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One man's guide and confessional Tuesday, Mar 4, 2008 By John Brummett Here's a little Q-and-A to help you negotiate the hoopla this evening as Democratic votes get counted in Vermont, Texas, Ohio and Rhode Island. Q: First of all, why did I list the states in that order, which only so happens to reflect how they rank in the rosiness of prospects for Barack Obama? Doesn't that indicate the very media bias against her that Hillary Clinton claims? A: If it reflects any bias, it would be only mine. And I'm an opinion columnist who has already written that I prefer Obama. Don't blame all of the media for anything I say, and don't fault me for anything anybody else in the media pulls. I'm not responsible that Brian Williams and Tim Russert asked Hillary harder questions in last week's debate. They simply planned and executed their questioning poorly. Nor am I responsible for the Clinton cultists in the media in whose eyes Bill and Hillary can do no wrong. None of them is responsible for me. Most of the people offering support for Clinton's whine - they're in the media themselves. As a wise publisher once said, media failings will more often reflect incompetence than bias. Generally, media people care about the story more than any character. Anyway, media compete, not conspire, with each other. Q: So what's likely to happen tonight? A: Obama ought to win Vermont in a landslide. Those folks elected a socialist, Bernie Sanders, to the U.S. Senate. People who would do that are more inclined to favor Obama's trans-partisan change message than Clinton's tired, conventional politics as usual. Please note that I did not say that Obama was a socialist. I didn't even mention that the National Journal recently ranked Obama the most liberal member of a U.S. Senate that includes this very Bernie Sanders. We'll hear about that this fall. One thing people always forget: The euphoria of the primary becomes the agony of the general election. Meantime, Clinton ought to win Rhode Island, though by less than Obama's margin in Vermont. She'll win with working folks and Catholics, who prefer her. They'll start out saying Ohio is too close to call from the exit polls, but Clinton will end up winning by a few points, again owing to the working folks and the Catholics. Texas will be hard to assess. Obama and Clinton will split the primary vote pretty much down the middle. Any distance between them will come from delegate apportionment according to margins in state Senate districts. Obama will do better on that basis, since his strength is Democratic strongholds with more African-American votes and more delegates at stake. Delegates in Texas are allotted among Senate districts according to the Democratic performance of those districts, you see. Then, to make the outcome even less discernible, there'll be evening caucuses. Everybody will obsess on the razor-thin margin in the statewide popular vote. But that will mean next to nothing. One thing that might happen in Texas to break the popular vote tie is that white Republican men will cross over to vote against Hillary. Apparently they don't like her. In about a week, they'll have sorted all this out, and Obama will have more delegates from Texas. Q: What will tonight's returns mean to the overall race? A: In numbers, nothing. In spin, a great deal for Clinton's state of mind. After all is said and done tonight, Clinton will have made little to no gain in earned delegates. She'll stay 150 or so behind. She may be nearly out of time to make up that much ground, since Democrats have no winner-take-all primaries and Obama can pick up roughly half the delegates the rest of the way merely by staying close. But Hillary will spin any win tonight - whether one, two or three - as a dramatic comeback that overpowers Obama's preceding 11 wins in a row and practically projects her headlong into the Oval Office. The super-delegates will suspend for the moment their gravitation to Obama. We'll go on to Pennsylvania on April 22. Q: The other day I outlined a scenario by which Clinton would drop out in a couple of weeks. Today I see her rising from near-death to go on to Pennsylvania. Which is it? A: Take your pick. You call this C-Y-A - cover your anatomy. With frequent columns, one can cover what one might not be able to find with both hands. ------- 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. |
