COMBAT AND COMPOSURE (David Brooks, New York Times) Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria. His astounding composure has come across as weakness in the midst of combat with Clinton, but it’s also at the core of his promise to change politics. He vows to calm hatred and heal division. This contrast between combat and composure defines the Democratic race. The implicit Clinton argument is that politics is an inherently nasty business. Human nature, as she said Sunday, means that progress comes only through conquest. You’d better elect a leader who can intimidate. You’d better elect someone who has given herself permission to be brutal. Obama’s campaign grows out of the longstanding reform tradition. His implicit argument is that politics doesn’t have to be this way. Dishonesty and brutality aren’t inevitable; they’re what gets in the way… Amid the storms of the presidency, their basic worldviews would shape their presidencies. Obama is instinctively a conversationalist and community-mobilizer. Clinton, as she says, will fight and fight. If elected, she’ll have the power to take the Hobbesian struggle she perceives, and turn it into remorseless reality.
FOR PRIMARIES IN TWO STATES, A VARIETY OF SCENARIOS (Adam Nagourney, New York Times) It’s almost over. Well, not quite. But the Democratic presidential primaries taking place on Tuesday in North Carolina and Indiana have more delegates up for grabs than any of the remaining contests. For political, demographic and mathematical reasons, those states have the potential to reshape the competition between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama. It will be an opportunity for Mrs. Clinton to make the case that Democratic sentiment is swinging in her favor, and to slice into Mr. Obama’s lead in pledged delegates and in the popular vote (putting aside the disputed contests in Florida and Michigan). For Mr. Obama, it is a chance to tamp down talk that Mrs. Clinton has exposed him as a flawed general election candidate.
EIGHT QUESTIONS ABOUT TODAY’S PRIMARIES (Dan Balz, Washington Post) Has Obama put the Rev. Jeremiah Wright controversy behind him? Will the gas tax holiday proposal help or hurt Clinton? Will a Clinton win in either contest guarantee that the race will go to the convention? After today, which state will be most important to determining the Democratic contest? Is there a person remaining whose endorsement could make a difference in the race? If Obama wins the nomination, can he win working-class white voters in November? If Clinton wins the nomination, will black voters support the Democratic ticket? Who do Republican leaders see as the tougher opponent – Obama or Clinton?
FIVE THINGS TO LOOK FOR IN INDIANA… AND NORTH CAROLINA (Carrie Budoff Brown, Politico) Indiana: Before Barack Obama experienced a rough couple of weeks, his campaign was optimistic about his chances in this state. But with a black population of less than ten percent and swaths of blue collar towns and rural counties, Indiana is looking far more favorable to Hillary Clinton, who has blanketed the state with visits from her, former President Bill Clinton and their daughter Chelsea. Can she achieve a replay of Ohio and Pennsylvania, when the rural counties turned in huge margins for her? Or will Obama, with significant endorsements in southern Indiana, be able to cut into her support? And will Obama succeed in driving up his totals in Indianapolis and the northwestern corner of the state?
North Carolina: If Barack Obama’s late decision to hold his election night rally in Raleigh is any indication (his campaign didn’t settle on a location until Monday afternoon), the Illinois senator is feeling confident about his chances in North Carolina. It’s a good thing, for an upset win by Hillary Clinton in North Carolina could shake up the presidential campaign if paired with a Clinton victory in Indiana.
DEMOCRATIC DIVISIONS WILL BE HARD TO BRIDGE (James Carville, Financial Times) Underlying all of this is the inevitable game of electoral chicken that is almost certain to erupt at the conclusion of the contest. The winner, with help from the loser, is not only going to have to bridge the fissures within the party but also to find a way to re-embrace those racial and gender identity voters who now find themselves aligned with a new wing of the party. If Mrs Clinton wins the nomination, do the Party B African-Americans who have embraced Mr Obama’s campaign feel comfortable remaining in the party and voting for Mrs Clinton? Conversely, are the Party A, older, college-educated white women comfortable embracing Mr Obama’s candidacy after supporting Mrs Clinton so fervently? Only time will tell and it is certainly not as simple or easy as it seems. When you consider that African-Americans make up slightly less of the Democratic party as self-identified evangelical or social conservatives do for the Republican party (about 25 per cent), you get a sense of how serious this could be for Democrats.
