She's Not Dead Yet

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 5, 2008 9:15 AM

The show goes on.

In retrospect, Hillary Clinton changed the tenor of this campaign in the last four days.

The pundits scoffed at her red-phone ad, but it shifted the focus to Barack Obama's commander-in-chief credentials.

She pounced on the NAFTA flap, which had Obama on the defensive because his campaign couldn't get its story straight.

She went on "Saturday Night Live" and the "Daily Show" (okay, I'm taking the kitchen-sink approach here).

And the news media, perhaps embarrassed by "SNL," turned a tad more critical of the phenomenon from Illinois.

So just as the media chatter about when oh when was she going to get out of the race was reaching a crescendo, she did what many journalists privately doubted she could do: Clinton won both Ohio and Texas.

Let's look at how the television coverage unfolded:

Obama, the Ben & Jerry-endorsed candidate, was projected to win Vermont at 7 p.m., but things slowed down after that.

Ohio may have been too close to call early on, but that didn't stop the MSNBC boys from slapping Hillary around. Chris Matthews asked whether Clinton is "on a route now to destroy the credibility of Barack Obama." Howard Fineman said that if Hillary continued in the race out of "stubbornness," she would be subjecting the party to "the death of a thousand cuts." Fineman described Hillary's answer on "60 Minutes" -- that Obama was not a Muslim as far as she knew -- as "brilliantly Machiavellian" and "positively Nixonian."

On Fox, meanwhile, there was talk about Rush Limbaugh urging Republicans to vote for Hillary, and she had been shortchanged by the media. "There's a backlash against the gentle press treatment of Barack Obama," Bill O'Reilly declared.

Even without winners, Tim Russert announced that the big states were so close that "there's no doubt about it -- this race is going to continue."

Karl Rove told Fox viewers that a prolonged Democratic battle could knock John McCain off the front pages and hurt his effort.

On CNN, Paul Begala was excited by news that McCain would visit the White House today for a Bush embrace. "Democrats -- we're jumping up and down at that prospect," he said.

"Nobody will confuse John McCain with George Bush," Bill Bennett countered.

The only suspense on the Republican side, of course, was whether John McCain would hit the magic number of 1,191, thereby forcing Mike Huckabee to stop making appearances on the "The Colbert Report." All the cable networks declared at 9 o'clock that McCain had gone over the top. "No great surprise, but it gives us something to talk about," Brit Hume conceded.

Matthews talked up McCain's November chances, saying: "It is ironic that the man who represents the least change is in the solidest position right now."

Kelly O'Donnell provided a reminder of the journalistic malpractice of last year by saying that months ago McCain "was much figured to be out of the race." Pretty much figured by media people, that is.

With Ohio and Texas too close to call, the underlying assumption at MSNBC was that Hillary is unnecessarily prolonging the race. "When does it become clear that the Clintons are interested in the Clintons and not the Democratic Party?" Matthews asked.

Fox seemed to regard Obama as the inevitable nominee. He gives high-flying speeches, Fred Barnes said, and "McCain has to bring him down to earth."

It was 9:20 when Huckabee took the stage, congratulated McCain and vowed to work for his election. But MSNBC interrupted him to project Hillary the winner in Rhode Island, breaking her 12-contest losing streak.

MSNBC was a little slow on the uptake, putting up a banner that said "Sources: Huckabee To Drop Out of Race." Unfortunately, the former governor had already told the world he was getting out.

Interesting that McCain called for bringing the war to "the swiftest possible conclusion" without endangering our interests there. I guess he's off the 100-year thing. That is a not-so-subtle repositioning of the kind that doesn't happen by accident.

Soon it was back to speculation about the Dems. Joe Scarborough said the pundits were trying to "bury" Hillary but that she could still win the night. Everything had to be framed in the hypothetical. At one point Obama and Hillary each had 711,000 votes in Texas. "Has Obama peaked?" Bill Kristol asked.

At 10:55, at virtually the same moment, CNN, Fox and MSNBC called Ohio for Hillary. She had won a big state. A "psychological" boost, Russert said. One down, one to go for Clinton.

Hillary dedicated her win to everyone who ever "refused to be knocked out." It was Comeback Kid stuff, and for the first time in many primary nights, her smile looked real, not faked. She invoked the red phone again and talked about debating McCain, ignoring the fact that she still trails in this race. She played the woman card, too, citing a mother who wants her young daughters to know anything is possible.

