Hillary Clinton has followed up her solid primary win in PA yesterday with what appears to be a tactical victory today: laying down a story-line that the only contest that matters on May 6 is in Indiana, a state she has a decent chance of winning, making NC, where Obama has a big lead in the polls, essentially meaningless.
I call it a success because so far, the news media, and even some pro-Obama commentators, are buying it. In the midst of a generally negative assessment of Clinton’s ultimate, today’s Washington Post article by Dan Balz on the PA results says this:

Clinton expects victories in West Virginia, Kentucky and Puerto Rico. Obama’s team expects to win Oregon, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota and Guam. That makes Indiana the critical battleground. Obama was there last night and Clinton will arrive today.

Even more interestingly, Ezra Klein of the American Prospect–who usually reflects the pro-Obama leanings of the progressive blogosphere–has an article up today arguing that Obama needs a “knockout” over Clinton on May 6, meaning an Indiana win.
And the articles discussed here at TDS by J.P. Green earlier today all point to Indiana as the next big contest.
Implicit and sometimes explicit in the all-about-Indiana story-line is that Barack Obama can’t claim true and final victory in the nominating contest–delegate-math be damned–until he can finally exorcise the haunting fear that he can’t win states with substantial but not massive African-American populations. And that’s a concern for him beyond Indiana, if he loses there: if the contest is still alive, HRC is almost certainly going to win big in WV and KY, and Obama’s subsequent likely wins in MT, SD and perhaps OR may be written off as irrelevant to his “problem,” which superdelegates will be constantly asked to weigh.
Part of Obama’s current dilemma is that his own campaign can’t seem to get beyond an inevitability argument. Brandishing projected delegate and popular-vote charts, the Obama campaign and its media allies have been dismissing adverse primary results for weeks and even months now, on the reasonable but probably irrelevant theory that it would take a miracle for Clinton to catch him on either measurement. If he’s already won, then it’s psychologically difficult to lay down his own marker for when superdelegates should force Clinton from the race–e.g., the next time she loses, say, in NC.
So: Clinton gets to call the next “meaningful” battle, and thus gets to lose NC with no consequences beyond whatever net gains in delegates or popular votes Obama can squeeze from the Tar Heel State. Those gains would simply represent a small addition to the charts showing Obama’s inevitability, which much of the media and a critical mass of superdelegates have clearly decided to reject for now.
It was particularly crafty of the Clinton camp to get word out today that key supporters close to the candidate would gently push her to withdraw if she loses Indiana–a pretty empty pledge since no one thinks she could survive a loss there. No such promises were made with respect to a loss in NC.
When I called this framing of the contest a “tactical” victory for Clinton, I did mean just that. Obama can take the bait and win Indiana and not only nail down the nomination, but quiet some of the caterwauling about his “weaknesses.” Perhaps a NC win would add just enough to the inevitability argument to begin to tip superdelegates in his direction even if he loses Indiana. And in the end, the math that underlies the Obama inevitability argument is generally sound; something other than occasional must-win victories would have to happen to give HRC a plausible shot at the nomination.
But the chance to pick the battleground remains a precious asset to Clinton, and one rarely available to a trailing candidate.

If you are curious about the accuracy of all the comparisons last night between Hillary Clinton’s wins in PA and OH, check out Jay Cost’s article in RealClearPolitics this morning. As he demonstrates in category after category, the two candidates performed roughly the same in the two states. If anything, PA’s primary electorate turned out to be somewhat older, whiter, and more Catholic than OH’s, which helped Clinton. Her margins among white woman and white men actually dropped a bit in PA, but they represented a slightly larger percentage of the vote than in OH.
Here’s Cost’s bottom-line take:

What we see, then, is what we have seen again and again in this contest. Clinton continues to do well with “downscale” whites. Obama does well with “upscale” whites and African Americans. What is intriguing about this result is not just that it is similar to Ohio – but also that it is similar after seven weeks and millions of dollars in campaign expenditures. Clearly, these voting groups are entrenched.

I’d add another factor: as Cost himself demonstrated during the last round of primaries, there’s no real evidence that either candidate has enjoyed much of a “bounce” from winning any given contest, with the sole exception of Obama’s Wisconsin victory, which seems to have been influenced by his Potomac Primary sweep. So if demographics are indeed destiny in this nominating contest, HRC’s got an steep uphill climb in NC but a much better chance in IN. “Momentum,” negative or positive, doesn’t seem to matter to Democratic voters this year. But nor do gross ratings points of advertising bought. That’s the bad and good news for HRC right now.

With the vote nearly all in from PA, it looks like Hillary Clinton will get her double-digit win, just barely (55-45). She’ll also get a bit over a 200,000 popular vote margin, which will cut Obama’s cumulative popular vote lead (excluding four caucus states, plus MI and FL) to about a half million.
The county map for PA looks a lot like OH’s–a few urban pockets going for Obama, and everything else going for HRC. Her wins in two Philadelphia suburban counties (Bucks by a landslide and Montgomery by a whisker) will get some post-election attention, along with her 74% victory in perennial NE PA general election bellweather Lackawanna County.
Since my earlier post mentioned Howard Fineman’s theory that Obama’s real strategy in PA was to spend HRC into bankruptcy, it’s worth noting that she seems to be raising some serious money online tonight. But the real question is whether PA will give her enough money or votes to survive May 6, when she must win Indiana and may need an upset win in NC.

