CE Week #2: “Obama Is Racing Against the Clock”
Short Calendar Favors Clinton
By Alec MacGillis and Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 2, 2008; A01
ALBUQUERQUE, Feb. 1 — Sen. Barack Obama has two opponents: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the clock, which is rapidly running down.
With three days to go before Super Tuesday, when roughly half the delegates in the Democratic presidential contest will be awarded, Obama is racing around the country, still trying to introduce himself to voters, speed-dating style.
On Tuesday, he touched down in his grandfather’s home town, El Dorado, Kan., where many residents did not realize until recently — if at all — that Obama has Kansas roots. From there, it was on to big rallies in Kansas City, Mo.; Denver; and Phoenix, followed by Los Angeles, where he tried during an hour in East L.A. to make an impression on Hispanic voters who know little about him. On Friday: Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Boise.
Polling and election results so far suggest that the more time Obama has to present himself to voters, the better he fares. In each of the first four states where voting was sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee, Clinton maintained essentially level support in polls in the months leading up to the contests, while Obama saw a steady upward trajectory the more he campaigned. In Florida, by contrast, where the candidates did not campaign after the DNC punished the state for moving its primary to January, Clinton soundly defeated Obama, offering a rough gauge on how much the senator from Illinois relies on voter contact.
The compressed primary calendar presents a challenge for all of the remaining candidates, as they try to visit as many as possible of the more than 20 states holding elections or caucuses on Tuesday. But the time crunch is particularly acute for Obama, who, for all the hype around his candidacy, remains far less well known than Clinton. Obama vaulted into contention against her by spending week upon week in Iowa before the state’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. He engaged in an intensive grass-roots effort and visited the smallest towns and the most remote county fairgrounds to introduce himself to voters, who rewarded him with a big win over his rivals.
Now, with far less time and broader territory to cover, he must make do with a radically truncated version of that outreach, relying on a single final visit to big cities to win over voters to whom he remains little more than a first-term senator with an exotic name and a reputation for oratory.
His efforts appear to be paying off, as his standing in polls inches closer and closer to Clinton’s. The question is whether he has enough time to make up the gap.
“The schedule is compressed, so no doubt Senator Clinton has an advantage going into February 5 states,” Obama said during one leg of his travel this week. “She’s better known, and I’m still being introduced to a lot of casual voters in the other states.”
The lack of time concerns Obama’s rank-and-file supporters in the Feb. 5 states, who see him packing arenas this week — 15,000-plus in Denver, 13,000 in Phoenix — yet know that most of those turning out are the converted and that countless more undecided voters will not see Obama make his case in person.
“It worries me. Everyone in Arizona ought to see what we saw today,” said Tim Nelson, a lawyer for the state government, after bringing his 9-year-old daughter to see the candidate in Phoenix.
If a few extra weeks would help Obama, the opposite is true for Clinton, whose advisers would be happy with just a few extra days, they said in interviews Friday.
Clinton at one point declared that she would have the race wrapped up by Feb. 5. Now, her strategists concede, as Obama appears to be closing the gap with her, she needs the days until then to keep pushing her message — outreach that includes visiting critical states and luring former supporters of John Edwards, who ended his candidacy this week. “There are a lot of places to touch,” one strategist said.
After a heavy emphasis on the West Coast this week, Clinton will seek to maintain her national lead between now and Tuesday with a whirlwind travel schedule that extends from Missouri to Massachusetts and is capped off with a 90-minute “national town hall meeting” conducted via satellite Monday night. Her campaign also believes that, with her performance in Thursday’s debate, the senator from New York moved past questions about her husband’s role in the campaign and their approach to African American voters, and is now running on comfortable ground — the issues of health care and the economy.
Still, Clinton strategists are not planning on seeing the nomination contest end on Feb. 5. They are looking ahead to March 4, when both Ohio (161 delegates) and Texas (228 delegates) vote, as the date that could be decisive.
