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The Calendar Becomes a Factor

This past week, esteemed Washington Post columnist David S. Broder predicted that post-Super Tuesday's comparatively drawn-out primary schedule would benefit Barack Obama. Meanwhile, a usually perceptive Boston Globe op-ed contributor, David Sparks, wrote that the "fat lady won't sing" for Mitt Romney for a while, joining others, such as radio host Hugh Hewitt, who predicted there was still time for a Romney comeback.

In reality, though, Obama now faces a road that may well get rougher. And the fat lady is singing so loudly for Romney that she's getting hoarse.

It's true that the pace of the post-Super Tuesday calendar now favors Obama. He won't have to campaign in 20 primary states at once again, and we've learned that the longer voters have to get to know him, the more they like him.

It's also true that, at least for the next week, the schedule looks good for Obama's campaign. He faces the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska, Washington, and Maine this weekend, and then primaries in DC, Virginia, and Maryland on Tuesday. The four states holding primaries the week following Super Tuesday have sizable black populations. The other three are caucus states, where Obama tends to do better than he does in primaries because his voters are more committed and thus likelier to participate than Clinton's. Obama could well sweep these contests, giving him momentum and a push for delegate parity with the front-runner.

The problem for him is that, after next Tuesday, the calendar switches back to favoring Clinton. Over the next month, the Democratic candidates confront a primary in Wisconsin and caucuses in Hawaii (both February 19), before winding up this phase of the campaign with March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

Most of these states (at least the large ones) have demographics that tend to favor Clinton -- a lower percentage of black voters, more working class voters, and, in the case of Texas, more Hispanic voters. More important, Clinton still retains a narrow lead in delegates. In a proportional representation scheme such as the Democrats use, it's difficult to erode any kind of advantage in delegates, since nearly every contest splits the delegates close to 50-50. It now looks like the 800 or so superdelegates -- members of the party establishment -- may well get to decide the party's nominee. That favors Clinton -- unless Obama can win most of the remaining contests.

Conservative agenda

On the GOP side, it's true that there are significant factions of the party who dislike McCain -- particularly the anti-immigration crowd, the hardcore conservatives, and the party's loudmouths (e.g., Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and Ingraham).

But, as "the poet" once wrote, you can't beat somebody with nobody. The problem for conservatives isn't that their vote has been divided (though some of it has been split between Romney and Mike Huckabee). It's that Romney is too unpopular to be the standard bearer of anything.

Romney tried to win the nomination the old-fashioned way: by buying it. Yet even though he overwhelmingly outspent all his opponents, he's never showed much vote-getting ability. In complete contrast with Obama, the more voters saw of Romney in Iowa and New Hampshire, the less they liked him. He achieved the singular feat of having failed to receive the endorsement of a single newspaper editorial board in New Hampshire. He pretty much bombed out on Super Tuesday, failing to win as many primaries as Huckabee. In fact, his most noteworthy contribution to politics this year is the way he has united every candidate in the Republican race around their personal dislike of him. Now it comes out that, despite Romney's being the candidate who has been the most supportive of the incumbent, even President Bush is angry with him for his flip-flip on immigration.

Romney also faces an awful calendar in the next few weeks, since McCain should run strongly both in the DC-area primaries next week and in the larger states in early March. So while Romney and his allies may not realize it yet, he's never going to win the nomination -- and he's not gaining any friends, either, by continuing to contest the race. Better to join the bandwagon and position himself for a potential place on the McCain ticket. (Yes, that's likelier than it seems today.)

Can McCain unite his party? More important, can he position himself so that no third or fourth party emerges in the middle, on the far right, or in anti-immigration circles, to cripple his run? Well, he's got six months before his convention and a vice-presidential choice to make. If he can't put things in order by then, he doesn't deserve to be president.

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Related Topics: election 2008 |

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