Perhaps the best description of what happened to Sen. Barack
Obama’s presidential campaign can be found in the words of Sky
Masterson, the protagonist of “Guys and Dolls”:
“One of these days … a guy is going to show you a brand-new
deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is
going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump
out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear.
But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand
there, you’re going to wind up with an ear full of cider.”
There’s no such thing as a sure thing, the crafty crapshooter
was telling his buddy Nathan Detroit, and if Obama ends up with an
ear full of cider instead of the Democratic nomination, he’ll have
only himself to blame.
As voters prepare to go to the polls tomorrow in North Carolina
and Indiana, Obama appears in danger of losing what looked like a
sure thing two months ago, when pundits declared he had the
Democratic nomination sealed up like a brand-new deck of cards.
Jonathan
Alter of Newsweek, Jonathan Chait of the New Republic and
former Clinton adviser Dick Morris were the most prominent of the Beltway
wizards who counted the delegates in early March and pronounced the
primary campaign effectively over.
Hillary Clinton — who herself had once been considered a
lead-pipe cinch for the nomination — was now doomed beyond hope of
redemption, the wizards said. Obama could safely begin focusing his
attention on the general-election campaign against the Republican
nominee, Sen. John McCain.
And then that one-eyed jack jumped out of the deck.
IT MAY HAVE BEEN pure coincidence that on March 13, just days after
the pundits published their obituaries of the Clinton campaign, ABC
News aired its first report about the radical rantings of Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, the pastor of Obama’s church in Chicago.
Yet Wright’s radicalism was not news. As early as Jan. 7, Ronald
Kessler of NewsMax.com had published an article with the headline, “Barack Obama’s Racist Church.” Given
that former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos is political
director of ABC News, the question of how his network stumbled onto
the Wright story in mid-March inevitably inspires conspiratorial
suspicions.
Whether or not the Wright story was a wild card dealt from the
bottom of the deck by Clinton operatives, Obama misplayed it.
Rather than treat his 20-year membership in Trinity Church like a
common campaign controversy — answer the press-conference
questions once, then refuse to respond to future inquiries,
dismissing the issue as “old news” — Obama went to Philadelphia on
March 18 and delivered a grandiloquent 5,000-word oration on the
meaning of race in America.
What followed was a textbook example of how hubris trips up
those too eager to believe good news. The press proclaimed Obama’s
Philadelphia speech a triumph — among others, Garry
Wills went so far as to compare it to Abraham Lincoln’s 1860
Cooper Union address — and with this acclamation ringing in his
ears, the nominee-in-waiting decided to take a trip to the
tropics.
While Hillary spent the last week of March slogging
around Pennsylvania, Obama took a three-day vacation in the
Virgin Islands. In a PR coup for the Clinton campaign, news
networks showed Obama splashing in the surf on St. Thomas on a
weekend when the weather in central Pennsylvania was rain with
overnight lows of 39 degrees.
CIDER-IN-THE-EAR episodes continued to plague Obama. Barely a week
after returning from vacation, he met with a group of wealthy
donors April 6 in San Francisco, where his observations about
Pennsylvania’s “bitter” small-town residents were recorded by Huffington Post contributor Mayhill
Fowler.
That ignited a firestorm that was still smoldering on April 15,
when Obama went to Philadelphia’s Constitution Center for a debate
showdown with Hillary. Stephanopoulos and his ABC colleague Charles
Gibson tag-teamed Obama with tougher questions than he’d ever faced
before, and even his supporters admitted Obama appeared tired and
ineffective in his responses.
A week later, with Rush Limbaugh urging his Republican listeners
to cross over and vote for Hillary in the talk-radio king’s
“Operation Chaos” crusade, Pennsylvanians spit
more cider in Obama’s ear. A statistical anomaly — where Hillary’s 54.7
percent of the vote was rounded up, while Obama’s 45.3 percent was
rounded down — allowed Team Clinton to claim a “double-digit”
55-45 victory, even though her actual margin was only 9.4
percent.
This spin-inflated margin gave the media an excuse to talk of a
Clinton comeback, reiterating the “electability” argument Hillary’s
handlers had rehearsed for weeks: Obama couldn’t close the deal,
couldn’t win the Big One, couldn’t compete for working-class white
voters in swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.
As the airwaves echoed with those arguments, the jack jumped out
of that brand-new deck again. Rev. Wright’s late-April whirlwind
tour revived the worries about race and radicalism that Obama
supposedly had laid to rest with his Lincolnesque lecture in
Philadelphia the month before.
On the eve of the vote in Indiana and North Carolina,
commentators keep calling Clinton a lost cause. The Washington
oddsmakers who told Obama he had the nomination locked up two
months ago keep pointing to their trump card: Democratic
super-delegates wouldn’t dare pick Hillary over Obama. To do so
would offend African-Americans, a constituency who loyally deliver
more than 90 percent of their votes to Democrats every
November.
Yet the odds are hard to calculate, the way the Clintons play
the game. Obama still looks like a sure thing, but Sky Masterson
would never take that bet.
