Pennsylvania keeps Clinton’s hopes alive

What happened

After a bruising, six-week contest, Hillary Clinton this week scored a clear victory in the Pennsylvania primary, re-energizing her campaign ahead of the Indiana and North Carolina primaries on May 6. “The tide is turning,” she said. Despite being outspent by a 2-to-1 margin, Clinton captured 55 percent of the vote to Barack Obama’s 45 percent and won among many traditional Democratic constituencies, including union members, whites earning less than $50,000 a year, women, and older voters. But because of the Democrats’ proportional voting system, Clinton only gained about 15 delegates, just slightly denting Obama’s 160-delegate lead in the overall count.

Obama’s camp found a silver lining in that fact that the Illinois senator had halved an early 20-point deficit in the polls. “We closed the gap,” Obama said. But his campaign seemed to stall about 10 days before the election, after he said that working-class Pennsylvanians were “bitter” over the loss of jobs, and compensated by clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Despite the loss, Obama has a huge fund-raising advantage and holds the edge in the overall popular vote. Those considerations will weigh heavily in the calculations of Democratic superdelegates, whose support will ultimately decide the nomination.

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What the editorials said

Voters are getting tired of this “mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled” contest, said The New York Times. Clinton rightly gets most of the blame for the campaign’s negative tone, which “does nothing but harm to her, her opponent,” and the Democratic Party. She forged her Pennsylvania victory with fear-mongering ads “torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook,” complete with images of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the 9/11 attacks, and Osama bin Laden. It’s time for the superdelegates to step in and “settle a bloody race than cannot be won at the ballot box.”

After Pennsylvania, Obama remains in the driver’s seat, said The Wall Street Journal. But Clinton’s campaign “revealed cracks in Mr. Obama’s candidacy that started to appear in Ohio and are now big enough for Democratic concern.” Just as he did in Ohio, “the Illinois phenom” failed to close the deal with culturally conservative Democrats, and Clinton’s attacks in the closing days of the contest highlighted his weakness on national security. Democrats have reason to worry if Obama is their nominee.

What the columnists said

Clinton’s win gives her “a much better argument,” said Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard. Since she fell behind in the Democratic race, Clinton has been telling the superdelegates “that Obama cannot defeat Republican John McCain in November but she can.” In Pennsylvania, she “clobbered” Obama among the voting blocs “that are critical to Democratic victory”—blue-collar workers, women, and Catholics. So now the superdelegates must at least be wondering if she’s right.

Actually, said Dick Morris and Eileen McGann in the New York Post, Clinton’s victory “doesn’t mean anything.” Pennsylvania’s voters are older and more traditional than most states’, and Obama’s chief appeal is to Democrats and independents under 45. Besides, he retains an insurmountable lead of 145 delegates. By the time the last primary is held, on June 3, he’ll still be leading by at least 100 delegates, and probably close to 150. The Democratic Party won’t “risk a massive and sanguinary civil war by taking the nomination away from the candidate who won more elected delegates.”

Still, Obama now faces a tough choice in the eight remaining contests, said John Dickerson in Slate.com. If he ignores Clinton’s attacks on him as an unelectable “elitist,” he will buttress her argument that he’s not tough enough to stand up to the “Republican attack machine.” So at the risk of undermining his claim that he’s a different kind of politician, Obama will now step up his attack on Clinton as a truth- and ethics-challenged candidate who will do anything to win. If you think this primary has been ugly, “it looks like it’s going to get even uglier.”

What next?

The May 6 Indiana primary is a make-or-break contest for Clinton, said Adam Nagourney in The New York Times. Obama is heavily favored in North Carolina, which holds its primary the same day, and Clinton has to win Indiana to avoid the perception that the race is over. Clinton has the support of several prominent Indiana Democrats, including popular Sen. Evan Bayh. If they can’t deliver a victory to her, Clinton aides say they’ll urge her to throw in the towel.