The Race Goes On

By Joe Klein

On the Friday before her resurrection, Hillary Clinton seemed exhausted, played out. She attended a funeral in Dallas for a policeman who had been killed in a traffic accident while accompanying her motorcade. Her campaign plane seemed funereal as well, reporters and staff sick -- the dry, incestuous campaign coughs reverberating through the fuselage -- and spent after the most intense eight-week run in the history of American politics. She wandered into Waco, Texas, that afternoon, uninspiring before an unimpressive crowd. In San Antonio that night, her stump speech collapsed into unstructured chaos. She yelled hoary Democratic cliches at the crowd -- "Health care should be a right, not a privilege!" -- and it was easy to assume that she had thrown in the towel, that this was coming to an end.

And then something happened. From a distance it seemed that her charming, self-deprecating appearance on Saturday Night Live -- and SNL's reprise of a debate skit in which MSNBC moderators gang up on her -- might have changed the zeitgeist. "Do I really laugh like that?" she asked her doppelgaenger Amy Poehler, whose Clinton laugh resembles Clinton's laugh only in its awkwardness. Poehler nodded, laughing, and Clinton's "Yeah, well ..." response seemed more spontaneous than anything she had done on the stump in a month of electoral massacres. If nothing else, SNL had tapped into the slow boil that many of Clinton's female supporters had experienced during Obama's February -- that feeling of taking a backseat to the egos of others who might not work as hard or know as much as they did. A feminine fury was abroad in the land; on March 4, women represented a staggering 59% and 57% of the Democratic electorates in Ohio and Texas, respectively.

But there were more prosaic, political things working to Clinton's advantage as well. Tiny fissures were beginning to appear in Obama's shining armor. I thought he won the Texas and Ohio debates with his elegant counterpunching and cool demeanor, but I was wrong: Clinton's policy details -- her specificity and passion on health insurance during the 16-min. volley with Obama that was later, foolishly, derided by the media -- apparently conveyed a degree of caring and preparation that seemed more reliable than her opponent's shiny intellect and rhetoric. On the ground in Texas and Ohio, she began to seem more real than he did.

Outside the debates, there were the first sprigs of evidence that Obama was a politician like any other. His association with the shady Chicago developer Antoin Rezko was almost benign compared with Bill and Hillary Clinton's buckraking, past and present -- especially the ex-President's cornucopia of sleazy companions in recent years -- but Rezko's suspicious visage was plastered all over the evening news on a nightly basis. It was not good that Obama had consulted with the guy to buy a roomier plot for the Senator's Chicago home, even if Obama had paid market price for it and pronounced the move "boneheaded" in retrospect. There was also Obama's strange NAFTA flap with the Canadians, in which one of his top economic advisers assured America's northern neighbor -- accurately, no doubt -- that Obama's anti-NAFTA ranting was just "political maneuvering" and shouldn't be taken seriously. The problem there wasn't merely that the North American Free Trade Agreement is (wrongly) considered synonymous with economic ruin in Ohio and not an issue on which a politician wants to be caught fudging but also that the Obama campaign had spent days denying a story that was obviously true.

There was another issue bubbling, which I hesitate to raise because it is largely scurrilous. It has to do with Obama's patriotism. There is a segment of the American populace that just can't get past his name. There are Internet sleaze purveyors -- a few, sadly, with roots in the Jewish community -- who have exploited this fact to spread slanderous nonsense about Obama. Hillary Clinton disgraced herself by playing into these innuendos by telling 60 Minutes that Obama isn't Islamic "as far as I know." Over the past few weeks, though, both Barack and Michelle Obama have given ammunition to the smear artists. Michelle's moment was her extremely unfortunate statement that the success of her husband's campaign had made her "proud of my country" for the first time in her adult life. The Senator's moment came in the Ohio debate when he played political word games before rejecting the support of the bigot Louis Farrakhan. The hesitation was noticeable -- and unacceptable. There are other guilt-by-association problems floating out there: the occasional over-the-top racial statements by Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright; the fact that Obama has been described as "friendly" with 1960s dilettante-terrorist William Ayers. It seemed clear on primary night that Obama was aware of this potential problem, as patriotism replaced hope as a theme of his concession speech. He echoed John McCain in citing Abraham Lincoln, and called America "the last best hope on Earth." That was the only "hope" he mentioned -- a fascinating calibration.

