Apr
24
What does the Pennsylvania Primary bring to Demoratic Party
April 24, 2008 | | Leave a Comment
By Tia Tian Chi
Senate Clinton has won the Pennsylvania primary as she and her supporters were hoping, but the coming path is going to be tougher for her as well as the entire Democratic Party. In the important and hard-fought primary of Pennsylvania, Senate Clinton won 1,237,696 votes, 54.6% of the total, and Senate Obama won 1,029,672, the rest 45.4%. What does this result mean to each candidates and the Democratic Party as a whole?
For the Clinton campaign, the victory has given “her candidacy a boost as she struggles to raise money and persuade party leaders to let the Democratic nomination fight go on,” as Patrick Healy at New York Times pointed out. Clinton’s spokesman, Mo Elleithee, tells reporters: “there’s beginning to be a subtle shift of psychology of a lot of the uncommitted supers. [they] are beginning to wonder why Obama has been unable to win this thing despite all the advantages he has.” According to his conversations with Superdelegates, they are also learning that “every time she’s got her back up against the wall, she delivers.”
As the Washington Post reported, Sen. Obama and his advisers showed their smiles and confidences after “the news of a projected single-digit win for Hillary Clinton – aprojection that might yet change – was transmitted via Blackberry as the campaign landed” in Evansville. Sen. Obama’s lost in Pennsylvania primary didn’t bring a “dreaded blowout” to the Obama campaign as some predicted earlier. Obama’s Chief political adviser, David Axelrod, added: “We’ve been very clear from the beginning; we didn’t come in with oversized expectations. We wanted to get our share.” In fact, Obama’s ability to attract new voters, “including independents and Republicans who changed their registration in order to participate in the primary”, has further pleased campaign officials and reemphasized his key pitch to Superdelegates.
Although both Democratic candidates have spun the Pennsylvania primary confidently for their own campaigns, other commentators are not so positive. Nedra Pickler from the Associated Press said “despite her victory, the dynamics of the race are the same as they’ve been for more than two months. Obama remains the front-runner, and that gets more important the close the campaign comes to the end of the primary season.” He also observed that Clinton is facing a financial problem, whereas Obama already is spending twice as much on ads airing in North Carolina and Indiana, the two big states holding primaries in the beginning of next month. Since neither of the possible states is like to give Clinton “a big enough margin to put her over Obama”, Pickler concluded that Sen. Clinton “needs a big influx of cash” and “a stunning change of fortune.”
Others have been more negative about the future of the Democratic Party. Jodi Kantor at the New York Times laid out “a double sense of impending doom” many Obama supporters had after the Pennsylvania primary: “first, renewed fear that Mrs. Clinton… may yet find a way to secure the nomination , and second, worry that the brutal nomination fight is tarnishing what once looking like a gleaming change for Democratic victory in November.” New York Times editorial has even blamed Clinton for “mean, vacuous, desperate, and pander-filled.” They continued: “voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.”
