So I'm sitting there, watching Hillary Clinton's now infamous "piss and vinegar" press conference, and two things suddenly occur to me.
1.) This sort of reminds me of a pantsuit version of R. Lee Ermey in "Full Metal Jacket."
2.) Boy was this press conference a stupid idea. A very stupid idea.
I also remember being struck by how last-minute and improvised it all felt. A small little area with a microphone and Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland behind her, his hands clasped in front of him and his eyes on the floor, looking mortified, too ashamed to even make eye contact with the press. The ramshackle feeling betrayed what I think was the press conference's likely origins: someone hands Clinton the fliers in an offhand, "look at this" kind of way, and for some reason a dam brakes inside her exhausted, beaten mind and lets loose a volcano. I imagine her calling for an immediate press conference and, even though it is almost always a dumb idea to allow your candidate to go in front of microphone when they're pissed, after 11 losses in a row there was no one with enough credibility around to stop her, and so her backroom, Bill Clinton-style meltdown over those mailers made it out in front of all of us.
Predictably enough, it backfired. Instead of it being a flashy moment of genuine anger, her tone served as a severe contrast from her "valedictory moment" at the Texas debate (allowing the news media to play the contrasting clips all day long). Most importantly, however, like many emotional decisions, it was also a severe tactical blunder, since the playing of the clip almost always immediately led to a discussion of Clinton's position on NAFTA.
Why Clinton would want to do this -- to invite people to examine the merits of Obama's attack, and in so doing repeat the attack over and over -- is beyond imagination, since not only is it tactically bad from that perspective, but it also serves to do something the Clinton camp should want at all costs to avoid: namely, having Clinton's name and NAFTA appear together as many times as possible. This is why I'm so sure it wasn't a planned out, considered thing, since planned out, considered things generally aren't that stupid (I imagine I will be disputed on this point).
But there she was, screeching like a hyena, and is it any wonder now that the public battle over Ohio has become almost entirely a discussion of Clinton's position on NAFTA?
With the outlines for the debate thus settled on a Clinton weakness, Obama immediately pounced, mentioning at every opportunity (starting with the next day's press conference) the numerous times Clinton has gone on record supporting NAFTA, throwing in for good measure the notion that she had only changed her mind when she started running for president (put a little checkmark next to "will do anything to get elected"). It was a perfect setup for him, and he used the opportunity to undermine her support among the very downscale white voters she must count on to save her campaign.
The irony of it is that it was an emotional decision from the notably vast, cool and unsympathetic mind of Sen. Clinton. She just sort of lost control of herself, abandoning her mind to her gut and instincts, and operating from that side of her brain is traditionally (or physiologically, if you're into that kind of thing) not something Clinton does well.
All of this serves as a good way to start a discussion of what I think is the essence of the narrative playing itself out in Ohio.
Practicality vs. Hope
In this corner, weighing in at lighter than air, in the clouds: HOPE! And in this corner, weighing in as a heavy steel blanket smothering your very dreams: PRACTICALITY!
The practicality vs. hope debate has, by now, become the central narrative in the campaign, and more than any other state, Ohio distills this discussion to it's essence. It's basically said to work like this:
*Ohio is a practical state.
*Clinton is practical.
*Obama is hope.
*Hope is not practical.
And there it is. Simple as that. Except, of course, not really. Let's consider that first point: Ohio is a practical state. Well, why is it considered that?
The idea is that the economic distress in Ohio has forced it's people to think far more about the immediate food on their table or the immediate job they're worried about losing than about metaphysical dreams like hope. Despite what a few ignorant assholes have said comparing Obama's rabid support among the masses to that of Hitler, he has not thus far been able to mobilize the desperate people of Ohio the same way Hitler did for all of desperate 1930s Germany.
And why? I would wager this has a lot to do with what I like to call the Bill Clinton Nostalgia Effect. Despite what happened with NAFTA, a large percentage of the population (the so-called "downscale whites") still remember the Clinton years, economically at least, as a period of relative prosperity (at least, compared to the last seven years). With Clinton's nuts and bolts image and backwards-looking candidacy, she is even more able to conjure up these feelings, and her support in this group has been relatively unfailing (my previous diary entry shows why recent exit polling showing otherwise is flawed).
But that's the situation. Ohioans are seen as practical, a term that implies they're somehow more resistant than average to far-flung ideas and momentum. But that's not the way I see it. Another (less pleasant, but perhaps more accurate) way of saying it is that the people of Ohio have shown themselves to be susceptible to fear mongering. This is, after all, the swing state that decided it for Bush in '04, and a more fear mongering campaign, as we all know, as never been run. Despite all the problems of the time, and the fact that re-election campaigns almost always come down to a referendum on the current president, Bush won Ohio by framing the debate in the minds of voters essentially this way:
"Sure he's made mistakes. But look, we could get hit again."
