Deathmatch

Michael Barone looks at the utter mess of the Democratic primary and believes there is little hope for either candidate to win this thing before the  convention.  It is turning into a disaster for both Clinton and Obama. There is a real opportunity for John McCain in all this – if he plays it smart.

The March 4 results suggest Obama may not turn out to be as strong a candidate against McCain this November as he is in current polls. Clinton's "red phone" ad asked which candidate you would want to rely on to respond to a crisis at 3 o'clock in the morning. Obama's campaign said this was a Republican tactic.

Yes — but Walter Mondale ran a similar ad against Gary Hart in 1984. It worked then, and it worked now. In Texas, where the ad ran, Clinton got a 60 percent to 39 percent margin among those who made up their minds in the last three days. That single ad may have made the difference in a contest she had to win to continue in the race.

In contrast, Obama's demagoguery on trade failed to attract white working-class voters: He ran far behind Clinton in Mahoning County (Youngstown) and the west side of Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). In southeast Ohio, settled originally by Virginians and still Southern-accented today, Clinton carried all-white counties with 70 percent to 80 percent of the vote — more than she was carrying nearly all-white counties in central Texas. That raises doubts that Obama could run well in these counties, which provided critical votes in Bill Clinton's wins in Ohio in the 1990s and Jimmy Carter's narrow win there in 1976.

But Clinton is still about 100 delegates behind, and the Democrats' proportional representation rules make it impossible for her to close the gap in the remaining primaries. Her only plausible path to the nomination is to win a majority of super-delegates (party and public officials) and, perhaps, to reverse the party's decision disqualifying the Michigan and Florida delegations — i.e., overruling the voters in one case and changing the rules after the game has been played in the other. 

McCain has to provide a positive message against the bitterness on the Democratic side which is bound to get much, much worse as the unsolvable mess of the Democrat's primary process continues.