Exciting Night for Clintons

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Editorial / Periscope - Niall O'Dowd

Exciting Night for Clintons

February 14, 2008

By Niall O’Dowd

WHEN this year’s presidential campaign is long over I will especially remember Super Tuesday night, February 5, when the race between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton hung in the balance, not for the first or the last time.

I was present at the Clinton headquarters in Manhattan as the results began streaming in from all over the country. To say people were nervous is an understatement.

Since that night and the dead heat in delegates, Obama had edged into a small lead after winning the weekend states. He is also expected to do very well in the Potomac Primary on Tuesday night.

However, Clinton still has her line in the sand in Ohio and Texas on March 3. Super Tuesday was her last chance to keep her hopes alive into March and she succeeded.

She was not there for the early part of a fascinating evening. No doubt when the eagerly awaited Massachusetts results came in the whoops of joy from Bill and Hillary Clinton’s home on a quiet cul de sac in the tony suburb of Chappaqua, New York startled the neighbors.

The numbers from Massachusetts showed Clinton handily defeating Obama on Senator Ted Kennedy’s home turf. No other result — not winning California, or taking Arizona in a squeaker — even came close.

The sense of betrayal over Kennedy’s endorsement and full-throated backing of Obama runs very deep among the Clintons. They believe they rescued Kennedy from political oblivion after years of Republican presidents when they took over the White House in 1992.

“We gave Teddy everything he wanted,” Bill Clinton told a leading Irish American in the days before Kennedy’s endorsement when he was trying to stop it.

Some in the campaign see the long arm of Kennedy vigilante justice. Way back in 1980 a young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, endorsed sitting President Jimmy Carter against his primary rival Senator Edward Kennedy, despite Kennedy’s best efforts to win over Clinton. Was the Kennedy endorsement of Obama a case of a dish best eaten very cold?

All week the sight of the Kennedy family strutting their stuff for Obama from California to Massachusetts had deeply angered the Clinton people. “Teddy’s bare” quipped one supporter who was whooping it up on Tuesday night in the Clinton camp.

Bill himself joined in the celebration when he came into the ballroom shortly after 10 p.m. after traveling down from Chappaqua with his wife. He grabbed hotelier John Fitzpatrick and Financial Dynamics Chief Executive Declan Kelly, two of her Irish born supporters, and shouted, “The Irish did it for us in Massachusetts. They stayed with us.”

There was much to celebrate on the night. Earlier in the evening a slew of exit polls were circulating which threatened to turn the party into a funeral, the rock music into a dirge.

Clinton was behind in Massachusetts, just even in California, behind in New Jersey. Losses in all three would doom her.

At the back of the ballroom the assembled host of media were ready to write their Clinton obituaries once again. But once again the pollsters erred hugely.

In the history of polling has there ever been a worse result than the Reuters/Zogby poll in California which was off by an astonishing 23 points, showing Obama with a 13 point lead on voting day?

The major factor in Clinton’s favor is that her core group of supporters — women, Hispanics, blue collar workers — are numerically larger than Obama’s core in the well-off, so called Volvo voters, students and African Americans.

This is especially true in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, which are the three biggest prizes left. But no one in either campaign is counting the days to accepting the nomination for the Democratic Party in Denver in late August just yet. This has been such a surprising campaign that there may well be many twists in the road ahead.

Clinton has money troubles and Obama has difficulty translating the huge numbers who show up to hear him speak into actual voters. It’s race that changes day by day, week by week. Nothing is certain except that there is more excitement ahead.

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