Oh boy, the big day. However I must admit it's a bit anticlimactic, for never, to my knowledge, has there loomed such a momentous primary election that meant so little.
Barring a Pennsylvania upset, tomorrow's Democratic "contest" will look much the same as yesterday's. Nothing, really, will have changed. Barack Obama will still be securely ahead; Hillary Clinton will still be hopelessly behind; and the media will still crank out scenarios in which all this could -- but won't -- change.
Today is only a dramatic exercise in satisfying what has come down to some rather idle curiosity. Will Hillary win by 12 or 15 points? Or perhaps only by six or eight? Or even less? We'll see. But we already know that no matter what her margin of victory -- whether it's 15 points or merely one vote -- Hillary won't go away. She's like a Volkswagen or Timex: She just keeps on running, no matter what.
Of course one potential joker in today's deck is the swollen number of new Democratic voters in Pennsylvania, which could yet provide a basis for the unexpected. It all depends on how close Obama actually was, going into today's primary -- something on which the various polls have not been especially helpful.
For the Clinton camp the numbers must be daunting. Reports the Politico: "Since January about 217,000 new voters have registered for the April 22 primary, the vast majority of whom signed up as Democrats.... That statewide Democratic surge has been accompanied by a flood of party-switching.... A poll of those switchers and new registrants released ... last week found that Obama was the preferred candidate for 62 percent of them. Depending on turnout ... those newcomers could help Obama cut a Clinton victory margin by 2 to 3 percentage points."
Unless Obama and Clinton were, in fact, already tied among preexisting registered Democrats. And then there's the matter of all those young voters -- Obama voters, mostly -- with cell phones, which don't ring from pollsters.
For a while there was, and possibly still could be, a third joker in the deck: undecided voters, whose polling numbers as of yesterday stood in the 10 percent range. That's a lot, yet undecided voters who are still undecided the day before an election tend to just stay home.
They also tend to be fiercely independent of any partisan loyalties, if not downright capricious in their general-election behavior. And it is about that, now, that Obama must be thinking. Like so many presidential elections of recent decades, this one will swing by the action of independents and the still undecideds -- and it's their capriciousness, especially, that keeps the thoughtful candidate awake at night.
Lord knows Obama has had too many internal distractions of late to really hone in on the greater independent vote, but as the number of game-unchanging primary states ticks down, his attention and efforts increasingly will be devoted to this all-important crowd. As of now, however, Obama has a long-term problem -- and it may be reflected in his short-term inability to put Clinton away in the "big states."
In his almost painful honesty he ... has been analyzing, not asserting; he has been projecting not an image of the big, competent father or brother, but the moral and intellectual proctor, the gadfly called conscience. In so doing he has revealed an integrity rare in American politics, a luminosity of intelligence unmatched on the political scene today; he has caught the imagination of intellectuals, of all those who are really informed; he has excited the passions of the mind; he has not excited the emotions of the great bulk of half-informed voters, nor among these has he created a feeling of Trust, of Authority, of Certainty that he knows where he is going and what must be done.
I find those words eerily applicable to Barack Obama, yet they were written in a 1952 letter by CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid about Adlai Stevenson, as the latter was going up against Mr. National Security himself, General Dwight Eisenhower. There are, of course, many a variable that remove 1952 from the contemporary political environment, so one musn't overdo the historical analogies. Yet the overall tone of Sevareid's observation, I think, is plenty apropos of today.
Without demagoguing, Obama must still find a way to reach the emotions of that "great bulk of half-informed voters" -- the ones who will never fall victim to pure reason or the excitement of intellectuality, which is, of course, always provisional in its declarations.
As they did with Eisenhower, these voters seek certainty. And that's the one thing John McCain and the GOP machine are downright marvelous at delivering. They may not know what in God's name they're talking about, but by God they're absolutely certain about it -- and in that, half-informed voters discover trust and authority. It is, as Sevareid astutely noted, kind of a "feeling" thing.
Therein lies Obama's coming challenge: to convey the feeling "that he knows where he is going and what must be done" -- something Stevenson never even tried, because he knew he had virtually no chance of winning. But that's hardly the Democratic case today. In turn, it is a sense of direction and certainty that remains for Obama to nail down.
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