCRATS SCRAMBLE FOR INDIANA (Christopher Cooper, Wall Street Journal) Determining the victor in Tuesday’s presidential nominating contest in Indiana could very well be left to that most elusive of Democratic primary voter: the Republican. A confluence of unusual political events has Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton looking for traction in districts often ignored by Democrats in this deep red state. Several factors suggest that Republican voters may be attracted to the Democratic primary this year, including an open-primary scheme that allows voters of all political stripes to cast ballots, a settled nominating race on the Republican side and a downticket slate that includes few cliffhanger races to interest the Republican faithful… The Obama camp is applying a grass-roots organizational zeal to courting Republicans, much as it has done for younger voters in previous contests. The best example: Hamilton County, a suburban enclave north of Indianapolis that delivered 72% of its vote to President Bush in 2004. This week, the Obama camp opened its third field office there, in the county seat of Noblesville.
UNLIKELY ALLIES FOR A GAS-TAX HOLIDAY (Julie Bosman, New York Times) Senators John McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton found themselves taking a lonely stand on the campaign trail Thursday, defending the proposed gasoline-tax holiday while critics from both parties lined up against it.
MORE: Will Voters Accept Obama’s Gas Plea? (Nick Timiraos, Wall Street Journal) Sen. Barack Obama’s argument that a gas-tax holiday makes no sense – a stand that is winning plaudits from editorial boards and economists – isn’t always getting through to voters worried about rising gas prices… The political popularity of gas-price relief illustrates the uphill climb facing Sen. Obama. After making his plea Thursday at a retirement community in Columbia City, Ind., an older voter asked him why he couldn’t support a gas-tax holiday that would be funded by a tax on oil companies, as Sen. Clinton has proposed, because it would offer some short-term relief. “A lot of us are short term,” she quipped.
EVEN MORE: How to Beat Gas Tax Demagoguery (Jonathan Chait, New Republic) Generally, betting on the intelligence of the American public is a bad move. But… I think this is a great fight for Obama right now. Here’s how pointing out his refusal to pander on the gas tax helps Obama: 1. Obama needs to move the narrative past race/class/gender splits, and the gas tax – a substantive issue where the campaigns clearly differ – is the only path that’s offering itself right now. 2. The specific substance of a candidate’s positions matters less than the meta-narrative those issues create around the candidate. John McCain’s endorsement of campaign finance reform helped him, not because the public was champing at the bit to ban soft money, but because it suggested that McCain was an independent-minded reformer. Opposing the gas tax suspension positions Obama the same way. 3. It allows him to tie Clinton to McCain. Her political strength is her wonkiness, and her weakness is her reputation for dishonesty and ruthlessness. This issue cuts away at her strength and reinforces her weakness. 4. It lets him tie McCain to Clinton. McCain’s biggest asset is his reputation as a truth-teller. By pandering on an issue where the whole news media knows he’s wrong, McCain is squandering his most precious asset. So Obama hammering this issue now will pay dividends in the general election.
THE TROUBLE WITH MCCAIN’S HEALTH PLAN (Clive Crook, National Journal) His proposal would widen access to health insurance and make insurance much more portable from job to job, but it would fall way short of providing universal coverage. Even with his proposed tax credit, many millions of bad-risk individuals–including those with pre-existing conditions–would find it impossible to afford coverage. Younger and healthier workers would have an incentive to opt out of employer plans in favor of cheaper alternatives, a step that would raise premiums for those left behind. Clinton and Obama would place obligations on insurance companies to cover high-risk people and provide new publicly supported alternatives to private coverage. McCain says that he “will work tirelessly to address the problem” but comes up very short on specifics. He offers more detail on what he will not do than on what he will.
WHAT OBAMA WISHES HE COULD SAY (John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, Politico) All manner of Clinton controversies, Obama partisans argue, have not been fully ventilated. This includes old issues, like Hillary Clinton’s legal career, which includes lots of cases that never got much public attention even during the Whitewater era. It also includes new ones, like recent stories raising questions about the web of personal and financial associations around Bill Clinton. Since leaving the presidency, he has traveled the globe to exotic places and with sometimes exotic characters, raising money for projects such as his foundation and presidential library and making himself a very wealthy man… As for electability, the Obama side believes — for all his trouble winning lower-income whites in recent primaries — that it is ludicrous to believe she is the stronger candidate in the fall. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found nearly 60 percent of voters think Clinton is dishonest. Think about that: Only four in 10 voters do not think she lies when she needs to. A majority hold an unfavorable view of her. Will those numbers improve if she wins the nomination and Republicans resurrect the scandals, the Bill Clinton sexual affairs and her Bosnia fib with the same intensity they brought to the Wright uproar? Unthinkable.
GUILT BY ASSOCIATION (Michael Dobbs, Washington Post) The McCain campaign has been making a lot of Sen. Barack Obama’s friends and acquaintances recently, seeking to tar the Illinois senator with the opinions of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright, the former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers, and even the radical Islamic group Hamas. The guilt-by-association claims seem to run counter to McCain’s own denunciation of such tactics. Some are a considerable stretch, resting on twisted logic and/or exaggerated rhetoric.
BILL CLINTON TRUMPETS FOLKSY MESSAGE IN N.C. (Susan Milligan, Boston Globe) Sporting a well-tailored suit and arriving in a chauffeured black car, Bill Clinton is quietly working to win over small-town crowds with a populist message: Don’t diss Wal-Mart shoppers… While Bill Clinton’s gaffes have been frequently spotlighted in the national media, he appears to be building good will among rural voters, who are vital to keeping his wife’s campaign alive. And although Clinton’s rock star appeal may have faded since his own candidate days, the 11 small communities he visited in North Carolina this week were thrilled to have a political celebrity in their midst.
