OK, I'll say it: the nomination campaign is played out. After more than a year of settling the primary field, releasing dozens of policy papers, watching more than twenty debates, determining the key differences between the candidates, examining the evolving rhetoric and stump speeches, settling the primary calendar, building national organizations, and following the ups and downs of the polls, it seems that all we are left with is a lengthy, and increasingly boring, electability argument.
One the one hand, the Clinton campaign is arguing that only Hillary Clinton can win the general election, because she has passed the "Command in Chief test," because she has won enough states to win the electoral college, because she has already taken on the Republican Noise Machine and won while Obama has not been similarly vetted, because she has won "the big blue states" needed to win the general election, because she won Ohio and no one has ever won the general election without winning Ohio, and because she wins the key swing demographics like Latinos and working class whites. On the other hand, there are repeated implications from the Obama campaign and Obama supporters that there is no way Hillary Clinton can win the nomination because she can't win the popular vote, because she can't catch up in pledged delegates, and because the delegate math is stacked against her. And even beyond the arguments made by the Clinton and Obama campaigns, there is a third discussion about whether either Democrat can win if the nomination is not decided until the convention, or even if the rifts the party has opened up are too wide to heal in time.
Basically, after fourteen months of hashing out the differences between the candidates on virtually every other metric, with four weeks until the Pennsylvania primary, with no revotes in Florida and Michigan, and with less than 20% of the voting actually remaining, it seems that all we have left is a long argument about electability. That is a problem because, let's face it, long arguments about electability are really boring because they are ultimately unprovable and go nowhere. Even when discussions on race puncture the narrative, they are also couched in "electability" terms. Does Jeremiah Wright make Obama too racially polarizing to win the general election? Has Hillary Clinton alienated African-Americans too deeply to win the general election? It is a frustrating, boring catch-22, where the nomination campaign has become entirely an argument about who can win the general election, but we can't reach the general election because we can't settle the debate about who would perform better in it.
What isn't boring is the vast array of groups lined up to take on Republicans in the general election, a fully fledged left-wing conspiracy that, at long last, will be able to swamp the right in terms of activism and money spent. What isn't boring is the Responsible Plan to end the Iraq war, where an effort organized outside of the traditional institutional structures of party committees and think tanks now has over twenty-five endorsements from Democratic congressional candidates. What isn't boring is finding new and innovative means of attacking John McCain via search engine optimization, which is an effective, direct, quantifiable means of activism that anyone can accomplish simply through the use of embedded hyperlinks. We have built up a huge infrastructure utilizing new coalitions, new institutions, and new organizing techniques, and I am excited to see them in action. Unfortunately, it can't really take off yet because we are still slogging through an endless electability argument in a primary campaign with no end. In fact, even though I live in Philadelphia, I find the nearly dozen state legislative primaries to be more interesting than the presidential primary. The fact is that we already pretty much know that the campaign will continue past Pennsylvania, and we also already know the pledged delegate counts in the two main Philadelphia congressional districts (PA-01 will go for Obama 4-3, while PA-02 will go for Obama 6-3).
Barring something shocking, like the Michigan delegation being seated as is, the delegate math is clearly laid out before us, and Obama will slowly slog toward clinching the nomination sometime between May 20th and June 21st. For now, unfortunately, we are stuck in a holding pattern of an endless electability argument. I don't think that this sort of campaign will carry with it the benefit of the first two months of the year, where an intense, high-profile Democratic nomination campaign was largely helpful to the party. That is demonstrable by McCain taking the lead in general election matchups over the past two weeks. Without any voting to maintain interest between Mississippi and Pennsylvania, the void has been filled with electability and race (with the latter really being about electability). That is not the kind of discussion that Democrats need to win, because when Democrats talk about electability, no one believes what Democrats say. |
