The Road Ahead for Hillary
February 20th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
The Hillary Clinton campaign is getting good at putting on a brave face the morning after a tough night at the polls.
Barack Obama won his 9th and 10th straight states last night. This morning, senior Clinton advisors held a national conference call with reporters. The message: We can still win the nomination, and we will go after Obama hard.
Strategist Harold Ickes, a longtime Clintonista, mapped out Hillary’s path to the nomination. Win Ohio and Texas on March 4, close the delegate gap with Obama, and recruit enough superdelegates to overtake him at the end. Of course, the Obama campaign might term this strategy, “planning to steal the nomination.” Ickes argued that since neither candidate will amass the 2,025 delegates needed to secure the nomination before the convention, it’s all fair game.
It’s clear the Clinton campaign plans to continue, and even boost, its attacks on Obama. The strategists said it was important that Obama receive increased “scrutiny.”
Spokesman Howard Wolfson laid the wood to the Illinois senator: “At the end of the day, Sen. Obama is not running on a string of legislative achievements. He’s not running on his preparedness to be commander in chief. He’s not running on his vast experience in government. He’s running on the power of his oratory and the strength of his promises. And we have seen in several instances in the last several days, oratory being lifted and promises being broken.”
And if you thought the Clinton folks would be too gracious to jump all over Austin state Sen. Kirk Watson’s cringe-inducing turn on MSNBC last night, well, you thought wrong: “When you have a major surrogate of Sen. Obama’s from the state of Texas go on television and he is unable to name any legislative accomplishments of the senator, that is a major moment for voters,” Wolfson said. “And it confirms what we are saying.”
Meanwhile, Ickes and strategist Mark Penn had to fend off questions about why the Clinton campaign had “ceded” so many recent contests to Obama. Ickes’ response, “There was no decision to cede them. Every campaign has the allocation of resources issue.” Read: we didn’t have the money to play even with Obama in every state.
They pointed out repeatedly that Obama has outspent them by four and five times. It’s still unclear how the Clinton machine ran short on cash so quickly This Los Angeles Times story helps explain Obama’s fund-raising edge and how his Internet donations are allowing him to skip most of the fundraisers upon which Clinton still depends.
The argument from Team Clinton is that their losses were not a failure of strategy or message — not surprising from the folks who designed the strategy and message — but because Obama has outspent them. They claimed that when the campaigns spend equally in a state, Clinton performs well.
That premise will be tested on March 4.
Asked if Ohio and Texas were “must wins,” (we’re thinking whoever asked this must be a former sports reporter), Wolfson said, “I think they are critically important.” He then reached for the always-handy football analogy. “I’m not going to make any Namath-esque predictions, but they are critically, critically important” Later he added, “We’re going to have a very exciting couple of weeks as we contest these states.”
February 20th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
[…] contest that math. But in a conference call of their own earlier in the day, Clinton advisers laid out a different strategy. They contended Clinton need not catch Obama among pledged delegates, but simply stay close enough […]