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Those two eccentric states Tuesday, Feb 5, 2008 By John Brummett On this Super Tuesday evening I'll direct my attention to our most eccentric states, Arkansas and California. No doubt others across the nation will pay scant attention to Arkansas. The delegate count is minuscule and the odd state happens to have a former resident of its Governor's Mansion in each of the contests - wholly predictable outcomes, therefore. What interests me, though, is the margin by which each favorite child, a daughter and a son, will win in the state. I'm thinking Hillary Clinton will win big. She's certainly trying. She and her husband have campaigned in the state as if it were large and vital. She has paid for an Arkansas-specific television commercial, thick with syrup and wholly patronizing. (We in Arkansas taught her so much, she asserts with faux intimacy.) This intensity occurs because Hillary sees a chance to dominate the delegate haul here, and the delegate race probably will remain highly competitive nationally after today. Perhaps more to the point, though, is that she doesn't want to endure the negative connotation to come from what would appear to be a lackluster victory in what is kind of a home state. She's going to get drubbed in another of her three home states, her native Illinois. She prefers not to appear least popular with those who know her best. Her margin in Arkansas, whether under 60 percent or over, hinges on the black vote. Her husband always got 90 percent of the African-American turnout in the state. But that was before Barack Obama emerged as a racially transcendent candidate and before the Clintons conducted that distressing strategy to marginalize and compartmentalize Obama as black, not mainstream. Making amends with old Arkansas black friends - to whom he owes his very career - is why Bill needed to sweep into the state. In part, it's why he conducted what an unidentified Clinton campaign aide was quoted as calling a "mea culpa tour" of black churches in Los Angeles on Sunday morning. There are two things we know about the Clintons. One is that they will say whatever it takes to win. The other is that they will apologize for whatever they said if that becomes necessary to win. Bill's entire career is based on apologizing. It happened in 1982 to Arkansas voters, about 55 percent of whom fell for it. Then he apologized for all that carnal horseplay in the White House. For the record: Clinton's apology in the LA churches was implied. He didn't actually say "I'm sorry." That way the Hillary campaign could officially deny any need to rehabilitate the former president, even as he obviously was contrite and even as he said from one pulpit: "I'm not against anybody." Not even the one whose win in South Carolina, he said, was like Jesse Jackson's, meaning just a black thing? Now to the favorite son, Mike Huckabee. At issue is the extent to which he actually is favored in the Arkansas Republican primary. The other issue is who'll finish second, and by what percentage. Huckabee has never been embraced by his right flank among Arkansas Republicans. Still, surely he'll win by a decent margin, if perhaps less than Hillary's. But in what will be a relatively small turnout on the GOP side, I could easily see a robust second place in Arkansas going not to John McCain or Mitt Romney, who ceded the little state to Huckabee, but to the frivolous and odd libertarian, Ron Paul, who has advertised here heavily. Arkansas Republicanism has a decidedly extreme strain. So I suspect that Arkansas will distinguish itself tonight - not positively - by giving Paul his best primary showing. Finally, to California: Hillary remains likely to win more than half the delegates there, as well as nationally. The Hispanic vote is hers, apparently. But her march to the nomination would be inconvenienced, though not stopped, if Obama is indeed surging among independents and white center-left voters in California, as polls suggest, and pulls out a win in the statewide vote. Remember that Californians have been early-voting for weeks. Hillary surely leads those votes. So she could lose today's votes and still win the state. But if Obama should somehow best her in California, we'll have ourselves a stretch run for the ages. We'd have a few more weeks of Clinton aggravation. And the Clintons already would have played the race and apology cards. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