Obama is hardly lacking for public exposure, and he is not relying only on his personal appeals to get voters to the polls. He has well-developed organizations making phone calls and home visits in nearly all of the Feb. 5 states, a growing list of prominent surrogates to campaign on his behalf, and enough money to blanket the country with television ads.
But along the trail there are signs of the ground that Obama has to make up with many voters who have had little experience in casting a meaningful vote in the primaries and have only recently trained their minds on their choices.
In Phoenix, Cynthia and Stuart Preston said that as they were driving to Obama’s rally with their children, they quizzed each other to come up with three of the candidate’s major platform planks. To their surprise, they couldn’t think of them. Despite that, Cynthia Preston said she is supporting Obama. She was drawn, she said, by the “popular movement” behind him.
“I don’t know if he has enough time to detail [his plans in all Feb. 5 states], but if you care enough, you can do the research on your own,” she said.
Aware that many voters still have basic holes in their knowledge of his background, Obama is doing his best to fill them, making sure at nearly every stop to mention details such as his years as a community organizer, the death of his mother at age 53 and the fact that he is a church-going Christian, no matter what the false rumors circulated by e-mail might say. He takes time to describe the family history that led him to where he is today.
“My own family’s journey moved west — from Kansas, where my grandparents met and married, and my mother was born; to the Pacific Coast after World War II; and then across an ocean to Hawaii,” he told his audience in Denver.
At that event, supporter Becky Bowman, of Lakewood, said before Obama’s speech that she figured voters in Colorado could get enough information about Obama on their own. But after witnessing him bring a diverse crowd of thousands to its feet with his characteristically rousing pitch, she wondered about the shortcomings of the rushed itinerary.
Voters “need to know the magic. You can’t do that through little soundbites,” she said. “It’s a problem.”
MacGillis is traveling with the Obama campaign. Kornblut is traveling with the Clinton campaign.
At first I was wondering and surprised how quite a few people do not know Barack Obama well? He is one of the major candidates running for President and even Oprah is supporting him, but after reading the article, I realized that people watch their televisions and see Obama through sound bites, not in person, which causes less public exposure for the candidate. As we know, a sound bite is a approximately seven second video clip typically showing a politician’s speech. You cannot present a message to the public with seven seconds. As the article said, “Voters “need to know the magic. You can’t do that through little sound bites.” People who came to watch Obama had understanding of his position than the people who glance at him through sound bites. Candidates trying to present their message to the public will not have an impact on them. It’s a problem.
Another thing, the article mentioned that Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls for Super Tuesday and Obama is catching up by traveling nonstop to the Super Tuesday states; well we all know that we cannot rely on polls. The New Hampshire primaries confirmed the unreliability of polls by declaring Hillary Clinton the winner when the polls announced that she was losing in double digits. Super Tuesday is not any different. There is the possibility that Obama could win by a long shot causing Hillary to drop out of the race. Anything could happen.
It’s suprising to me how little people know about the candidates themselves. Most people for instance, only see Obama as ‘the black guy,’ and Hillary as ‘the crazy lady.’ Or like the article says, that the citizens of Kansas were barely even aware that Obama had roots there!
And since we already know the results of Super Tuesday (as of yesterday), basically, we know… that nothing is clear in the world of politics (what we already knew). This is a race where the scales are about even…for now.
Now in hind-sight, this article brings to light some interesting points. It seems that Barack’s Tour did have an impact on Super Tuesday. He did after all win more total states than Hillary did. But an interesting point brought up in this article is what if Barack had more time? I am sure with more time to continue his grass roots movement and explain his story; he could easily be in the lead.
Another interesting point that this article brought up was the fact that this race is not over. Ohio, with 161 delegates, and Texas, with 228 delegates, are still on the way.
With the way this Democratic nomination race is playing out, it could come down to a very small margin.