Well, the nets have now called PA for Hillary Clinton, and the final (unadjusted) exits are out, and it looks like her margin of victory will fall into that ambiguous territory of high single-digits (53-47 or 54-46), thought that could change. The exits themselves are not terribly surprising, given past patterns; the most striking numbers to me were her better-than-two-to-one wins in the perpetual battleground territory of NE PA, and also among Catholics. For Obama, the most impressive numbers were his tie with HRC among voters under retirement age, and his 3-2 margin among new Democratic voters (including first-time voters and party-switchers).
HRC’s three-to-two margin among white voters in PA is one of those numbers that can be read either way.
So: let the spin wars begin.

I’ve been watching MSNBC’s early coverage of the PA primary, and it’s been a roller-coaster of hints that the race is very close and hints that Clinton may wind up winning pretty big. The gradual drip of exit poll date has, even more than usually, contributed to this confusing impression.
The one clearly interesting thing I’ve heard on this network so far is actually by Howard Fineman, who’s saying that Obama’s real PA strategy was to bleed HRC’s finances while limiting her margin of victory. Under that theory, if Obama avoids a double-digit loss while forcing the Clinton campaign into virtual penury, then he’s lost the battle, but maybe contributed to victory in the war. We’ll see.

The long hiaitus in Democratic primary voting is finally over, as voters troop to the polls in PA today. MSNBC’s First Read has a reasonably good assessment of the range of likely results, which will only have a big impact on the nomination contest if Barack Obama pulls off an upset win (which would be as big a blow to the polling industry as HRC’s win in NH), or if HRC wins by a bigger margin than in Ohio (i.e., by double digits). A very narrow Clinton win would produce the most intense spin wars, since most polls predict a high-single-digit margin for her. Even with a comfortable but not overwhelming victory in PA, she’s unlikely to make any significant net gains in pledged delegates, though she could shave Obama’s (roughly) 700,000 lead in the cumulative popular vote by somewhere between 150,000 to 200,000.
If you’re planning to watch the network/cable coverage of the primary results tonight, expect a lot of talk (particularly if there is a significant gap in time between the release of exit poll data and the “calling” of the state) about Obama’s relative performance among various categories of white voters–those without college educations, Catholics, Appalachians, etc., etc.–perhaps with comparisons to his numbers in Ohio. Another good bet is a lot of confused discussion about the cumulative popular vote totals, which will vary from count to count based on all sorts of definitional factors. And yet another lead-pipe cinch will be close scrutiny of exit poll data about the alleged willingness of Clinton and Obama voters in PA to desert the party in November if their candidate does not get the nomination. (Note, however, the TDS staff post earlier today pointing to historical evidence that such defections rarely happen in big numbers, whatever voters say months away from the general election.)
While it may not get much media attention unless the numbers are really surprising, total turnout–generally expected to be in the neighborhood of a record 2 million–will be interesting, not just in terms of the possible impact on the Clinton-Obama competition, but as a reflection of (a) the year-long national trend towards a significant expansion of Democratic registration, and/or (b) the existence or absence of “voter fatigue,” which some observers expect as a product of the increasingly negative nature of the contest, or of television ad over-saturation. The weather, described this morning by the Philadelphia Inquirer as “a near perfect spring day…across the Keystone State,” certainly won’t depress turnout.
Stay tuned here for updates tonight as developments warrant. We’ll try to add some value to the media chatter.

I have a very high regard for Ross Douthat of The Atlantic, exceeded only by Ramesh Ponnuru as a conservative commentator who consistently manages to rise above talking-points-distribution and cant, and make us all think twice about our comfortable partisan assumptions. But his contribution today to the backlash against the backlash to the ABC-sponsored Democratic debate last week is disappointing.
At considerable length, Douthat defends what he calls “the freakshow” of non-substantive candidate grilling on this basic ground:

[W]hen we elect a new chief executive, we aren’t just electing to live with their policy positions. We’re deciding to live with their personalities – their sexual appetites and Daddy issues, their spouses and their friends, their religious beliefs and their psychodramas – for four or eight long years.

