'Super Tuesday'

'Super Tuesday' may not settle it all

Sheldon Alberts, Washington Correspondent, Canwest News Service

Brian Snyder/ReutersThe race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama might not be over after Super Tuesday.

WASHINGTON -- Advantage, John McCain. Hillary Clinton? Maybe not so much.

In a presidential primary season that has repeatedly turned conventional wisdom on its head, American voters find themselves confronting another big surprise as the campaign sprints towards Super Tuesday, the biggest day so far on the 2008 election calendar.

The Republican party -- divided by competing factions and searching for a post-Bush era identity, suddenly is much closer to picking its presidential candidate than the Democrats, who only a few months ago seemed united and ready to hand Ms. Clinton the nomination.

What's even more ironic? The GOP candidate standing tallest heading toward Tuesday is also the one most disliked by social and economic conservatives who have controlled the party since the early 1990s.

"John McCain really is in the driver's seat, and may well be the Republican nominee," says Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta.

"But he is going to have a huge problem just uniting and motivating all the parts of the Republican party to come out and support him with any kind of enthusiasm."

Not many folks saw this coming.

It was only in December, Republican strategists were predicting a long, drawn-out nomination process in their party, and Clinton aides privately were predicting Super Tuesday would put their candidate over the top.

Voters in 24 states will head to the polls on Tuesday, making it a de facto "national primary" for Republicans and Democrats alike.

The GOP will award more than 1,000 delegates to its national nominating convention in Minneapolis-Saint Paul this September, roughly half the delegate total.

Likewise, the Democrats will award almost 1,700 of the more than 4,000 delegates attending their Denver convention in late August.

Because no candidate in either party has accumulated enough delegates in the early contests, Super Tuesday won't produce a clear winner on either side.

But Ms. Clinton, the nominal Democratic frontrunner, faces a far more complicated path to her party's nomination than Mr. McCain does to his.

An average of nationwide polls among Democrats shows Ms. Clinton with an eight percentage point lead over rival Barack Obama, but her advantage has been almost cut in half since the Iowa caucuses Jan. 3.

Blame some of those poll declines on Bill Clinton. The former U.S. president's attacks on Mr. Obama before the South Carolina primary are now widely believed to have damaged his wife's campaign -- driving black voters and liberal Democrats like Ted Kennedy firmly into the Illinois senator's camp.

With the sense of Ms. Clinton's invincibility destroyed after losses in Iowa and in South Carolina -- and a near-loss in New Hampshire -- enthusiasm for Mr. Obama's campaign has soared.

In January, Mr. Obama's campaign raised an astonishing US$32-million.

Mr. Obama is spending the money as fast as it comes in; he plans a US$10-million advertising blitz in each of the 24 states ahead of Super Tuesday, making him every bit as competitive in the campaign ‘air wars' as Ms. Clinton.

"The biggest thing for the Democrats is that Hillary Clinton -- with all her experience, skills and advantages -- is really being hard-pressed here for this nomination," says Ms. Black.

"When you look at the national polls, you see Obama getting closer and closer to Clinton all the time."

It's long been assumed Clinton would fare better in a national primary than Obama because she has 100 per cent name recognition and an unrivaled political organization.

Heading into Super Tuesday, the former first lady holds commanding leads in her home state of New York, and neighbouring New Jersey.

She's also competitive with Mr. Obama in the southern states voting on Feb. 5. Mr. Obama leads in Alabama and Georgia, which have large African American populations, while Ms. Clinton is strong in Arkansas and in Tennessee.

Mr. Obama is expected to win easily in his home state, Illinois, and is hoping the strength of endorsements from Mr. Kennedy and Senator John Kerry will help him pull of an upset in Massachusetts.

The big unknown -- and the state that will decide which Democrat emerges from Super Tuesday in the lead -- is California, which has 441 total delegates. A Rasmussen poll released Jan. 29 showed Clinton with just a three-point advantage in the Golden State.

"Because those big states split their delegates and it's not winner-take-all, Mr. Obama can certainly continue in the campaign even if he loses in California," says Earl Black, a political scientist at Rice University in Houston.

"The fact is, the Clinton campaign thought that it would be all over by Super Tuesday, that she would be so far ahead everyone else would drop out. That certainly hasn't happened."

There's more clarity in the Republican race.

Mr. McCain's victories over former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in South Carolina and Florida have created an air of inevitability about his campaign. He's won a gaggle of high-profile endorsements and appears to have cleared the one hurdle that most threatened his campaign -- lack of money.

Mr. McCain, who in November was forced to take out a life insurance policy to secure a bank loan for his campaign, raised US$7-million in January alone.

The 71-year-old senator is leading Mr. Romney in delegate-rich states like New York and California. More surprisingly, polls have shown Mr. McCain ahead in socially conservative states like Georgia, partly because Mr. Romney and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee are splitting the religious right.

"McCain is winning pluralities. He is not winning majorities. It shows he is still unacceptable to large numbers of Republicans," says Emory University's Merle Black.

But another phenomenon is at play among Republican voters. Mr. Romney's failure to beat Mr. McCain in this week's Florida primary -- despite a heavy emphasis on the economy -- was seen less as a sign of the Arizona senator's strength than the former Massachusetts governor's weakness as a candidate.

Of the five contested primaries and caucuses in January, Mr.. Romney has won only in Michigan, his native state.

"The ambiguities about where the Republican party is headed are reflected in this race," says Linda Fowler, professor of government at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H.

In short, Mr. McCain has become the default candidate in a Republican field that failed to excite the party's base.

"McCain wouldn't be my first pick," Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist at National Review, wrote this week. "Then again, none of the candidates were really my first pick."

Mr. Romney is running out of time to turn his campaign around. The former investment firm executive -- who has a net worth estimated between US$100-million and US$250 million -- has increasingly been forced to spend his own money to finance his campaign as external donations dwindle.

"If McCain can open up a lead among the delegates, and both Romney and Huckabee are far behind, then it becomes very unlikely that Romney would continue to spend his money," says Merle Black. "At some point he will concede the obvious."

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=280507