This race is only for Democrats to lose

COMING out of the Super Tuesday contests, the American presidential campaign should be the Democrats’ to lose.

President George W Bush’s approval ratings are mired in the cellar, the American economy is spiralling downwards, the war in Iraq has been a disaster, and the Republicans are likely to be saddled with a candidate their base can’t stand.

The Democrats, on the other hand, have not one, but two candidates who are well liked by the party faithful, according to the polls. In Hillary Clinton, they have a party veteran with name recognition, an encyclopedic knowledge of policy and, not incidentally, a husband who has been the most successful Democratic politician in a generation. In Barack Obama, they have a visionary orator who stirs comparisons to John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. He has splashy celebrity endorsements, endless energy and a groundswell of support among the young.

And each has lots of money, while the Republican frontrunner, John McCain, continues to be strapped for cash.

So what could go wrong for the Democrats? First, unlike McCain, neither Clinton nor Obama scored a decisive victory on Tuesday. So while the Democrats battle on, McCain can start looking toward the November election.

The Clinton campaign had hoped to stop the Obama insurgency cold by winning a commanding lead in the popular vote and in the race for delegates. Then Clinton watched her prohibitively large lead dwindle just days before the voting. The late deciders went with the establishment candidate, as they usually do, so Clinton wound up with better results than many polls had suggested, but still in a virtual draw.

Obama’s supporters point out that he has gone a long way toward closing the gap between the campaigns, and that’s true enough. Still, the Obama camp had high hopes of winning the popular vote in California and at least coming close in Massachusetts, and neither happened. That suggests that the endorsement and campaigning by Senator Edward Kennedy was not as powerful as the Obama camp had hoped.

So the Democrats came out of Super Tuesday almost exactly as they went in, with Clinton still the favourite of the party establishment and Obama charging hard.

The next primaries come in clusters of just two or three states, not the nearly two dozen we saw this week. That favours Obama, who, in person, generates enthusiasm more befitting a rock star than a politician.

More than 200 delegates are up for grabs this Saturday in three states — Louisiana, Nebraska and Washington — and the US territory of the Virgin Islands. Nearly 250 are on offer next Tuesday in Maryland and Virginia.

Obama is about 100 delegates behind in the race for the 2,025 needed to secure the nomination, a range that party professionals say is near the far edge of the deficit he could conceivably make up in the rest of the primary season. It won’t be easy, because delegates are usually awarded proportionately in Democratic primary contests.

The drawn-out race could be a liability for the Democrats if the campaign gets nasty in the coming weeks, as it did before the South Carolina primary. That could generate a “plague on both your houses” backlash, giving McCain a big boost. The Democrats have to be mindful that while McCain may have trouble winning over right-wing Republicans, his maverick reputation could well induce Democrats to vote for him in November if they are turned off by the Democratic primary campaign. It’s very much in the party’s interest for both candidates to stay on the high road.

If neither candidate wins enough delegates before the primary season ends in May, the nomination would be decided at the convention, where old-fashioned power politics could come into play and jeopardise the party’s fragile unity. The worst case for the Democrats would be a bitter convention fight — especially if it involved Florida, reviving memories of the Florida debacle in the 2000 general election.

Florida and Michigan are not supposed to be able to seat delegates at the convention because their primary schedules violated Democratic Party rules, and all of the Democratic candidates promised not to campaign in those two states. But Clinton kept her name on the Michigan ballot and campaigned a little, sort of, just a bit, in Florida by holding fundraising events there just before the vote. She carried both states — running, essentially, unopposed. Clinton has already indicated very clearly that she wants those Florida delegates seated.

If the nomination came down to a convention vote and Clinton won the nomination by forcing those votes into play, large numbers of disillusioned Democrats would almost certainly stay home on election day or defect to McCain.

* Dr Steven Knowlton is professor of journalism at Dublin City University.He has been a journalist, mostly in the US, for 40 years and has taught for 20 years in the US, eastern Europe and Ireland.