WHO’S MORE RED, WHITE AND BLUE-COLLAR? (Eli Saslow, Washington Post) The presidential race has turned into a riveting competition for ordinariness, as both campaigns have concluded that whoever does a better job of winning over voters like Winschief – an average blue-collar man in an average American town of 60,000 – is more likely to triumph in Tuesday’s primaries in Indiana and North Carolina. Identifying with the common man has been a requisite in presidential elections for almost two centuries. But the stakes are especially high in a race largely defined by an economic crisis, and campaign experts say the candidates have gone especially far in their appeals… Whether these voyeurs of blue-collar existence yield results depends on how people like Winschief perceive them. Are these genuine attempts at connection or overly calculated tactics to win voters? Are they telling moments that reveal a candidate’s humanity or patronizing charades that reveal a candidate’s guile?
MORE: With the Right Props and Stops, Clinton Transforms into a Working-Class Hero (Jodi Kantor, New York Times) Whatever the results of the primaries on Tuesday in Indiana and North Carolina, Mrs. Clinton has accomplished the seemingly impossible in those states. Somehow, a woman who has not regularly filled her own gasoline tank in well over a decade, who with her husband made $109 million in the last eight years and who vacations with Oscar de la Renta, has transformed herself into a working-class hero… But what is more remarkable about Mrs. Clinton’s approach in Indiana and North Carolina is how minimally she uses her own biography. Perhaps because almost nothing she could say about her life would sound humble or hardscrabble — she grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, went to prestigious schools and is, of course, a lawyer — Mrs. Clinton says very little about herself at all.
HILLARY’S BUBBA BAIT (Rich Lowry, RealClear Politics) A push-pull dynamic has redefined Hillary. As the mainstream media, the left-wing blogs and latte liberals have turned on her, she has held all the more tightly to her down-scale constituency and reacted against her critics. She has lashed out against MoveOn.org and husband Bill has dissed “upscale culture liberals.” She has defied the precious rules of liberal politics, referring to Osama bin Laden in a TV ad, threatening to “obliterate” Iran and – even worse – sitting down with Bill O’Reilly for a cordial interview. The same people who spent a decade defending her and her husband howl betrayal. Every politician becomes a function of his constituency, a particular peril this year. Both Republican and Democratic primary races have been exercises in electoral tribalism: the evangelicals have voted for the evangelical, the Mormons for the Mormon, the southerners for the southerners, the blacks for the black, the youth for the young guy, the old white people for the old white people. The easiest way for Hillary to grow her support has been to get even more of her – older, poorer, less educated – white voters.
JOHN AND ELIZABETH EDWARDS: WHAT WE LIKE AND DISLIKE ABOUT CLINTON AND OBAMA (Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, People) Elizabeth Edwards likes Hillary Clinton’s plan for universal health insurance. Husband John Edwards doesn’t much care for Clinton’s “old politics.” So goes the his-and-her debate in the Edwards household (their kitchen, to be specific), as they spoke exclusively to PEOPLE Monday on the eve of primary voting in their homestate of North Carolina – the latest must-win state in this year’s protracted Democratic presidental nomination fight between Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama. In their first joint interview since John, the Democratic former senator and 2004 vice presidential nominee, dropped out of the race in January, the couple named what they liked and disliked about each of the remaining Democrats – and Mrs. Edwards didn’t hesitate: “I like Hillary’s health care plan.” What doesn’t she like about the senator from New York and former first lady? “The lobbyist money,” she adds. On Obama, she says: “The fact that he has motivated so many young people to be involved, I think is fantastic.” But, she adds: “I don’t like his health care plan or his advertising on health care, which I think is misleading.”
WILL EXAMS COST OBAMA STUDENT VOTES? (Sara Murray, Wall Street Journal) Barack Obama’s campaign has gotten a boost all year by a big youth vote, but in Tuesday’s balloting, that powerful force confronts a new challenge: final exams. The latest primaries in North Carolina and Indiana happen to arrive when most college students are in the midst of tests and preparing to exit campus at semester’s end… The youth vote was tested in this year’s first contest. Iowa’s caucus fell during many students’ winter break, but even so, turnout among voters between ages 18 and 29 rose, according to Public Opinion Strategies, the firm that co-directs the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. To ensure turnout during exams, organizers at two Indiana campuses – the University of Notre Dame, in South Bend, and Indiana University Bloomington – organized shuttles to bring students to early voting locations. Volunteers in North Carolina also helped drive students to off-campus voting sites.
CAMPAIGN AD WAR (Peter Feld, Portfolio) Regardless of the outcome, the ad war gave Clinton the simpler and, probably, stronger positioning: She offered immediate action, while Obama offered “truth-telling.” But Obama’s team made their task harder by insisting on trying to educate those voters who are least interested in policy details. This explains much of Hillary’s enduring advantage in the campaign’s air war: She wants you to vote for her, while Obama first wants you to understand—and cheer—his logic.
