Networks Dismiss Hillary Landslide

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:26 AM

When Hillary Clinton wipes the floor with Barack Obama, the pundits have to give her her due, right?

I mean, when she just crushes him by a 2-to-1 margin, the talk would immediately turn to why the Democratic front-runner, the man anointed by the media as the party's nominee, can barely manage a third of the vote in West Virginia. Wouldn't it?

Here is how the cable networks reacted when they called the race at 7:30 last night:

On MSNBC, Tim Russert called it an "overwhelming victory" for Hillary. And then said that the 10 delegates she would net were more than offset by the 27 superdelegates Obama has picked up in the past week or so. As for West Virginia, he said, "the Obama campaign believes it's already been discounted, the way they do on Wall Street."

On CNN, John King said that "Barack Obama is the nominee even if he only gets 30 percent of the delegates the rest of the way."

On Fox, Shepard Smith asked his panel: "Anybody have a path to victory for Hillary Clinton, in a word?" The three guests simultaneously said no.

How did Clinton's big night immediately turn into a wake?

Far be it from me to suggest that the commentators didn't want to contradict their own declarations last week that Obama's got the thing wrapped up. Nor am I saying that the math isn't extremely daunting for Clinton.

But her West Virginia romp must mean something. If not, why are the cable nets bothering to cover it? Why not just relegate the news to the crawl?

(Actually, Fox didn't. It quickly went back to "The O'Reilly Factor" and other regular programming. Bill O'Reilly's second topic: "Is there a feud between Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama?")

Meanwhile, David Gregory was saying that perhaps Hillary would run with Obama because the Clintons would want to be part of the huge event that his election would represent.

One spin is that Obama blew off the state, making just one appearance Monday. But the Hillary team says he still outspent her in West Virginia.

After Hillary's speech, Chris Matthews said she was trying to set up a contest between her and the pundits, when it was really her versus the inexorable math. (Of course, Terry McAuliffe began the day on MSNBC by calling Chris Matthews "Barack Obama's campaign chairman.")

The only really negative analyses of Obama came during the dissection of exit polls, which showed barely a third of Clinton voters saying they would support Obama in November. Sean Hannity called the exit polls "devastating" for Obama.

By my count, Hillary has won five of the last six states. But it is, of course, too late. The pundits all agree on that.

NYT: "Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won a lopsided victory over Senator Barack Obama in the Tuesday primary in West Virginia, where racial considerations emerged as an unusually salient factor.

"Mrs. Clinton drew strong support from white, working-class voters who have spurned Mr. Obama in recent contests. The number of white Democratic voters who said that race had influenced their choices on Tuesday was among the highest recorded in voter surveys in the nomination fight. Two in 10 white West Virginia voters said race was an important factor in their votes. More than 8 in 10 backed Mrs. Clinton."

Boston Globe: "Even with her presidential hopes fading, Senator Hillary Clinton won a landslide victory in the West Virginia Democratic primary yesterday, renewing doubts about Senator Barack Obama's prospects in states with large concentrations of white, working-class voters."

LAT: "Initial exit poll results from West Virginia's Democratic presidential primary drive home the work Barack Obama still has to do to disassociate himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"The Associated Press reports that 2 in 10 voters said they believe Obama shares Wright's views 'a lot,' while 3 in 10 said the candidate 'somewhat' embraces the preacher's opinions."

WSJ: "Hillary Clinton trounced Barack Obama in West Virginia's Democratic presidential primary, as expected. But her negligible payback in convention delegates illustrates why her rival and her party are turning away from her candidacy to begin the fight against Republican John McCain."

A Chicago Tribune blog has Hillary in denial:

"Welcome to the parallel universe.

"In this place, Hillary Clinton has as good a shot as ever to win the Democratic nomination, mathematics, delegate counts, and pundits be damned."

Slate's John Dickerson:

"Barack Obama lost West Virginia by 30 points, which looks like an enormous fall. Clinton was favored to win the state, but Obama is the all-but-named nominee. Shouldn't that have prevented such a rout?

"Whether Obama suffered any damage will be determined by the behavior of the superdelegates in the next few days. Will any of them embrace Clinton after her victory? Right now, Obama's cushion seems intact . . .

"So, the Democratic race may supply us with the kind of headline you'd expect to see in the Onion: 'Clinton Wins in Landslide, Drops Out of Race.' "

The Huffington Post, which treats each Barack victory as a celestial happening, is more interested in President Bush saying he gave up golf in 2003 out of respect for our soldiers, with Hillary's win relegated to a small headline that says it "Doesn't Really Matter."

In the cat-out-of-the-bag department, James Carville is quoted by South Carolina's State newspaper as saying: "I still hear some dogs barking. I'm for Senator Clinton, but I think the great likelihood is that Obama will be the nominee."

