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Is Obama About to Blow It?

By Earl Warren

Like the Dude dealing with Walter as they make the hand-off of his dirty undies, I'm deeply worried Obama is fucking this up. Yes, he has the momentum, the newspapers, the money, the endorsements, the press, and the pundits working in his favor. But there's one thing he doesn't have working in his favor: the numbers. And if he doesn't radically change his message in the next 48 hours to start screaming "delegate count!!" he could be in for trouble.

Here's why. Though Obama has been surging in all the polls, Hillary still has small but distinct leads in seven of the nine super-super-Tuesday states: California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Massachusetts, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, and Tennessee. Together, they account for more than 1,250 of the almost 1700 delegates up for grabs. (Real Clear Politics has great polling data on this -- though their delegate counts are off. This DNC blog and this Wikipedia page do the best job of analyzing the delegate mess.)

I've spent the last hour running some spreadsheet models for 2/5 (because, alas, I have no dates with Hillary supporters this weekend...and probably never will again after confessing this is what I do on Saturday nights, but I digress....), and, using the latest polling for the Super Tuesday states, it looks like Hillary will win between 12-16 states to Obama's 6-10, giving her about 875 delegates to his 800 -- and about 750,000 more votes cast nationally. (Delegates are awarded proportionally, so a candidate can lose a state but still draw significant numbers of delegates. I used the latest polling to award delegates for each state.)

So if you're Hillary, and you win twice as many states as Obama, 100 more delegates, and almost a million more votes -- but you face an insurgent candidate with all the momentum (who does exponentially better the more a state sees him, as the Washington Post discovered today and I noticed eight weeks ago) -- what do you do? I submit you do what Senator George Aiken told LBJ to do in Vietnam: declare victory and get out.

If these trends hold, Hillary would be crazy not to stand up and claim a national mandate on Tuesday. Tell us the country has spoken. Humbly accept the nomination. Hug Chelsea. Then put Terry McAuliffe and the other spinners on TV to announce that prolonging the nomination battle only benefits the Republicans -- if not Al Queda.

Don't think Hillary hasn't thought of this. She's got a superior press operation that thinks they can roll the press -- and a press that's been telling us for a month Super Tuesday will decide the whole megillah. 2/5 has an inexorable momentum. If she succeeds in this, the national numbers will push to 60-40 in the week following Tuesday, and the rest of the race will be mop-up duty.

What should Obama do? (Assuming he doesn't pull off the triple-bank shot and win Super Tuesday. I actually think he might -- and ignore those big Hillary poll leads in CA. This state is a total toss-up...but I digress again.) Climb the tallest media riser he can find and start screaming about delegates at the top of his lungs. He needs to frame this as a long-term war of attrition -- with all the voting to date equaling nothing more than a split decision.

And he needs to show people the numbers to make this work. Omitting super-delegates for a minute, if these polling trends hold (and if I've converted them to delegates properly), Hillary would have only about a 925-850 delegate lead -- with 2,025 needed for the nomination. That's nothing. On 2/5, no Obama aide should be allowed to speak to a reporter, go on TV, or appear in public without a little portable white-board listing these numbers. Better yet, convert them to percentages needed to win the nomination: Hillary has a "45% to 42% lead in delegates needed for the nomination." "It'll take another two months to sort this out." "Time to move on to the next states." Poof. A blow-out turns into a nail-biter.

The problem is that Obama needs to start framing the message as a long-term delegate fight right now. If he doesn't, the Clinton press operation will control the 2/5 frame, declare victory, and hope enough reporters bite.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any Obama messaging along these lines. Nada. As I look at the Sunday wires, I see a few national reporters starting to speculate that 2/5 might not resolve everything -- and for all I know, some Obama press aides pushed that line. But if so, they're not pushing hard enough. And it's important to remember that, in the final days before an election, no one is thinking clearly and no one is thinking more than 12 hours out. Right now, on the Obama campaign, the comm shop is exhausted, the campaign manager is putting out fires , and Axelrod is looking at a giant map of media buys. No one is worrying about the 2/5 message. But unless someone starts, there'll be nothing to worry about on 2/6.

Full post as published by Nuts & Boalts on February 03, 2008 (boomark / email).