I believe Mr. Kautzman was talking today about how the Samoans are being called in to vote? Mr. Kautz, do you remember any other recent candidates calling upon this group of people? [No - I believe this is unique to this election cycle and is a result of the closeness of the contest.]
It seems to me that Barack could learn a thing or two from Hillary and do a Fireside Chat of sorts. As we all know, the mass media plays a very key role in politics today. This Fireside Chat would allow Barack to give his sales pitch to all of the Americans who would not normally hear it.
Connor Christeson
Bowman’s quote at the end of this article really nailed the situation that Obama is stuck in. Obama has enough money to create commercials in any state and city that he wants but, those small twenty to twenty-five second soundbites won’t get Obama’s campaign and theme into the crowds of people who have yet to know who he is. If Obama hopes to close the gap between Hillary he needs to campaign everywhere possible in order to gain public appeal. As Super Tuesday shows Obama might not have gotten all the delegates he needed to win, but the gap between the forerunners for the democrats has significantly decreased, even to the point where a small state could potentially break a tie in the end. It seems like until the gap between the two candidates widens more, all the states are potentially in play.
What did seem odd to me though was the fact that people don’t know much about Obama. Obviously we know Hillary as Bill’s wife, and beyond that people don’t want to know much more. They want to see Hillary as a crazier, female version of Bill. Most people don’t want to see Obama past the color of his skin, and if the person that is making the judgment is African-American then it seems they simply question the color of his soul. Time and again I hear people say that Obama is simply a “white-washed” black with a name that sets off little warning bells in the back of your head that yell “Terrorist Terrorist Terrorist!!” However Obama has one advantage over Hillary in this situation.
People see and label Hillary as a psycho-demon-constantly PMSing woman. You either hate her or you love her. No one wants to know about her past because it’s already set in stone and no one desires to look into it any more. Obama however takes advantage of this. He uses his “mystery” past to fill people in and show them where he was and how he got to where he is now. He gets to sugar-coat his past and tell his past in ways that can be spin into a positive light.
It’ll be interesting to see who’s tactics and personality do the best in the end.
I have to agree with Melissa. Sound bites (the approx. seven second coverage of a candidates speech and campaign on the nightly news) are no way to get to know a candidate, their stances, or platforms. The article goes on about how people don’t really know him, which is true, and that Hillary has such good name recognition. There was a man today at my caucus who stood up to defend Hillary and was going on about how he was there the day the Clintons left office and how Bill had done such a good job with many aspects of his presidency. His point was pretty much that he was going to vote for Hillary just because her husband was a semi successful president! Luckily, we changed his mind. =] Anyways, there have to be a lot of people out there who think like this and it’s an uphill battle for Obama. There was a lady at the end of the article who talked about how before she heard Obama speak she thought votes could get to know Obama on their own (through the media and sound bites) but after she heard him speak she would blown away by how amazing of a person he was and how he was able to bring the entire group there…the different races, ages, gender, and back grounds…together. Hopefully Obama will be able to have this impression on enough people to win the nomination!
I disagree with Shauna, in this day and age sound-bites are the ONLY way to get to know candidates if you don’t attend some sort of special rally or speech or something. As we’ve learned during our units on the media and the media’s influence over politics and society in general the sound-bite has evolved over the past several decades and is now limited in length not by what the media might want it to be but by how long Americans can sit to listen to something. I can’t listen to a song on the radio for more than 45 seconds (drives my mother crazy), there are just too many other choices out there. If someone wants to learn about Barack Obama and his platforms on health care, foreign policy or even just where he came from they have to resort to their own devices. Sure it’s unfortunate that no one can sit to listen to a news reporter give an accurate and full description of something or someone but that’s what it’s come down to. I think that as we’ve seen recently it doesn’t/didn’t really matter how much exposure Obama had but rather now it matters that the media is covering him more and more because he’s gaining so much momentum over Hillary who is remaining rather stagnant.