The Democratic Elections of 2008

The Early Word: Billification?

By Ariel Alexovich

Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton are each making two campaign stops in Indiana today, but that’s a cakewalk compared to what Bill Clinton’s got on his agenda — six rallies in Oregon.

But the grueling schedule is exactly how the former president wants it. The Wall Street Journal has a front-page story about his increasingly influential role — some insiders call it a “Billification” — in his wife’s campaign.

The former president says he’s in uncharted territory. “Being the spouse is more difficult than when I was the candidate,” he says in a brief interview. “When you’re running, you’re out there driving every day. But when you’re the spouse, you feel more protective. It’s much harder.”

Mr. Clinton has placed several of his own aides at headquarters, including his former lawyer and a bevy of strategists. Known as a bad loser, Mr. Clinton privately buttresses his wife’s drive to push on, telling her, according to aides: “We’re not quitters.”

The Politico, however, suggests that Chelsea Clinton may be Mrs. Clinton’s best surrogate — or at least better than her dad.

The former president has stumbled badly at times, veering wildly off message, picking fights with reporters and making ill-considered comments that have caused his wife’s campaign to relegate him to out-of-the-way locales. The once-and-maybe-future first daughter, on the other hand, has loosened up and eased into her role as a surrogate, hitting her stride just when her mother needed it most.

Of all the Clinton surrogates on the campaign trail, she is proving to be among the most steady — unburdened by the past, not prone to controversy and, in more ways than one, better suited to this YouTubed campaign than her father is.

Senator Clinton, speaking to local TV reporters in Indiana and Kentucky on Friday, three times dodged the question of whether she’d press on with her campaign if she loses big on May 6.

“We have a long way to go,” Clinton told a Louisville station when asked if she would campaign in Kentucky if she lost Indiana. “I’m looking forward to coming up to Kentucky.” The Bluegrass State holds a primary on May 20.

Pressed on the question, she said, “Well, I don’t make any predictions or speculate on things that haven’t happened yet.”

That hedging aside, all of Mrs. Clinton’s other actions suggest she’s thinking long-term about her campaign. She’s still strongly courting superdelegates with the argument that she’s going to end up winning the popular vote — a claim The Wall Street Journal says “is built on some shaky calculations — or may depend improbably on Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory that can’t vote for president.”

Larry Rohter and Carl Hulse of The New York Times write that Mrs. Clinton’s Pennsylvania win has left those superdelegates in a deeper stalemate than before.

The latest New York Times survey of superdelegates — the party leaders and elected officials who essentially have the power to determine the nominee — finds that Mrs. Clinton holds a 16-person edge that slices into Mr. Obama’s overall lead in delegates. And those 478 superdelegates who have declared their allegiances show no signs of switching sides as the primary calendar proceeds toward its June 3 ending.

John McCain wrapped up his tour of “forgotten places” — what The Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller calls the “swaths of the country where Republicans dare not go” — and one of the takeaway lessons from it might be that Mr. McCain should work on his rhetoric.

Newsweek’s Holly Bailey says Mr. McCain is a “born storyteller,” but that he loses his charm when he’s reading off a teleprompter.

It’s no secret McCain loathes being trapped behind a podium. “I honestly don’t like giving speeches,” he told Newsweek earlier this year. He’d rather spend time fielding questions from voters, even hostile ones. “I like town halls,” he says. “I like the back and forth.” When he was racing state to state before Super Tuesday, his aides scheduled back-to-back rallies at airport hangars. As the days wore on, McCain grew irritated. Finally, at a rally in Florida, he ditched the script and asked if anyone in the audience had a question. He handed his microphone into the crowd. “We just have time for a few,” McCain beamed, his mood visibly lifting.

The Los Angeles Times’s Maeve Reston offers another example of Senator McCain’s struggle to connect to a crowd of supporters, this time when an audience member asked him to explain his faith.

McCain, an Episcopalian who attends a Baptist church in Phoenix, turned to a well-worn tale of the guard he met when he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. The man once loosened the ropes binding McCain, and later shared his Christian faith with McCain by silently sketching a cross in the prison yard with his sandal.

The story played well in an ad before the New Hampshire primary, but it was deeply disappointing to many at the New Orleans gathering, conservative activist Richard Viguerie recalled.

“He blew that question off by telling us about the faith of his jailer,” said Viguerie. “It was very obvious to those three or four hundred conservative leaders there. . . . The vast, vast majority of them were either sitting on the sidelines or unenthusiastic about his impending nomination and he didn’t move a single person.”

