Clinton wants to set tone for rest of race
Clinton won the Kentucky primary Tuesday with 65 percent of the vote; Obama won in Oregon.
combined dispatches
WASHINGTON — It is a purely Clintonian form of math, this idea of winning by losing.
But it may be working. By any conventional means of keeping score — pledged delegates, superdelegates, primaries and caucuses won, popular votes in party-sanctioned contests — Sen. Barack Obama became the putative Democratic nominee for president Tuesday night after winning the Oregon primary.
Obama moved within 100 delegates of the total needed to claim the prize at the party convention this summer.
Sen. Hillary Clinton sees the race differently.
She sees votes and delegates not counted from Florida and Michigan; she sees superdelegates who, if they listen to her case about why Obama can’t win in November, could switch their votes. And she sees a cluster of large must-win states, where she, not Obama, racked up the big numbers.
The odds are beyond long, but that doesn’t mean Clinton does not feel she has earned the right to end the race on her terms. That’s dignity as she defines it. The Obama campaign seems resigned to that. She won’t be driven from the race, and she will drive the tone of the rest of it.
Clinton coasted to an overwhelming victory in the Kentucky primary Tuesday, winning 65 percent of the vote. Oregon also voted, but the outcome was unknown Tuesday night.
Clinton has repeatedly said that she will continue her campaign at least through the final contests in South Dakota and Montana on June 3. That is as much threat as promise, and her calculation seems to be that she must follow through on her threat to be taken seriously.
After that point, some in her camp believe she will soon stipulate to Obama as the party nominee. Some party leaders also believe it is important that her support come days, not weeks, after the contest has ended.
Clinton’s options, other than winning the nomination, are many. She may gain more leverage from losing than most any other failed presidential candidate.
The thinking among some who have talked with her campaign is that she would be a vigorous campaigner for Obama throughout the fall campaign, wiping out any memories of damage she might have inflicted while prolonging the primary season. In the process, she would also maintain and perhaps even enhance her own viability should Obama lose the general election to presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain.
Before that, she will have the near-term issue of returning to the U.S. Senate. Clinton has a well of good will among her colleagues, but must balance that with the fact that so many of them supported Obama.
In that sense, she would likely be like Hubert Humphrey, who enjoyed a triumphal re-election to the Senate in 1970 after losing the White House race to Richard Nixon in 1968, rather than like Sen. John Kerry, whose profile was hardly enhanced by his losing White House bid in 2004.
There is another model of a candidate who lost in a close primary, Sen. Edward Kennedy, who on Tuesday revealed he is suffering from a malignant brain tumor. He challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and took his fight to the convention. He was criticized at the time and to a degree marginalized as the rare Kennedy who lost a political race. But over time, he built an impressive record of accomplishment in the Senate that few of his peers could match. As the first viable female candidate for a major party nomination, Clinton is not just another senator who would have lost a race for her party’s nomination. She has a powerful and potent constituency of woman voters who are loyal to her, and at least a claim that she could win over the votes of working-class white men as well. Obama would need both in some sizable number in the fall.
There are some signs that a merger of the campaigns has already started, with agreements for some joint fundraising and talk of some top Clinton staff members joining the Obama team.