They pushed some version of that message relentlessly, and it worked, despite the overwhelming economic reasons Ohioans had to vote for Kerry (Bush has championed NAFTA, for example). A look through the exit polling available from 2004 shows that among the biggest voting bloc in Ohio, voters making between $30,000 and $50,000, Bush and Kerry essentially tied, 49%-50%. Bush also managed to win white women (including the so-called soccer moms, a big voting bloc especially in the conservative suburbs of Cincinnati), winning them statewide, 55-45, when he lost them nationwide, 51-48. He also picked up 17% of black voters in Ohio, when nationally he only won 11%.
My general analysis of Ohio is that the people there aren't so much practical as they are afraid. Let me say right here that I don't mean that as an insult. They after all have good reason to be afraid of losing their jobs and their homes. Norman Mailer once wrote that "the natural role of the twentieth-century man is anxiety," and there is no greater anxiety to be had than the fear of a family man facing destitution, and there is no more natural result of that anxiety than of cautiousness when facing the tidal forces of change, whether that change be represented in the forms of Obama (when faced with Clinton) or Kerry (when faced with Bush). The formulation that leads you to say: "Bush is the president. It's a time of war. Let's stick with him" is not really all that mentally different from "Bill Clinton was a good president, Hillary is nuts and bolts, and this is a time of economic desperation." This cautiousness seeps into the decision making process when faced with any big and nebulous threat, and the insight of the Bush campaign was to consciously drum up the threat of terrorism in a way that at least to most people didn't seem like a campaign tactic, but worked all the same to exploit the fears of Ohioans that had grown out of their economic troubles and then transferring that fear to national security issues.
The Clinton campaign knows all of this, and have sought to use fear at several points in the campaign, most recently and perhaps most starkly in their recent campaign commercial (my father humorously remarked that he half expected the camera to cut to someone with an Obama mask stabbing the sleeping children). I mean, when someone compares your ad to the now infamous "Daisy" ad or the Reagan "Bear" ad, you know you've waded deep into the fear mongering pool.
On the plus side, however, I don't expect this ploy to be as effective in Ohio, mostly because the Clintons aren't currently in the White House to run it the way Bush, Reagan and Johnson were. That ad works most effectively when the people are faced with a big and terrible threat, whether it be real or created. In the current Democratic campaign, the most palpable emotion has been anger (which Obama has been trying, with a good degree of success, to transfer into hope). People are more pissed and tired of being pissed than afraid, and it's hard to convince people to be afraid by showing them an ad.
So while I don't think this strategy will work as effectively for Clinton as it did for Bush, it's clear that at this late and desperate stage of the campaign, they're certainly willing to try, and with things as close as they are, it might swing enough votes to make a difference. To my mind a better ad for them would have been one that focused on Obama's lack of experience in running an economy (which Clinton could claim to have done, as she has many times, by proxy). But then, an ad like that probably wouldn't have gotten the same kind of superheated press coverage the one they ran did, so what do I know?
Obama, for his part, has also used fear, deflecting Clinton's 3 a.m. ad with one of his own that basically said, "when that phone rings at 3 a.m., wouldn't you like someone in the White House who won't start a stupid war over it?"
Of course, this is ridiculous. No reasonable person should think of Clinton as a war monger because she voted for the Iraq resolution. Her error was not in being bloodthirsty, but of giving in to public pressure. Which, of course, is just another phrase for fear. The fear, in this case, of being on the wrong side of what was then a popular war. But, I don't want to wade down that road right here.
Anyhow, Obama's ad is an aberration in his overall strategy, which, by contrast, has not been one mainly of fear, but of blame. With the so-called downscale whites as the swing vote, the race in Ohio has, for the first time, been waged largely for the same voters, rather than a contest of organizational power. Knowing this, the Obama team started working to modify his strategy to appeal to this demographic. He was fortunate that Wisconsin came first, since it gave him the opportunity to test drive a few different approaches. His victory speech after Wisconsin, if you recall, was something on the order of 45 minutes long, and felt very much as if someone had taken his "Inspiring Speech v.3.4" and clunkily shuffled it, very much like a deck of cards, into his "Economic Proposal Speech v.2.1." It was not a good speech, and fell flat. It ran long. They hadn't worked out the kinks yet.
However, Clinton's press conference helped change all that. Rather than having to try and compete on her turf, with her voters, going toe to toe on policy speeches, she inadvertently put NAFTA front and center and allowed him to begin clobbering her with it, with the implicit message being that while Clinton might talk a lot about solutions, she is actually part of the problem.