Is Obama trying to ensure a fair playing field or rule his critics out of bounds? National Review's Rich Lowry thinks it's the latter:

"After his blowout win in North Carolina last week, Obama turned to framing the rules of the general election ahead, warning in his victory speech of 'efforts to distract us.' The chief distracter happens to be the man standing between Obama and the White House, John McCain, who will 'use the very same playbook that his side has used time after time in election after election.'

"Ah, yes, the famous distractions with which Republicans fool unwitting Americans. Ronald Reagan distracted them with the Iranian hostage crisis, high inflation and unemployment, gas lines, and the loss of American prestige abroad. Then, the first George Bush distracted them with the notion of a third Reagan term, as well as the issues of taxes, crime, and volunteerism. After a brief interlude of national focus during two Clinton terms, another Bush arrived wielding the dark art of distraction.

"Forget 'bitter'; Obama must believe that most Americans suffer from an attention-deficit disorder so crippling that they can't concentrate on their own interests or values. Obama has an acute self-interest in so diagnosing the American electorate. His campaign knows he's vulnerable to the charge of being an elitist liberal. Unable to argue the facts, it wants to argue the law -- defining his weaknesses as off-limits."

ABC's Jake Tapper has been keeping track of the number of times the Illinois senator has blamed his staff for some politically embarrassing position, under the headline: "Obama's Inability to Hire Good Help Rears Its Head . . . Again":

"In an interesting New York Times look at Obama's rise in Chicago politics, we learned that in 2004 some Jewish supporters became alarmed to learn that in a questionnaire Obama refrained from denouncing Yasir Arafat, or from expressing strong support for Israel's security fence.

"Reports the Times: 'In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that "none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel's security. ' "

Tapper puts the total number of blame-the-staff incidents at 10.

Is John McCain weighed down by a giant albatross? Roger Simon examines the evidence:

"McCain's burden this year is as much about convincing voters that he is not a continuation of the Bush presidency as it is about beating his Democratic opponent . . .

"How serious is the problem for McCain? A USA Today/Gallup Poll released Monday states: 'George W. Bush may do as much damage to John McCain's chances of being elected as Jeremiah Wright does to Barack Obama's.' The poll found '38 percent of likely voters saying McCain's association with Bush makes them less likely to vote for McCain, while 33 percent say Obama's association with Wright diminishes their likelihood of voting for Obama.' . . .

"But what helped doom McCain in 2000 -- that he was too much of a maverick for some Republican primary voters -- may help him now. His maverick status puts some distance between him and Bush."

One way for McCain to topple Obama, says Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, is to outwork him:

"Those of us who have traveled with McCain and Obama know that McCain generally appears less fatigued at the end of a long day (although Obama has gotten much, much better since he began his campaign.) But McCain's advisers know that one way to divert attention from their candidate's age is to show voters how hard he works and how little the work seems to tire him. So the plan is, for now, to work McCain to the bone, scheduling grueling days full of town hall meetings and hope that Barack Obama, in following suit, is one who winds up appearing worn out.

"The explicit message: McCain has more energy than a guy half his age; he's got calluses on his hand. The implicit message: Obama's a bit of dabbler, a dilettante."

The vast left-wing conspiracy has had trouble coming to grips with the Reagan legacy. Consider this Louis Bayard review in Salon of a new book by Sean Wilentz:

"Between Ronald Reagan's last year of presidential office in 1989 and his death in 2004, a strange transformation took place within the Washington Post. I only noticed when, in a fit of masochism, I began to plow through the paper's coverage of Reagan's state funeral. As expected, there were the usual encomiums from Krauthammer and Will and Novak -- no different in kind than what they'd been churning out for a quarter-century -- but where was the other side? After decades of antagonism to Republican presidents in general and Reagan in particular, Post reporters, analysts, columnists and editorialists were sprinting -- practically elbowing each other out of the way -- to apotheosize a man they had never even liked, let alone endorsed . . .

"Nostalgia lies so thickly over the '80s that it's hard now to recall what Ronald W. Reagan represented to your average card-carrying liberal. Hating him then was as much an article of faith as hating George W. Bush is now. Everything his supporters loved --the Plexiglas optimism, the blithe disregard for detail, the chuckle, the very cock of his head -- we loathed. To this day, many of my friends refuse to call National Airport by its new title, and to this day, I refuse to pass the Ronald Reagan Building without a private snigger that Mr. Government-Off-Our-Backs has his name forever attached to a massive concrete bureaucratic complex

"But who's sniggering now? History, it seems, is on the side of the turncoat Washington Post, and there's a distinct possibility that if we paleo-libs continue in our ancient rancors, we'll start looking like those troglodytes who still plump for Alger Hiss' innocence. We may finally have to admit that Ronald Reagan didn't . . . completely . . . in every respect . . . suck."

A sad development: NYT Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and his wife, Gail Gregg, are separating after 33 years of marriage.

Did the LAT really run a piece analyzing the candidates' handwriting? (McCain is a pit bull, Hillary precise, Obama fluid and graceful.) Gag me.