I want you to take everything you know about this primary season and forget it for just a moment, and visit with me into an alternate history of the last six months. Turtledove a bit with me for a bit, over the fold.
It's January 14, 2008. Hillary Clinton, after attempting to rebound from a disappointing third place finish in Iowa, comes in a distant second to Barack Obama in New Hampshire. Opinion polls had her at a 9 point deficit in the days leading up to the primary, but she was unable to make up that difference and lost by 8 points after heavy campaigning. Three days later, the Washington post publishes an article detailing the gross financial mismangement of the Clinton campaign by Patti Solis-Doyle, and the pressure for Clinton to step down increases. After a weekend meeting with top advisors, fundraisers, and after a discussion with Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton suspends her campaign for President.
Only two leading Democratic candidates remain, Barack Obama and John Edwards. Obama and Edwards battle vigorously for the vote in the Nevada caucuses on January 19 (the intervening January 15 Michigan primary all but ignored by the media due to the absence of either Obama or Edwards on the ballot). As anticipated, Obama wins by 18%. Disadvantaged by increasing debt and facing a surging Obama financial war chest, Edwards' campaign chair Joe Trippi suggests in an interview on Meet The Press that South Carolina is a make-or-break state for Edwards.
On January 26, Obama pulls off a 63-34 win over Edwards. On January 27, 2008, Edwards withdraws from the race at a speech in New Orleans.
Now it's SuperTuesday. Barack Obama wins the SuperTuesday contests in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia, and American Samoa. Hillary Clinton, despite having suspended her campaign, wins California, New Jersey, New York, and Oklahoma. The race for the Democratic Nomination is effectively over. Barack Obama will be the nominee.
There are, of course, no further debates, no opportunity for Obama to improve on his shaky debate performances. There's no one to debate, except Gravel, who is ignored. Thus, there will be no opportunity for Obama to address the Rezko charges in a debate against Clinton. And thus, he will not feel pressure to address the issue of Rezko by sitting down with the Tribune for a wide-ranging Q&A on the issue (for which the Tribune--which has followed the story most closely--would effectively say "there's no there there").
Indeed, the primary is over. The media narrative shifts. Because he has not had to address Rezko, the press spends airtime and print on the Rezko trial in April. Although this is more damaging to Blagojevich than Obama, ultimately (the press eventually concludes there is no there there, but only after tedious Rezko trial-watch updates and statements that come in dribs and drabs from the Obama campaign), the issue proves to be a greater distraction than necessary.
Summer 2008. The Rezko distractions in April for Obama only highlight a significant weakness on Obama's part throughout the summer, which is his penchant for keeping the press at arm's length. Because Obama did not have a contentious primary season to deal with, he had much less pressure to deal with the press. Thus, Obama never had the benefit (as he would if the primary had continued)--of learning to "play the rules of the game" when it comes to the press.
This, of course, would lead to the event which would most likely threaten Obama's chances to win the White House.
Late September 2008. Fox News releases previously unbroadcast video clips of parts of sermons given by Obama's former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The clips are incendiary, and are replayed over and over again on cable and network news outlets. They are made into commercials by one 527 group calling itself Americans for Truth, headed up by the founder of the Swiftboat Veterans group.
This material is fresh and new, making it more appealing to the swiftboaters and the media (which had grown tired of the unsexy summertime narrative built upon boring policy scraps between McCain and Obama).
The Wright, scandal, of course, comes days before a critical first debate with John McCain. It also comes within a month of the Democratic Convention, during which Obama had spoken about his faith and "the pastor who brought me to it and the church which strengthened by beliefs."
Those words--once seen as helping Obama with evangelicals and conservative Christians (who, polls showed, were surprisingly responsive to Obama's message throughout the summer)--are now pointed to by the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and even people like James Carville and Paul Begala as (in the words of Peggy Noonan) "a great and heavy chain irrevocably linking Obama to the disturbing Rev. Wright. They are great, iron links that threaten to drag Obama and his chances at the Presidency below water."
This controversy is only exacerbated, of course, by the fact that Obama had put Wright on a faith advisory committee, where he served throughout the campaign, and which had met once over the summer with Wright in attendance.
Of course, some pundits respond to the controversy by noting that Obama had attended Wright's church for 20 years, that Wright had presided over the marriage of Obama and his wife, and that Wright had baptised the Obama children. But those facts are small and almost irrelevant compared to Obama's praise of Wright (if in title, if not by name) at the Convention, and the fact that Wright served on Obama's campaign, albeit in an advisory role.
Because there was no extended primary contest which may have pushed this issue to the fore before September--such as, say, in March, six weeks before a primary when he could have dealt with it in a speech that could have been effective (perhaps even--although unlikely, given the weight of the controversy--historic)--the controversy is correctly deemed by pundits and bloggers alike as the kind of "October Surprise" that does in candidates.
Now it is October. Obama's "Wright problem" dominates the first debate, crowding out time for substantive policy issues as ABC News moderators George Stephanopolous and Charles Gibson dominate the first 20 minutes of the one-hour debate with questions about age and "character", with McCain getting off easily, and the barage of questions directed at Obama. He answers clumsily under the grilling. He is not wholly prepared for the onslaught.
Obama's woes continue well into October as Sean Hannity begins a new controversy: Hannity compares Wright with the newly-revealed association between Obama and Bill Ayers, who decades earlier had engaged in domestic violenmce against the government, and who was a one-time conributor to Obama, and who had served on a board with him in Chicago. Although their association is loose, at best, the Rezko distractions of April coupled with the still reverberating Wright issue serves to create an atmosphere in which the Ayers "scandal" is conflated into something more than it is.
Obama's responses to these October Surprises is somewhat clumsy and ham-handed. Having never had to deal with the press through a lengthened primary season, and having never had to face the kind of primary tests of character that Bill Clinton had, Obama's campaign falters.
Analysts looking beyond the scandals and to the numbers see even greater pitfalls for Obama. Chuck Todd notes that polling shows that Obama has problems with voters making less than $50,000, and an astute article posted by
Poblano finds even greater weaknesses among voters in the Appalachian regions.
The week before the election is a depressed time among Democrats. Obama's campaign, though smart throughout the early primaries and the summer, lacks the kind of
well-organized ground game a tough primary battles would have necessitated. Although Democratic registrations are up, analysts wonder if an energized primary season would have resulted in a boom of Democratic registrations. Those same analysts predict that Democratic turnout, although higher this year, might have been even greater had the primary contests not wrapped up so early.
It's November 3, 2008. On the eve of the election pundits and media analysts wait for polls to close and returns to come in.
The roundtable panel on MSNBC agrees: it had all gone pretty much exactly as everyone had predicted more than a year earlier. There had been a swiftly decided Democratic race for the nomination. And although there was not as much turmoil in the Republican nomination as predicted (McCain had sailed pretty smoothly to the nomination after March, and had survived a minor coup by Paulites at the Convention), the pundits all agreed that the fall campaign had been as everyone had thought it would be, with one exception.
Obama had done more poorly than expected.
As the results start coming in from Georgia and New Hampshire and Connecticut and Florida and the other states, the analysts on MSNBC watch the numbers and wait, and in their wait they do what they do best. They talk.
They talk about what the campaign had been. They talk about how the candidates had responded to controversy. They talk about this voting bloc and this state, these numbers and those.
They talk about what it all means.
And they talk about what could have been.
"It makes one wonder," mused Chuck Todd, after reviewing early results out of Virginia, "how Obama and the Democrats might have been helped if Hillary Clinton had stayed in the race."