This ended up being a generally good strategy. And a familiar one. Change the words around a bit and this is very similar to how Obama has sought to frame the Experience question, by deflecting it with the Iraq War. Unfortunately for him, in the case of NAFTA there was no particular speech or action he could point to where he opposed or showed prescience on it, so while he has been waving his finger, I'm not sure Ohioans see him as much better on this issue (especially after reports alleging an Obama economic adviser told the Canadians his position on NAFTA was mainly public posturing). The main failing in this strategy has been that, for reasons that escape me, Texas (a state that has benefited greatly from NAFTA) is the primary running concurrently with Ohio. To the degree that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA have reached South Texas (where he is already weak but looking to make inroads), I would say that they have hurt him there, since that trade deal has been great for Mexico and good for Texas, where the rate of job creation is nearly twice the rate it is nationwide.
There is also the fact that the importance of the NAFTA debate in Ohio has in all honesty been blown out of proportion. NAFTA has certainly been bad for Ohio, but pretty much any free or semi-free trade deal is going to be bad for factory workers. Those steel worker and auto plant jobs didn't just go to Mexico, they also went to China and Korea and India and a dozen other countries after trade deals with lax labor standards were made. What has surprised me most about the race for Ohio is the fact that ethics reform has been left almost entirely out of it. There is, of course, little to debate when it comes to ethics (since even your well-heeled snake-in-the-grass politician can wax poetic about necessity of ethics reform), but an emphasis on it has been almost entirely absent given the fact that the state has been rocked over the last few years by a series of high profile scandals (including "Coingate") in the Ohio Republican party that helped Democrat Sherrod Brown run Republican Mike DeWine out of his Senate seat. The only hint I got as to the presence of an emphasis on ethics reform was a TV report that indicated one of Obama's standard lines about running lobbyists out of town had gotten the biggest applause line of his speech. Watching the debate, you would have never known it was such a big issue among voters in Ohio, but I suppose it's no surprise that it didn't come up given that Tim Russert and Brian Williams have often seemed much more interested in picking fights between the candidates than actually speaking to the relevant issues. When we think back and do the postmortem on Ohio, if Obama loses there (which I think likely) his lack of an emphasis on his history as an ethics reformer might prove to have been his undoing.
My last thought about the cautiousness/practicality/fear nexus is one aspect of it that should actually prove useful to Obama. Namely, the fact that he has been generally polled better against John McCain in general election polls than has Clinton. Whatever the reasons (and there are many) for Obama to be polling better, the fact of it has helped him given that we have reached the portion of the race where people are thinking as seriously about who their candidate is going to be in November as they are about the immediate primary. Given the polls, and the general consensus, the idea of Obama having momentum is just a synonym for electability, and the more people think about the general election and John McCain, the better Obama is going to perform, because even if we are to accept the fact that many of the people in Ohio live their lives in fear, they are surely even more fearful of having to face four more years of the same economic policies that have thus far doomed them to their fears.
A Prediction
I've felt all month that Clinton was likely to win Ohio. The demographics that have been turning out all along for her are there in spades, and although tactics play a big role in deciding elections, demographics can generally tell you 80% of what is going to happen. In my previous diary, I went on at length describing why the Texas and Ohio elections were going to be very different from those of the month of February, and I maintain those same views now. To wit, neither Ohio and Texas have been uncontested, so don't expect the 8% bump Obama has gotten in the polls on average. That was a function of the lack of a get out the vote operation on the part of the Clinton campaign more than any special powers on the part of Obama.
Tactically, I would say they have battled essentially to a draw. Obama won both debates, in my view, but his NAFTA strategy has helped him in Ohio and hurt him in Texas. The Clinton campaign has also been able to get their negative attacks (NATO oversight, 3 a.m.) wide play in the media, and that's always a good thing, even if the attacks are eventually (i.e. after being played several million times) considered to be dubious.
Obama's main hope lies in the strength of his organization and fundraising. He has significantly outspent Clinton, and has been fortunate to have organizations like the SEIU spending millions on mailers and phonebanks. The general consensus also seems to be that his ground game is better, and better prepared. And as I said, the polling numbers are showing him ahead when battling McCain, something that will help him in "practical" Ohio.
For the night, I'd say a draw. Obama wins Texas and Vermont. Clinton wins Ohio and Rhode Island. Expect the delegate count to be relatively split or leaning Obama due to the Texas caucuses. For myself, I'll be watching closely. For those of you Champions of Fun out there, join me in drinking whenever Wolf Blitzer says "too close to call."