Clinton and Obama should kiss and make up or risk a McCain landslide

THE US primaries are supposed to help parties select the best candidate for the Presidential election, but the Democrats could be on a hiding to nothing because they are deluding themselves.

Barack Obama has won 26 of the 43 states in which primaries have been held, along with Washington, DC. Hillary Clinton has only won 17 states, but if the same electoral college system were being used in the primaries as will be used in November, Clinton would already have won because she would have 284 delegates to Obama’s 201. Obama could win all the remaining seven states with their 52 votes, but he would still be well short.

When it comes to the presidential election Obama has no realistic chance of carrying many of the states in which he won primaries.

For instance, he has won in 13 states in the west and the south that the Democrats traditionally lose. Jimmy Carter did carry his home state of Georgia in 1976, but otherwise the Democrats have traditionally lost southern states since introducing the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Obama cleaned up in western states like Alaska, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota in which the Democrats have not won the presidential vote in more than 40 years.

Obama did particularly well in states that held a caucus rather than a ballot. That is an archaic form of voting.

All the caucus meetings in any particular state are held at the same time. Usually comparatively few people show up. Supporters of the different candidates would be asked to go to different corners of the room and they would be counted. The candidate with the most supporters would win. This facilitated party workers and the more committed voters.

While in Texas in 1972 I was involved with students supporting Senator George McGovern, the anti-war candidate. Instead of the usual 20 or so people, 132 turned up for the caucus. About 110 of us were students for McGovern.

McGovern won the Texas primary and went on to win the Democratic nomination, but he was trounced in the presidential election. The same thing could happen to Obama.

In 12 different states the Democratic primary was decided solely by caucus. Obama won 11 of those handily, while Clinton carried only Nevada.

This form of voting clearly favours somebody like Obama with young enthusiastic supporters. They will take the time to attend the caucus meeting, whether it is in the middle of the day or in the evening after most people have finished work. The primary in Texas was decided this year by a combination of a ballot in two-thirds of the state and a caucus in the remainder. In the two-thirds where there was a ballot, Clinton won by 51% to 47%, but in the caucus areas, Obama won by 56% to 44%.

In states where primaries were held by secret ballot, Clinton has won 16 states to Obama’s 15, and she has won all the bigger states with the exception of Illinois, which Obama represents in the US Senate.

The contest between them would be very different if the were using the same electoral college system that will be used in the actual presidential election in November. She would by now have won the nomination.

If this system were being used in the primaries and Obama won each state where he has won the caucus, Clinton would already have sealed the nomination as she would be leading by 284 to 202, with just 52 to be decided in the remaining seven primaries. Yet elements of the media have been calling on her to accept defeat and withdraw from the contest.

The Democrats are not using a system that will select the strongest candidate for the actual presidential election, so nobody should be surprised if they are routed in November. It is similar to choosing a sprinter to run in a middle distance race. The candidate may look good at the start, but he is likely to be trounced at the end.

In the last few elections the Republicans have played particularly dirty politics. They used the morality issue and family values against Bill Clinton twice and they tried to force him out of office by impeachment. They failed with him, but they narrowly succeeded with vicious smear tactics questioning the patriotism of John Kerry in 2004. Kerry was a decorated Vietnam veteran, but he returned to the US to testify about war crimes committed by some Americans in Vietnam.

Yet those who are doing all the yelping about terrorism smeared him for having the audacity to expose American terrorism. It was ironic that Bush’s supporters questioned Kerry’s patriotism.

He still has some shrapnel in his body to prove his service, while all Bush could show was few fillings in his teeth that he got on the few occasions he showed up for National Guard service in Alabama.

Obama is not nearly as well known to be able to discredit the kind of lies that are likely to be told during the campaign. By the time the November election comes around, some people would not know if his name is Obama or Osama, or whether he is a Christian or a Muslim, or a pluralist or a racist. Hillary Clinton has been through the rumour mill with her husband over the past 16 years and the electorate are unlikely to be very surprised at any allegations against her.

With Barrack Obama as her running mate, they would pose a real contest for John McCain and the Republicans. In four or eight years Obama would be better known and would have had a chance to establish his own credentials firmly.

HILLARY CLINTON won comfortably in Pennsylvania despite being heavily outspent by Obama, who spent well over twice what she spent on TV advertising. During the primaries his campaign has spent more than $200 million compared with her campaign’s $147.8m.

The Republican contest is over and 14% of the people who voted in Pennsylvania this week were newly-registered Democrats — 59% of whom voted for Obama. How many of those were Republicans who believe Obama would be the easier candidate for McCain to defeat in November? The race issue is like the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about, but it is absurd to think race will not figure in the November campaign, or that it has not been present in the primaries.

Most black people are Democrats with the result that their influence within the Democratic party is virtually doubled and this has worked greatly in Obama’s favour in states with a large black population, especially in the south.

The largest of the seven states still to hold primaries is North Carolina where 22% of the electorate is black. Over the past 40 years the Democratic vote has averaged less than 40% in presidential elections. If one were to assume that almost all the blacks are Democrats, it would mean that up to 55% of the North Carolina Democrats are actually black.

Since Obama has been winning more than 90% of the black vote, he is virtually guaranteed victory in the North Carolina primary, but the black vote will only count for 22% of the state electorate in November. The Democrats should remember George McGovern — a good man in the wrong place at the wrong time. He lost 49 states to Richard Nixon, who was compelled to resign as president in disgrace less than two years later.