Republican strategists now are considering whether Mr. Obama would be an easier opponent to beat in November — this after the general consensus had been that Mrs. Clinton would energize more of the G.O.P. base to get to the polls, writes Carl Hulse of The Times.

“There were times when Republicans reacted with just horror that he would lead the ticket,” said Stuart Rothenberg, a nonpartisan political analyst. “Now there is not the sense of him being invulnerable, the magic bullet. I think there has been a major change.”

Democrats are expressing their own concerns about the general election. The Washington Post says “many African American leaders say a Clinton nomination — handed to her by superdelegates — would result in a disastrous breach with black voters.”

If Mr. Obama wins his party’s nomination, he’s likely to be the first general election candidate to abandon the public campaign finance system since it was created in 1974.

He also may be the first candidate to mean business — serious business — in a 3-on-3 basketball tournament, like he did in Kokomo, Ind., Friday night.

Campaign trail roundup:

* Hillary Rodham Clinton holds rallies in Fort Wayne and South Bend, Ind. Bill Clinton campaigns across Oregon, making stops in Junction City, Albany, Monmouth, McMinnville, Oregon City and Portland.

* John McCain has no events on his public schedule.

* Barack Obama holds town hall meetings in Marion and Anderson, Ind.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about her affection for the Book of Esther.

Senator Barack Obama spoke about the “moral dimension” of abortion.

They both described themselves as people of faith.

The appearance of both of the Democratic presidential candidates at tonight’s “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, sponsored by the group, Faith in Public Life, and broadcast live on CNN, highlighted just how far the party has come in its willingness to talk about matters of faith.

In 2004, of course, regular churchgoers voted overwhelmingly for President Bush, who proclaimed his favorite philosopher was Jesus, over a Democratic candidate, Senator John F. Kerry, who was distinctly uncomfortable talking about his own Roman Catholic beliefs. Analysts talked about a “God gap” between the parties, setting off a flurry of frantic efforts within the Democratic Party to set out its own faith agenda.

But hanging over the entire evening were Mr. Obama’s recent controversial remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser about residents of small towns clinging to God or guns, spotlighting just how nascent these efforts are in the Democratic Party and how precarious its advances are.

Mrs. Clinton, who went first in the evening’s conversations about faith, alluded to the potential political import of Mr. Obama’s remarks, noting that the Democratic Party had been viewed as one that “didn’t understand and respect the values and way of life of so many of our fellow Americans.”

But she seemed to struggle at times with going from broad platitudes about the importance of faith in her life to how it concretely informed her policy, reflecting her own party’s continued grappling with what role faith and religious values should exactly play in policy and public discourse.

Meanwhile, after thrashing uncomfortably through yet another attempt to explain the remarks last week that have threatened his candidacy, Mr. Obama demonstrated much of the facility in talking about matters of faith that have caused many of those who have been promoting a greater role for religious belief in the Democratic Party to attach their hopes to him.

He riffed comfortably about the balance between science and faith and his belief in evolution as well as the idea that God created the universe; he adeptly sidestepped a question about whether God intervenes in history in real time, saying that he believed that God did intervene but that his plans are “too mysterious” for him to grasp. He also talked about how he became a Christian at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, returning once more to an explanation of his relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose incendiary preaching has also put Mr. Obama on the defensive.

But perhaps in his rush to explain his relationship with Mr. Wright again, Mr. Obama failed to recount completely his personal conversion story in the same way he has in the past. In a speech last year at the 50th anniversary convention of the United Church of Christ, he described responding to an altar call at his church and hearing “God’s spirit beckoning” while kneeling at the foot of the cross.

“I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truths and carrying out His works,” he said.

Many Democrats were hoping tonight’s forum would lure some of the evangelical Christians who helped power President Bush’s victory in 2004 to their side. Bolstering that hope was the fact that Senator John McCain, who is uncomfortable talking about his personal faith in public, declined to participate in tonight’s forum—an event that his former opponent, Mike Huckabee, a former Baptist minister, endorsed.

But in light of Mr. Obama’s recent remarks about belief in God, many evangelicals undoubtedly were looking for evidence that faith is not simply political window-dressing for him and the Democratic candidates in general.

For many evangelicals, it is that more personal description of one’s relationship to God that they look to as proof of that. A central unanswered question of the evening is whether Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton were able to convey that.

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