A final showdown for Clinton, Obama

What happened

With time running out on her flagging campaign, Hillary Clinton this week stepped up her criticism of Barack Obama, mocking his soaring oratory, likening his foreign-policy experience to George W. Bush’s in 2000, and denouncing his campaign literature as misleading. With next week’s crucial nominating contests in Texas and Ohio looming, the two Democratic candidates campaigned frenetically, and engaged in a final, testy debate in Cleveland in which they clashed on free trade, health care, and Iraq. Clinton said Obama’s talk of uniting the country was unrealistic, and would not be enough to bring about change. “I do think we need a fighter back in the White House,” she said. Obama conceded that “hope is not enough,” but said that “if the American people are activated, that’s how change is going to happen.” By opposing the war in Iraq that Clinton voted to approve, he said, he’d already demonstrated superior judgment.

The latest polls show Clinton’s once-commanding leads shrinking to single digits in Ohio and swinging to a slim lead for Obama in Texas. He’s won 10 straight primaries and caucuses and now holds a significant lead in delegates. Unless Clinton can win decisively in Tuesday’s four primaries (which also include Vermont and Rhode Island), she will face mounting pressure to withdraw.

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What the editorials said

Is Obama a liberal or a centrist? asked The Washington Post. “It’s telling, at this relatively late stage in the nominating process, that the answers are not clear.” He hasn’t joined any of the Senate initiatives aimed at overcoming partisan divisions, such as the “Gang of 14” senators of both parties who united to push through stalled judicial nominations. Obama’s “rhetoric about bridging partisan differences has been inspiring,” but voters deserve to know where he intends to lead the country.

One thing we do know is that Obama is “eager to engage the world,” said the Chicago Sun-Times. One of this week’s campaign sideshows was a widely circulated photo of Obama dressed in traditional Somali garb while on a visit to Africa. If, as is widely assumed, Clinton campaign staffers leaked the photo to embarrass Obama, they “did the senator an unintended favor.” He looks positively presidential in the picture—“global in his perspective and inclined to build bridges among peoples and nations.”

What the columnists said

Obama’s charisma is not the only reason Clinton is in such big trouble, said Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. She’s proved to be a terrible campaigner—not even remotely likable. “Her smile is strained. She is contained. She seems unknowable, and there is that melancholy Billie Holiday air about her.” Clinton’s poll numbers, in fact, start slipping from the moment she sets foot in a contested state. If she somehow secures the Democratic nomination, she’ll lose to John McCain, because “the harder she works, the worse she does.”

In her panic, Clinton has abandoned what made her husband so popular, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. Bill Clinton understood instinctively that “sunny beats gloomy” and “confidence beats whining.” Yet on the campaign trail and in Cleveland, Clinton was sour, sarcastic, and indignant, as if she couldn’t believe that some little-known upstart had usurped her rightful place as the Democratic nominee. Sorry Hillary, but “experience does not beat excitement.” If it did, Richard Nixon would have beaten John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Excitement is one thing, said Kathleen Parker in the Orlando Sentinel, but “religious fervor” is another. Women are weeping and fainting at Obama’s campaign appearances, while he proclaims, “We are the change we seek,” and promises redemption and resurrection, as if he were a messiah instead of a politician. The Obama phenomenon “is a perfect storm of the culture of narcissism, the cult of celebrity, and a secular society,” and what it reveals about our nation isn’t flattering. His followers have searched for the meaning of life in vegetarianism, hooking up, and therapy, to no avail, before turning to “the Church of Obama.”

What next?

Assuming that Clinton doesn’t mount a stunning comeback, Republicans can study her playbook for tips on how not to beat Obama, said Tony Blankley in RealClearPolitics.com. She’s proved that sweeping attacks on Obama’s experience and oratory “backfire on the accuser,” because he never loses his cool and responds with “wry, dry irony.” But he’ll be less effective if confronted with “a hundred tightly argued, irrefutable critiques” of his positions. “Specific point by specific point,” McCain should expose him for what he is—a liberal.