Of all the beatings which conventional wisdom took during this marathon election season, none was more brutal than the notion that Hilary Clinton’s four-month death swoon was going to ruin the Democratic Party’s chances for victory in November.
Obama’s significant electoral vote totals clearly gave the lie to this particular shreik of doom. It was always going to be a Democratic year - with an incumbent less popular than bread mold and an economy that continues to require new negative adjectives - but it cannot be denied that the year-long slog that was the Democratic primary season has been a huge boon for Obama.
The biggest reason is the perception of experience that arose from a year and a half on the campaign trail. The defenders of Sarah Palin’s scant record tried to point to Obama’s similarly- thin experience on the national stage, but the criticism simply didn’t stick. By the time we got to September 2008, Obama had been talking about the important issues of the day for over a year; even if he hasn’t cast many critical votes or shepherded ay important legislation through Congress, he has been on the stage for so long that he has experience by proxy.
The longer Obama spent on the stage, first with four or six or eight others, and then since February in mano-y-mano bouts with Hillary Clinton (sexism be damned, sometimes the language works that way), the longer he had to shrink the perception that he was unready, until it had utterly disappeared by June.
But the most glaringly-obvious reason emerged in the last month, as the campaign wound down and the rabid attack-dog wing of the Republican party keep reaching for different ways to go negative. Clinton did Obama a tremendous favor by giving the media months to talk about Rev. Wright, William Ayers, the Islamic schooling in Indonesia, the liberal voting record - in short, every negative line that was raised by the McCain campaign. Because all of these lines were trotted out from February to June, there was just no juice left in them. They failed to stick because none of them were new and shocking. They had a “been there, done that” which left them sounding old and tired.
The Republicans kept tryng to justify guilt-by-association attacks, such as Palin’s “palling around with terrorists” line, by saying that “the voters have the right to know who Barack Obama is.” But this line of attack failed to catch hold precisely because the voters had already decided that they knew Obama. By October, outside the whack-job world of conspiracy-theorist bloggers, who is Obama stirred no interest as a story line.
Because the fact was that voters had gotten to know who Obama was a hell of a lot better than they got to know the ultimate nominee in many a year. John Kerry in 2004, Bill Clinton in 1992, and Michael Dukakis in 1988 all sewed up the nomination in the early spring (remember the mad rush to hold a primary before March 1st in order to be “relevant”?) and then spent several months coasting along without being challenged to say what they were going to do as President or to defend themselves from attacks, legitimate or scurrilous or whatever in between. Without Hillary Clinton pushing for the nomination, it might have been fall before Obama addressed his troubling association with the incendiary Rev. Wright - a time when it might have become the Swift Boat of 2008. Obama should call at least once a week to thank her.
The next reason why the state-by-state debate-a-thon benefitted Obama was that it required him to build an organization in state after state. The clear result of Pennsylvania mattering during the primary campaign is that Obama emerged with a ground game built in the state. Even states where he was pummeled by Clinton in the primary vote, such as West Virginia, left him with a campaign headquarters and volunteers ready to work in the fall.
The story of the final month of this campaign was Obama’s ability to mobilize the vote the way Bush did in 2004 and turn a close contest into a clear victory. And it was entirely due to the primary campaign. As a result of the North Carolina primary being contested by the Democrats, Obama has been able to keep active in a state that was thought to be safely Republican, forcing McCain to expend resources there, and ultimately connecting with enough of the voters in the state that it voted Democratic for the first time since 1964. Does that happen if he had won in Texas or Ohio and sewed the nomination up in April? Possibly not.
The final reason why running the Barry & Hillary show through the entire winter and spring was a boon for Barack is really perverse: the voters were so freaking tired of the horse race that they just didn’t care about anything except the issues anymore. Unlike any election in recent memory, none of the character attacks, none of the negative ads, none of the snarky debate comments about either candidate seem to get any traction.
Sometime back in the spring, the politics of personal destruction, at least for this Presidential cycle, lost its fastball. The McCain campaign was perceived as the more negative and, not coincidentally, McCain’s campaign lost ground with the large cohort of middle-of-the-road and independent voters that ultimately determine the election . The live audience meters during the debates showed it best - any time either guy went on the attack, the audience got hostile. “Shut up about him and tell us what you’re going to do about the mess we’re in” was the undeniable message.
Barack Obama owes a huge debt to Hillary Clinton. And the prophets of doom who predicted that Hillary was killing the Democrat’s best electoral opportunity since 1932 (and you know who you are), owe her a very large apology.
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