Washington watch

Now that Obama looks unstoppable, some Dems are having second thoughts about whether he can win. Plus, McCain's fundraising trickery and cut-price Clinton T-shirts
June 28, 2008
Obama's blue-collar problem

Short of catastrophe, Barack Obama cannot be stopped. But many Dems are starting to feel buyer's remorse now that Hillary Clinton has exposed Obama's weakness among core blue-collar voters. She annihilated him in West Virginia, winning 67 per cent of the vote to his 26 per cent, and almost half of her voters said they would not turn out for Obama in November. And she beat him in all the high-population industrial states except his home turf of Illinois.

The Democrats' gleeful talk of a new electoral map is being turned on its head. In April, the conventional wisdom was that come November, Obama would get such a high turnout among blacks and under-30s that the Dems could take previously Republican states like North Carolina, Virginia and Colorado. Now it seems more likely that John McCain, by following Hillary's strategy of courting patriotic blue-collar white voters—one the Republicans say they invented with the Reagan Democrats—could win states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and even New Jersey for the Republicans. A recent national poll found that among voters with a high school education or less, a group that usually leans Democrat by 60 per cent or more, McCain had a six-point lead over Obama. Not only that, but in Karl Rove's latest electoral projections, Clinton matches up against McCain much better than Obama, winning many more states comfortably.

It could be a close convention

But the Dems are stuck with Obama. The superdelegates fear mass disillusion among his young and black supporters if they drop him now. Clinton's women, they hope, will get over their disappointment and vote Democrat anyway.

But nervousness over the convention is now acute. It looks like the closest Democratic convention vote ever, much closer than the current record from 1980, when Jimmy Carter had 1,998 delegates to Ted Kennedy's 1,226. (It probably won't be as close as the Republicans' 1976 convention, when Gerald Ford edged out Ronald Reagan by 1,187 to 1,070.)

Senator Ted Kennedy's collapse on 17th May and subsequent illness was a blow, since he had been trying to broker a deal with Clinton. He was offering to help with her debts ($21.4m and counting) and to provide support for her to replace Harry Reid as Senate majority leader if Michelle Obama kept up her veto of a vice-presidential slot for Hillary.

But there is also a convention floor vote for the vice-presidential nominee. If Clinton decided that she really wants the veep slot, there would be a nasty floor fight that would tear the party apart, just as the real election campaign begins.

Blogging beats polling

An analysis by an anonymous blogger has proved a better predicter of the latest primaries than the polls. "Poblano," at fivethirtyeight.com, used demographics and prior voting patters to predict that Obama would take North Carolina by 17 percentage points and Clinton would win Indiana by 2. If only she had known—Clinton spent $10m on polling, the bulk of which forms her ex-strategist Mark Penn's outstanding bill.

Penn may have been a waste of money. He once told Clinton that if she won the California primary, the state's 370 delegates would guarantee her overall victory, not realising that the state used proportional representation in appointing its delegates. In the event, Clinton got 207 California delegates to Obama's 163.

McCain's fundraising tricks

The Dems can take some comfort in McCain's dismal fundraising efforts. In April, he raised $18m to Clinton's $22m and Obama's $31m. Worse, some of the big industrial groups have decided that McCain is hostile to their interests—earlier this year he called pharmaceutical companies "big bad guys," for example, and said Americans should be able to import cheap drugs from Canada. So while by the end of March, Clinton and Obama had each raised close to $11m from the big four industries of security, construction, pharma and energy, McCain only received $6m. Four years ago, Bush outraised John Kerry three to one among the big four.

But it may not be as bad as it looks for McCain. In March, the Republican National Committee raised $13m. And despite his co-authorship of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, which limited campaign spending, McCain has a trick to get around the limit of $2,300 per individual donor. The McCain Victory '08 fund is a hybrid legal structure that includes his campaign, the RNC and local Republican parties in four battleground states. Voters can donate $70,000 to the fund—only the legal limit of $2,300 goes directly to McCain, but the rest can be spent by the Republicans to help him.

Half-price Hillary

Travellers passing through Washington's Dulles and Ronald Reagan airports can still buy the pink T-shirt that reads "Madame President 2008: Making History" and the black one that reads "Anyone but Hillary," featuring a version of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Also still on sale is the Hillary nutcracker, "with stainless steel thighs." But now all of these items are 50 per cent off.