For once, Obama couldn't blow her off the screen, because this time she had won. He had all the momentum in the world going in, but yesterday, at least, couldn't close the deal.

Little wonder, then, that Obama said he has nearly the same delegate lead that he had in the morning. You go with the math most favorable to your side.

It wasn't until nearly 1 a.m. that networks projected Hillary would carry Texas as well. Much of the country may have gone to bed, but they would awaken to a changed race, or at least an altered media narrative.

Now hear this: The Pennsylvania primary is only seven weeks away! And I've always wanted to cover a primary in Puerto Rico.

The NYT focuses on geography: "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that -- in spite of his delegate lead -- Senator Barack Obama was still losing to her in the big states.

"Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.

"Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses."

For the LAT, the big story is the newly aggressive Clinton:

"In winning New Hampshire a few weeks ago, Hillary Rodham Clinton declared, 'I found my own voice.' But it was a much different voice in the closing days before Tuesday's voting that carried her to victory in Ohio and Texas -- and which now lets her make a strong case for extending the Democratic presidential race into the spring and possibly beyond.

"Gone was the misty-eyed Clinton who scored points showing her human side. Gone was the gracious Clinton who, just two weeks ago, drew thunderous applause for expressing her pride in running against Barack Obama.

"The new voice was angrier, sharper and far more negative toward Obama -- a voice that at one point bellowed at her rival, 'Shame on you,' as she pushed back against what she said was an unfair attack."

Don't underestimate the role of the media, says the Boston Globe:

"Barack Obama woke up yesterday morning with hopes of vanquishing his last remaining rival and claiming the Democratic presidential nomination. He ended the day with two stubborn opponents: Hillary Clinton -- vowing to continue her campaign after victories in Texas, Rhode Island, and Ohio -- and a long-delayed but growing media backlash against his candidacy.

"The second one may be more threatening than the first."

But it's ultimately about the math, says the Washington Times: "Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's relentless attacks on Sen. Barack Obama exposed his weaknesses and helped her regain support among her core voters in last night's contests, but did not deliver the decisive margins that several Democratic superdelegates said they were looking for to keep her candidacy alive."

What exactly did Hillary win? "Hillary Clinton is trying to make the story matter more than the numbers, and what she won Tuesday were some good talking points for her narrative," says John Dickerson. "She's got to make the case to the roughly 500 undecided superdelegates that they should overlook Obama's advantage among pledged delegates. Her argument has two parts: Obama doesn't represent the Democratic Party, and he is a flawed general election candidate.

"How is Obama a flawed Democrat? He can't win big states, her aides will argue. Clinton has now won Ohio, Texas, New York, California, and New Jersey. Obama has only limited appeal, they will argue, whereas Clinton wins the kinds of Democrats necessary to win in big, electorally rich states. But it's not that simple. Obama won electorally crucial swing states such as Missouri, Colorado, and Wisconsin, and he's won all across the country, so his appeal isn't that limited. He also lost Texas by only a whisper."

Before the vote, Politico's Jim VandeHei and John Harris offered possible reasons for a Clinton comeback, and here's one:

"Reporters roll their eyes when Clinton or surrogates start suggesting she is the victim of sexist assumptions in political and media cultures. But the press this year may be underestimating how much those complaints ring true to many women. It could be that we are on the brink of another New Hampshire, where anecdotal evidence suggested that many women were self-consciously voting against a pundit-class story line that said the race was over and the smooth-talking man had won out over the hard-working woman."

The should-she-drop-out debate was in full swing well before yesterday's results, with Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias charging that HRC is playing for the next time around:

"I see no real way for Clinton to make up the lost delegate lead, but at this point it does seem to me that she and her campaign staff are probably egomaniacal enough that if they pull out a narrow 'win' they'll keep running anyway hoping for lightning to strike and seeing the damage it'll do to the party as a feature, rather than a bug, since a crippled Obama who loses to John McCain could set them up for another run in 2012."

That drew a sharp reaction from Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum: "Holy cats. This is entering Andrew Sullivan territory. It's also almost certainly wrong on an analytical basis since Democrats are famously hard on candidates who don't win their first time around. Name the last time that a Democratic primary loser came back to win a subsequent Democratic primary without being vice president in between. You have to go back 80 years. Hillary Clinton knows perfectly well that this is her only shot at the presidency. That's why she's fighting so hard."