I'm not so sure that the other oft-cited cause of Obama's stumble -- Clinton's ad featuring the phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., which the Obama campaign called fearmongering -- was all that effective. Until last week, Clinton had not spent any time at all exploiting her knowledge of military affairs and establishing herself as a strong Commander in Chief. In any case, Obama's lightning response -- you want someone who was right about Iraq answering that phone -- seemed devastatingly good. Even better was McCain's: if you want someone really experienced on national-security issues to answer the phone, that would be me.

Clinton's late arrival to the national-security argument seemed yet another example of an overcalculated, underthought campaign strategy. She had made the conscious decision not to talk about national security until the general election because, as one of the generals supporting her told me, "Military stuff just doesn't make it with Democratic voters." In other words, it seems ... militaristic. It doesn't poll as well as health care. But national-security expertise speaks directly to the question of strength and authority, which is central to the presidency. And this has been the fundamental mistake at the heart of the Clinton campaign: a stifling literalism, which leads to caution and an overweening sense of calculation; the absence of art and creativity.

It seemed, for a few days before the New Hampshire primary back in January, that Clinton had belatedly discovered the importance of openness and humanity. There was the press conference she ended by giving MSNBC's Chris Matthews, one of her longtime media tormentors, a pat on the cheek. There were the near-tears. I expected she would continue in that successful vein, but her campaign was immediately hijacked by her husband, who disastrously held center stage for weeks. She clenched up again after that: Bill was all anyone wanted to talk about and she couldn't. Her February nosedive ensued.

Finally, with nothing left to lose, the actual Hillary Clinton came back, in a dizzying array of moods and aspects that seemed to confuse the press. She was gracious toward Obama at the end of the Texas debate. She was furious -- "Shame on you, Barack Obama!" -- in Ohio. She was sarcastic, mocking Obama's high-flown rhetoric, in Rhode Island. And she was a tough-minded, gritty, independent woman throughout, a woman on her own, as so many working women find themselves these days, cleaning up the messes that their feckless men have made. I cannot emphasize enough how important it was that Bill Clinton was out of the frame. She appeared alone onstage in victory in Ohio -- and alone is the only way she can win the nomination, on the slim chance that it is still possible.

Is it possible? The delegate count and the unfathomable rules of the Democratic Party say it probably isn't ... unless she resorts to tactics that will make her candidacy seem sleazy and conniving, a course of action that will surely be self-defeating in the end. One would hope that her saying Obama is not a Muslim "as far as I know" on 60 Minutes was more the product of exhaustion than intent, but she could continue on the slimy path of innuendo, raising questions about Obama's patriotism and provenance. More likely, she could choose to play technical games: attempting to seat the disputed Michigan and Florida delegations even though she agreed that they should not be seated. She could try to stampede the superdelegates, but that will happen only if she continues to win as convincingly as she did in Ohio and Texas -- and that will happen only if she continues to play the role of hardworking, hard-fighting, essentially admirable candidate.

As for Barack Obama, it will not be sufficient to simply play out the math, continuing to take his share of delegates as he loses high-profile contests. He may win the nomination that way, but he will lose his rationale: that he represents a dramatic, tidal wave of a movement for change. In fairness, Obama did raise his game in recent weeks. His pitch was more down-to-earth, substantive and specific in Texas and Ohio. But his TV cool requires a certain distance, and distance easily slides into remoteness. Sitting on a tractor in Texas on March 4, he didn't look as out of place as Michael Dukakis in a tank -- but he did seem like a tourist getting his picture taken with a longhorn cow, a visitor to the hinterland. He badly needs to get down, get gritty, sweat a little, show that he is willing to scuff his shoes in pursuit of the nomination. In most cases, you don't achieve the presidency without surviving a near-death moment -- and, if nothing else, Clinton's victories have given Obama the opportunity to show us how he handles adversity. This is now his red-phone moment.

But the victories gave Clinton so much more. Even if she fails to win the nomination, as seems likely, she has finally defined herself as a public figure, and an attractive one at that, with a personality independent of her husband's. She isn't as clever as he is, but she's just as tenacious ... and, in an odd way, more vulnerable and more real. Her flashes of anger and sarcasm, her occasional emotional overflows, her willingness to just go on about health insurance -- these are all recognizable human qualities that, in the strangest turnabout of this campaign, have made her seem more accessible than her opponent. For the first time, she doesn't seem elite and entitled. For the first time, she's almost one of us.