Watch It, Democrats, You Could Still Slip Up: "Serious vulnerabilities in both front-runners"

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Sun Jan-20-08 12:53 PM
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Watch It, Democrats, You Could Still Slip Up: "Serious vulnerabilities in both front-runners"

WP: NOT AGAIN
Watch It, Democrats. You Could Still Slip Up.
By Paul Starr
Sunday, January 20, 2008; B01

Until recently, like most liberals, I was convinced that 2008 was going to be a Democratic year. While Republicans have been listless and divided, Democrats have been passionate and enthusiastic about their candidates for president. An unpopular war, a sinking economy, a general sense of conservative exhaustion: All pointed toward a Democratic triumph in November. A lot of conservatives had come to grudgingly agree and were preparing to spend four years in political rehab. But after the first rounds of caucuses and primaries, the prospects don't look so rosy for the Democrats or so bleak for the Republicans. The presidential race now looks like a tossup -- perhaps even with a Republican edge. If Democrats don't stay smart, tough-minded and realistic, we could blow it yet again.

The first problem is our likely foe. Especially after his victory in South Carolina, Sen. John McCain has a plausible route to the GOP nomination, and he remains by far his party's best bet for holding on to the White House. The Republican field has been so preoccupied with appealing to the party's hard-core base that it seems that the eventual winner will have little appeal to the independent voters who can swing a general election. Even McCain started out by embracing the evangelical Christians he had once denounced. But as his seemingly dead campaign has been reborn, his initial efforts to pander to the religious right have been forgotten, and he is once again happily running as a "maverick." Though his nomination is hardly guaranteed, the Arizona senator would provide the GOP with a powerful mix of continuity and change -- continuity with the Bush administration on Iraq at a moment when it has become conventional wisdom that the "surge" is succeeding, and a sense of change and freshness from McCain's cheerfully frank past deviations from conservative orthodoxy.

But the major reason I see trouble ahead for the Democrats is that voting patterns so far, as well as rumbling tensions over race and gender, suggest serious vulnerabilities in both of the Democratic front-runners that McCain (or another rival) could exploit. Most pundits assume it's the Republicans who have the weak field, but the leading Democrats -- both attractive and impressive people -- carry dangerous downsides of their own.

Sen. Barack Obama appeals strongly to affluent whites and minorities -- the old John Lindsay coalition -- but he seems to lose working-class whites. Moreover, if the pollsters turn out to have been wrong in predicting the outcome in New Hampshire in part because of the "Bradley effect" -- that is, the polling tendency to overestimate the number of votes a black candidate will win because some bigoted whites refuse to speak to pollsters or claim to be undecided -- then Democrats may also be deceiving themselves about the Illinois senator's chances in the general election. National surveys that show Obama beating various Republicans may be overstating his potential share of the vote.

For her part, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has done better at appealing to lower- and middle-income whites, especially women. But her loss to Obama among male voters in New Hampshire suggests that just as race may block Obama's path to the presidency, so gender may obstruct hers. That's hardly a surprise, of course. But Democrats have been so excited about the prospect of a historical breakthrough that many of them seem to forget that plenty of voters are still swayed by old prejudices....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/18/AR2008011802870_pf.html