Well, of course. But do we really need obsessive dwelling on such “issues” in network-broadcast candidate debates to give the country a peek at the personalities of potential presidents? Reading Ross, you’d think we were still living in the long-lost days when clubby journalists conspired to stifle reporting or discussion about, say, John F. Kennedy’s sex life or Richard Nixon’s use of profanity. They are truly long lost, for better or for worse.
So the question right now is not whether the public has a right to know about Obama’s choice of ministers or what a sociologist might deduce from what Obama or HRC says privately to donors, but whether that’s all the public needs to know. There is zero question that Americans know a lot more about certain of Jeremiah Wright’s opinions than those of Barack Obama on a host of subjects. It’s also clear that voters have massive sources of “information,” positive and negative, real and contrived and manufactured, about the personalities and “stories” of Hillary Clinton and John McCain. How much is enough? How much is too much? And if “debates” need to focus on such matters, why do we bother having supposedly sober journalists moderate? Why not just let Drudge and Dowd moderate, and show the whole thing on Entertainment Tonight?
Generally speaking, ABC’s defenders are depicting its critics as naive and wonky elitists who don’t understand real politics, or conversely, as cynics who are only upset that the debate didn’t go well for Barack Obama. I can’t speak for all the critics, but I have to say my own outrage at the debate was on the order of “Enough’s enough.” Contra Ross Douthat, my own fear is that we are in danger of electing a chief executive with far too little emphasis on their “policy positions” as opposed to their “personalities”–just as, arguably, we did in 2000 and 2004. And my only partisanship in rejecting the final descent into largely substance-free debates isn’t about Obama versus Clinton, but instead reflects an informed opinion that Republicans desperately want to make the general election a contest of “personalities” rather than “policy positions.”
Given his general body of work, I wouldn’t accuse Ross Douthat of that motive. But the idea that Americans need more and more of a style of campaign coverage that even he describes as a “freakshow” clearly ought to raise more suspicions of candidate or party special pleading than the views of the “freakshow’s” critics.

There was a revealing comment at National Review‘s The Corner yesterday by Mark Steyn, who sneers at a Michael Cowley quotation of a Bush political operative who said: “You guys never get it….People don’t vote on issues. They vote on character.”
Sez Steyn:

Well, why shouldn’t they vote on “character”? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin’. So if you don’t want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left?

Uh, gee, Mark, how’s about those “issues?” Does Barack Obama have to have “accomplishments” with respect to the war in Iraq to offer a slightly different form of leadership on Iraq than John McCain? And for that matter, do you really want to bet the presidency on John McCain’s “accomplishments” and “legislative record” when it comes to the economy?
Get used to this, folks. Republicans are going to do everything imaginable to make the general election “about” something, anything, other than the simple fact that they are out of touch with a majority of Americans on a wide variety of “issues.” This will definitely include elitist, snobby instructions to Americans that their interest in “issues” is a form of false consciousness that obscures their actual obligation to vote on the basis of “character,” as defined by people like Mark Steyn.

Just wanted to note, for the record, a couple of things I was involved in outside this site.
Yesterday I was one of 41 journalists (I’m pretty sure the list has grown since it was first published) signing onto an open letter to ABC deploring the tone and content of the Democratic presidential debate the network sponsored on Wednesday. Given what I’ve posted here on the subject, it seemed like a natural step to take. But I do want to make it clear I was acting solely for myself, and not for TDS or its co-editors.
I also did a post at TPMCafe commenting negatively on an effort by Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic (disputed on their site by Jonathan Chait and Isaac Chotiner) to defend the proposition that Sen. Joe Lieberman’s endorsement and active campaigning for John McCain is compatible with his past protestations of loyalty to the Democratic Party. I wrote this because I thought it would be useful to hear a Joe’s-Crossed-the-Final-Line argument from someone who’s never been accused of Lieberman-hatred or TNR-hatred–particularly someone who doesn’t accept the idea that Lieberman’s been some sort of crypto-Republican all along.

I’d be remiss in failing to end this week of political commentary without mentioning Jonathan Chait’s fine and definitive smackdown on Republican arguments (especially those expressed by self-styled-ultra-elitist George Will) that Barack Obama or Democrats generally don’t respect the cultural views of white working-class voters:

To urge the white working class to vote on the basis of economic policy is itself considered an act of elitism. When Obama and other liberals reproach blue-collar whites for voting their values over their wallet, argues Will, they are accusing those workers of “false consciousness.” A Wall Street Journal editorial took umbrage that Obama “diminishes the convictions of those voters who care more about the right to bear arms, or faith in God, than they do about the AFL-CIO’s agenda.”
But nobody’s challenging the validity of caring more about your religion, or even your right to hunt, than your income. The objection is whether it makes sense to vote on that basis. There are, after all, stark differences between the two parties on economic matters. Republicans do want to make working-class voters pay a higher proportion of the tax burden, restrain popular social programs, erode the value of the minimum wage, and so on.
Democrats, on the other hand, have no plans to keep anybody from attending church or hunting. A few years ago, their gun-control agenda revolved around issues like safety locks, banning assault weapons, and other restrictions carefully designed to have virtually no impact on hunters or average gun owners. Now Democrats have abandoned even those meager steps. The GOP’s appeal on those “issues” rests on cultural pandering rather than any concrete legislative program.

It’s much the same point I tried to make earlier this week: it’s bad to dismiss non-economic voter concerns as irrelevant. It’s far worse to dismiss economic concerns, which by and large do have a direct connection with public policy, unlike religion and gun ownership.
The idea that Democrats as compared to Republicans are the “elitists” when it comes to working-class concerns is just laughable–particularly when the supposed anti-elitists are folks like American Tory George Will or the editors of The Wall Street Journal.