Chris Matthews' jaw hung in slackened misery during the wee hours of last night as the numbers dripped in from Texas, and he struggled to combine syllables into words and words into sentences. I don't blame him. Matthews and his chorus was dumbfounded by one of the great comebacks in American political history - one that rivals John McCain's rise from his electoral grave of last summer.
Let's look at the scope of Hillary Clinton's victory. She'd lost 11 straight contests to Barack Obama, the most beloved candidate in either party since at least the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan and possibly since FDR's reelection in 1936. Obama's campaign outspent Clinton in Texas and Ohio by four to one, according to some estimates. His field operation was the stuff of organizing legend, and his big rallies made hers seem like church suppers. His online fundraising doubled hers. He led in all the national polls, and her leads in those big states had evaporated. Her imminent departure from the race was declared.
Hillary Clinton was laying on the canvas and the ref was pretty much at nine.
But she got up. She won by three points in Texas, 10 in Ohio, and by 18 in Rhode Island - all of these were surprisingly large margins. On March 1, Clinton was eight points behind Obama in the Gallup national daily tracking poll. In the March 4 poll she is four points ahead - and that's before her bounce from last night.
As great a candidate as Barack Obama is - and man, he is something - Hillary Clinton is his equal in many ways, mosts obviously in her ability to take a punch. She ran a great technical campaign in the last week - tough, but not vicious, and she made herself available to the voters through her SNL appearances. This was all accomplished while virtually the entire national press corps tried to push her toward the exits.
Yet last night, Obama had Clinton just where he wanted her - bruised and dismissed by the media. He had a month's worth of momentum, one of the great months in presidential electoral history. She was waiting to be put away.
And for the third time in this long, long fight - he swung and missed while she connected. What a race.
So we're in for it - a historic ride, possibly to Denver and the convention. A lot of panic everywhere in certain circles about this close race somehow destroying the party and annointing McCain. I think that's silly - this is great for the party. But Kevin Drum provided some much-needed perspective about the most vicious Demcoratic nomination battle in recent decades:
1968. Consider. The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ's Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party's eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.
In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.
If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. "Bitter" isn't even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost. This suggests that if primary divisiveness has any effect at all, it must be pretty small.
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