BU on Politics: Hillary, Continued

This week, BU Today looks back at the year in politics at BU — from alums with a national voice to experts on local issues.

On the night of June 3, shortly after 10 p.m., Senator Barack Obama announced to a crowd of 20,000 in St. Paul, Minn., “Because of you, I can stand here and say that I will be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.” Obama had clinched the nomination earlier in the evening through new endorsements by superdelegates and pledged delegates secured through the final primaries in South Dakota (which Clinton carried) and in Montana, which he won.

Meanwhile, in New York City, Senator Hillary Clinton was not ready to concede. “This has been a long campaign, and I will make no decisions tonight,” she told supporters.

Comments on the Clinton blog urged her to take the fight to the Democratic Party Convention in August or to run as a third party candidate, although many pundits believed she’s hoping for the vice presidential slot on an Obama ticket. But last night, Clinton’s chief strategists ended all the speculation by announcing that she would suspend her campaign and endorse Obama this weekend.

For some perspective, we turned to Simon Sheppard, a College of Arts and Sciences visiting assistant professor of political science and author of several books on history, politics, and the media, including The Partisan Press: A History of Media Bias in the United States, published in 2007.

BU Today: Hillary Clinton’s odds have seemed long for several weeks, but she continued not just to campaign, but to argue that she’s the more viable candidate in a general election even after Obama clinched the nomination. Why did she choose to leave the race at this point, rather than earlier or later?
Sheppard: Where there’s life there’s hope. Clinton may have hoped a succession of substantial victories in the late-season primaries and caucuses, coupled with some devastating campaign gaffe by, and/or personal revelation about, Obama might have swung enough superdelegates to win her the nomination. Also, having reinvented herself as the scrappy underdog after losing her front-runner status, she had to keep fighting the good fight or risk looking like a quitter by conceding prematurely. Finally, by staying in the race until the question of the seating of the Michigan and Florida delegations was settled on terms at least partially to her satisfaction, she can now bow out, having, according to her interpretation, achieved the moral victory of besting Obama in the popular vote.

The timing of Clinton’s announcement aside, what would you say was the real moment that her campaign lost this fight?
In retrospect, the three critical phases of the campaign were 1) Obama’s breakthrough in Iowa, which gave his insurgent campaign momentum; 2) February 5’s Super Tuesday, when Obama won 14 primaries and caucuses to Clinton’s 8 and shaded her in delegates won, proving he could go toe-to-toe with the establishment candidate; 3) the 11-day period from February 9 to 19 when Obama won 11 straight primaries and caucuses, cementing his position as front-runner and giving him enough of a buffer in pledged delegates to withstand Clinton’s late-season comeback.

What are the chances for the so-called Obama-Clinton dream ticket for the general election?
The most expeditious means by which Obama could reconcile Clinton’s supporters to his nomination would be by offering the vice-presidential slot to Hillary Clinton herself. However, he would have to seriously weigh the cost-benefit ratio of this strategy to assess whether he gains more in terms of party unity than he loses by compromising his appeal as the candidate bringing change to politics-as-usual in Washington. Obama must be aware the same equation applies in reverse should he consider a wild-card choice for vice president (e.g., Senator Jim Webb of Virginia or Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico). An alternate strategy might be to reach out to the Clinton camp by recruiting Clinton loyalists such as Senator Evan Bayh for vice president and former general Wesley Clark for secretary of state. Another approach would be to mollify feminists by picking a female running mate but one in his corner —perhaps Governor Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas or Janet Napolitano of Arizona.

Do you think the Democrats’ chances in November were harmed by the drawn-out nomination fight?
There is no doubt the protracted contest for the nomination exposed a number of potentially damaging revelations about Obama, most notably his relationship with Jeremiah Wright. However, in the long term it may be in Obama’s interests that these came to light relatively early in the year and not as a last-minute surprise in the general election campaign. The most worrisome aspect for Obama must be that the drawn-out struggle with Clinton has seriously poisoned relations between the partisans of the respective camps. The mutual recriminations will add to the challenges Obama faces as he seeks to unify the Democratic Party behind his candidacy for the fall campaign.

How hard do you anticipate it will be for Obama to win over the Clinton supporters by November?
Clinton’s core demographic constituencies were women, Hispanics, Catholics, and senior voters; Obama will have to make outreach to these groups a priority of his general election campaign. In terms of geography, his lack of appeal in Appalachia was repeatedly exposed throughout the nomination contest, contributing to a number of embarrassingly lopsided primary defeats in some states (West Virginia, Kentucky, etc.) that are now effectively a lock for McCain in November, and others (Ohio, Pennsylvania) where Obama must be competitive if he is to construct an Electoral College majority.

How will Obama’s upset victory impact the campaigns of future presidential hopefuls?
Obama is the first insurgent candidate on the Democratic side to win the nomination since the superdelegates were imposed on the nomination process with the specific intent of enhancing the prospects of the establishment candidate in each election cycle (e.g., Walter Mondale over Gary Hart in 1984). Howard Dean’s outsider campaign in 2004 established the template for how the system could be challenged; Obama is his natural successor in that his campaign effectively combined both an encyclopedic understanding of the minutiae of the party rules with sources of funding and activism from outside the party channels, enabling it to rise above traditional expectations about how the game is supposed to be played. In the final analysis, Clinton’s defeat can be ascribed to a poor choice of theme —running as the candidate of experience in an anti-incumbent year — and complacency in terms of its strategy — failing to anticipate the depth of Obama’s appeal and grassroots organization in the states electing their delegates by caucus.

Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.

This story originally ran June 5, 2008.