The presidential primary process, over the years since Eugene McCarthy "won" New Hampshire by losing it in 1968, has evolved into such an elaborate analysis of expectations and sequence that, this year, it has finally imploded on itself. Every other Tuesday brings a new analysis of whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has done better or worse than expected, is closing the gap or widening it. New measures are invented weekly -- this week, a version of the popular vote that excludes four states, but includes the invalid primaries in Michigan and Florida seems to have taken hold in the media, although it has no actual relevance to the nomination.
At a certain point, the constants of the underlying political alignment reassert themselves over the micro-trends of the artificial narrative. Consider the things that do not change from primary to primary:
Once again, almost as many people voted in a Democratic primary as voted for John Kerry in the 2004 general election (670,000 in the Kentucky primary, and 712,000 for Kerry). Three times as many people voted in Kentucky yesterday as in the 2004 primary, and for all the focus on those who seem to resist voting for Obama, 70,000 more Kentucky Democrats voted for the loser of the primary than voted for the winner in 2004. Together with the enormous sums of money raised by both Democratic candidates -- $22 million for Clinton and $31 million for Obama -- this increase indicates that the process is overwhelmingly additive, adding contributors, adding volunteers, and, in colossal numbers, adding voters.
Another thing that did not change, and that became evident on Super Tuesday, is that Obama has difficulty winning some working-class white voters -- not all, Oregon is as white and working-class as the country gets -- but a particular subset, those in the Appalachian belt from West Virginia through Tennessee. Even Tim Russert and Chris Matthews stopped talked about the "white working-class problem" and started talking about Obama's "Appalachian problem." Of course, white Democrats like Al Gore and John Kerry had an Appalachian problem as well, and it seems likely that West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee will be the three states that have switched away from the Democrats at the presidential level more or less for good, although all will continue to send Democrats to Congress and the statehouse.
In the fall, the "Appalachian problem" matters most in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Obama will likely lose the southern and western counties of Pennsylvania, as would Clinton. But good turnout in Philadelphia, the rapid Democraticization of the suburbs, and growth in the Allentown area (all described in great detail in a new report on Pennsylvania by Ruy Teixeira and William Frey) will enable any Democrat to win the state.
The same is not true in Ohio, though. There, in 2004, massive turnout in the cities and a Democratic trend in the suburbs were not enough to offset the Republican trend in the Kentucky-bordering part of the state. But that was four years ago, before the national revulsion at the Republicans, before Democrats took control of the machinery of government in Ohio, including the secretary of state's office, and before Ted Strickland, born in rural Lucasville, became governor. It's a different political situation in Ohio. If that's true, then Obama's "Appalachian problem" might be of little consequence in the general election.
But Democrats need to be able to speak to those voters, if not in order to win, then because the aspirations of those families, who have benefited least from the recent economic booms, are what the Democratic Party is about. That brings us to the third thing that hasn't changed: Since Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses, his candidacy has been on a steady trajectory from "a lot of hype and a little too much hope" as he put it last night, back down to Earth, to a substantive, practical politics of difference. Without the hype and hope, he never would have been able to overtake Clinton so readily, but a campaign can't go all the way on air and enthusiasm.
Clinton's greatest success has been in pigeonholing Obama as the candidate of "just a speech." Obama had plenty of policy substance, but not enough to differentiate himself from Clinton. Thus what differences did exist -- as on the individual mandate in health reform or the gasoline tax holiday -- seemed petty and nitpicky, as did the candidate.
David Moberg argued recently in In These Times that, to reach working-class voters, Obama needed to give "a speech on class" comparable to his Philadelphia speech about race. That's terrible advice; giving such a speech would reinforce the image of Obama as a speechmaker and analyst of problems rather than an actor. I can't speak for the working-class whites of America, but I suspect they're less interested in a national conversation about class and more interested in having some small hope that they'll have greater economic security and opportunity next year, and that government can play a role in that. In that sense, Obama's speech last night -- because, and not in spite, of its brevity and ordinariness -- was pitch-perfect. It was a reminder that once out from under the suffocating policy blanket of Clinton, in an open-field general election fight, Obama's economic vision stands in stark contrast to McCain's.
But there's a lot more work to be done. It's not just a matter of denouncing the malefactors of great wealth, Obama must put the pieces together into something that's persuasive and real and positive. That Obama is not there yet is not a knock on Obama -- no one's quite there yet, no candidate, no think tank, no one. No one has quite figured out how to wrestle together the pieces of the next social contract and deal with the government's role in minimizing the disruptive force of trade and globalization while maximizing its benefits.
Yesterday I spent a lot of time thinking about Sen. Kennedy and in the evening went to hear Rick Perlstein talk about his new book, Nixonland, in which he argues we continue to live with the corrosive politics of Nixon. It is worth remembering that what does not change is the robust, aspirational liberal tradition of Kennedy into which Obama fits far better than we have perhaps understood. He is not quite the candidate of the fierce, combative, anti-Nixon left that some argue is the only plausible counter to the right, but rather, the renewal of the unifying liberal consensus of the early '60s, chastened and educated, as Kennedy himself has been, by Nixon, Reagan and Bush, by Vietnam and Iraq. At the event last night, Christopher Hayes of The Nation argued that the nomination of Sen. Obama would be evidence that "Nixonland is over." The politics of resentment and American identity have run their course.
As the poet Charles Olson wrote, "What does not change/Is the will to change." Every primary, every special election, every poll reminds us that this is a moment when the country is ready to throw out not just some elected officials but 30 years of assumptions. The story of these primaries will one day be told quite simply: Barack Obama got that, and Hillary Clinton didn't.
