Hello Undeclared Superdelegates - Come out, come out, wherever you are!

'Obama, obviously'
Hillary clinton might be only one who thinks she still has a chance

Lisa Van Dusen | Edmonton Sun | May 8, 2008

In the same way Bill Clinton's face becomes a weapon of flushed and ornery fury in a dogfight, it becomes an unmistakable map of misery when he feels defeated. On Tuesday night, standing behind his wife as she put her best trouper spin on Indiana, the former president looked not only like the last dog had died, he looked like the dog.

While the results spoke for themselves -- Barack Obama won by an unexpectedly decisive 14% spread in North Carolina and then overnight pushed Indiana to a squeaker for Hillary Clinton of 20,000 votes -- Bill looked like a man who knew it wasn't just about the numbers anymore, aside from the $6.4 million of his money his wife loaned her own campaign to get beaten.

The former president had just spent two weeks bringing his Bubba Boonies Tour to small, mostly white rural hamlets in Indiana and, especially, North Carolina. And what Bill knows, after three decades of campaigning, is that they gave this one their best shot and it didn't work.

The Clintons gave Obama the works -- the gas-tax holiday trap, the targeted appeals to white rural voters, the selling of Clinton as the more macho candidate (to quote their megaphone-in-chief, James Carville, if Clinton gave Obama "one of her cojones, they'd both have two") -- along with the gift of Jeremiah Wright.

Obama effectively put Wright behind him Tuesday by proving that even if half the people who voted cared about it, it didn't stop him from winning. As the now-presumed nominee, he made what was essentially the first speech of the general election campaign Tuesday night, knowing the cojones argument had been pretty much settled and that the dirty work of waking Clinton up and making her smell the coffee now falls to the superdelegates.

After the toughest two weeks of Obama's life as a candidate, when he was running against three opponents -- Hillary, Bill and John McCain -- and Clinton, who the Republicans are purposely not laying a finger on, was only running against one, Obama still won bigger than anyone expected. She is favoured to win in overwhelmingly white, working-class West Virginia next Tuesday, which still won't make it anywhere near possible for her to overtake Obama's lead.

But Wednesday morning, the Clinton campaign (dubbed "Planet Clinton" by one reporter after the morning conference call for its stunning distance from earthly reality) was focusing on two fronts: The fact that she still won more white working-class voters than he did (although Obama made inroads with that group in Indiana) and that the Florida and Michigan delegates from two primaries that they themselves agreed were outlawed must be counted. Supporters got a Clinton e-mail telling them, "Today, in every way that I know how, I am expressing my personal determination to keep forging forward in this campaign."

UNDECLARED

But the remaining undeclared superdelegates, who won't remain undeclared for long, know that the demographic argument is really a racial one and the "48 states" argument is desperate and disingenuous. And what all the superdelegates know is that Tuesday's results contained a louder message about Obama's resiliency, his electability and the transcendence of his mantra about new vs. old politics. It turns out, contrary to all the conventional wisdom, that he's been able to fight old politics with new politics without resorting to old politics. In the process, he may have shattered the myth that fighting clean is for losers.

Lisa Van Dusen began her journalism career at 19, covering Canada's Parliament, was a press aide to the Prime Minister of Canada at 21, a Quebec correspondent for Maclean's Magazine at 24, then spent seven years of at home with her daughter, Grace, mostly in Washington, where she had moved as a diplomatic spouse in 1992. She resumed her career in DC as a copy editor at UPI. She began writing columns from Washington for the Ottawa Citizen, and continued to write about life in America when she moved to New York, where she wrote foreign news copy for the late Peter Jennings. She left New York in May, 2001, to return to Montreal. Until December, 2008, she was Director of Media Relations for McGill University, her beloved not-quite alma mater (two-time drop-out: BA'Eng and Poli Sci/Middle East Studies). She began her national column for the Toronto Sun in February, 2008, after spending January in South Carolina, volunteering for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She writes mostly, but not exclusively, about US politics.