Obama, Clinton: Paying a price for the primaries

March 30, 2008

By Mark Silva

Sen. John McCain’s "Straight Talk Express'' will roll out for a nostalgia tour this week, a bus-storming tour of many of the touchstones in the senator’s long life.

Yet, for the two Democrats still battling over their party’s presidential nomination, this will be a season to forget – if they can.

The spillover from the worst that Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have faced in a bruising marathon winter and spring of campaigning will provide McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, with endless fodder for a general election contest. Most likely, he will keep that bus on the high road, and leave it to his party to remind voters of the baggage that the Democratic nominee is carrying to the fight this fall.

How much will it matter this fall, should Obama claim the Democratic nomination, that he devoted two decades to a church whose pastor spoke of damning America for its racial practices? While Obama has condemned the most “incendiary’’ words of the now-retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he has not disowned the man. How much will it matter that the man positioned to become the first African-American president in a nation still seeking that “more perfect union’’ has acknowledged that his own grandmother was a “typical white person’’ in her responses to men of another race?

How much will it matter this fall, should Clinton claim the Democratic nomination with the support of her party’s superdelegates, that the great experience she has evoked in her campaign – signaled with that television ad asking who America wants to answer the phone at the White House when it rings at 3 a.m. – is not always borne out in the roles that she actually played in her husband’s administration? That landing “under sniper fire’’ in Bosnia in 1996 looks more like a photo opportunity to TV viewers today.

How much will it matter, should all or half of the delegations of Florida and Michigan be denied their seats at the Democratic National Convention in Denver? Will the party find a way to accommodate the states that broke its rules with early primary elections, or will the party of voting rights enter that general election bearing the guilt of “disenfranchising’’ millions of its own voters in the naming of a nominee?

All the while that the party ponders the “electability’’ of its candidates – the question which superdelegates ultimately will be asked to answer when the race between Obama and Clinton ends in early June, or perhaps even at the convention in August – that McCain tour bus motors along like one big rolling billboard for victory.

McCain will roll Monday in Meridian, Mississippi, Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia, Wednesday in Annapolis, Maryland, where he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy. Thursday in Pensacola, Florida, where he learned to fly, and Friday in Jacksonville, Florida, where his family sat out his captivity as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. On Saturday he will return to his adopted home state of Arizona.

Along the way, his campaign bus is likely to pick up nothing that will do the candidate any harm in his contest with Obama, or Clinton, in November.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Posted by Hillary · Filed Under Commentary, Hillary Clinton, News, Top Story

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Obama, Clinton: Paying a price for the primaries

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