I'm with Drum. It's not just that all post-Adlai Dems who ran a second time didn't win: Humphrey, McGovern, Hart, Gore, Gephardt, Biden, Edwards and on and on.

Did Obama being on the defensive over NAFTA and Antoin "Tony" Rezko have an impact? Is he likely to face more of the kind of tough questioning he got on Monday, which was led by Chicago reporters?

"Hmm," says Ed Morrissey, who has moved his blog to Hot Air. "It appears that the local press has managed to do what the national media could not -- treat Obama as a politician and not a secular messiah. They asked tough questions about Obama's political connections to a fixer and his campaign's outright false answers on an Obama adviser's contacts with Canadian diplomats regarding Obama's rhetoric on NAFTA . . .

"Compare this to the press conference John McCain held after the New York Times smeared him by accusing him of having a sexual affair with a lobbyist. Not only did McCain -- whose temper has its own zip code, according to some Capitol Hill staffers -- give a lengthy and reserved statement, but then stood at the podium until the reporters ran out of questions. In fact, at the end, McCain had to ask twice whether anyone had anything else to ask him before leaving the podium.

"By my count, McCain answered 36 questions in this press conference. How many did Obama take before walking off in a huff?"

A similar reaction from across the spectrum, by Jeralyn Merritt of Talk Left:

"What a disgrace that it took the media so long. If Hillary should end up out of the race by next week, which I doubt, they'll be jumping on Obama and propping up McCain. I'll be having none of it."

Or, as Hotline described Obama's challenge, invoking the dogged Chicago Sun-Times reporter who was at the news conference: "If He Can't Face Lynn Sweet, How Can He Face Al-Qaeda?"

From a damage-control perspective, it's pretty clear that the Obama camp mishandled the NAFTA flap and made their guy look like . . . just another politician. National Review's Byron York examines the chronology:

"With the evidence we have so far, Obama appears to be in a difficult position. At first, his campaign denied that there was any contact with the Canadian government. Then, when it was forced to concede that there had been contact, it insisted that it had nothing to do with softening Obama's position on NAFTA. And then, when the newly-released memo suggested that it had been about just that, Team Obama simply stuck with its story . . .

"So it's not likely that the story will go away, given the Obama campaign's inaccurate and misleading statements about it and the Clinton campaign's interest in keeping the controversy alive. The only question is whether it will do Obama any significant damage and Clinton any significant benefit."

OpinionJournal's John Fund sees Obama as largely immune to scrutiny until now:

"John McCain's dealings with lobbyists have properly come under a microscope; why not Mr. Obama's? Partly, says Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass, because the national media establishment has decided that Chicago's grubby politics interferes with the story line of hope they've set out for Mr. Obama. Former Washington Post reporter Tom Edsall, who now teaches journalism at Columbia University, told Canada's Globe & Mail that 'reporters have sometimes allowed themselves to get too much caught up in [Obama] excitement.' Then there are Chicago Republicans, loath to encourage the national party to pounce because some of their own leaders are caught in the Rezko mess."

After McCain held a media barbecue at his cabin near Sedona, Columbia Journalism Review seems to have developed indigestion, especially since it was on the record but political questions were discouraged:

"Such ground rules must go down easier with a tour of the grounds and a plateful of McCain-made ribs. (While, apparently, 'objectivity prohibits a good reporter' like Reuters' Jeff Mason from telling readers how tasty McCain's ribs were, CBS's Dante Higgins 'is confident in reporting they were succulent and flavorful').

"In return for dropping 'political talk,' reporters got their candidate-cooked meal. And a tire swing. And Frank Sinatra tunes on the deck.

"And McCain, in return, got press coverage depicting a relaxed, confident, regular-like-you-and-me-but-also-very-much-in-charge guy holding court at what could well be, as so many reporters noted, the future Western White House. (Could rib-grilling be the new brush-clearing? Just as manly -- and sticks to reporters' ribs!)"

There might be a morsel of a complaint here if journalists didn't get much chance to ask McCain serious questions. But he's the most accessible presidential candidate in modern history. Hillary had one dinner with her press corps, but it was off the record. And my sources say she didn't cook.

It's true: Media coverage of the campaign has gone into the toilet.

Finally, Judith Regan may have settled her suit against Rupert Murdoch's company, but now her own lawyers are suing her.