Clinton

With the final pair of primary contests in the books, Hillary Clinton has been mathematically eliminated from the race for the Democratic nomination.

The 1992 campaign was the first election that I followed closely, and with some understanding of what was going on. I was twelve, the son of two diehard Baby-Boomer Democrats, and every night we kept up with the race on ABC's World News Tonight, where the late Peter Jennings jousted entertainingly with then-White House correspondent Brit Hume. During the Connecticut primary, when the Democratic race was down to Clinton and Jerry Brown, my father took me out to Wooster Square, the old Italian neighborhood in New Haven, to see the Man from Hope put in an appearance. (All I remember is the top of his head, gray but not yet silver, bobbing just above the crowd.) Later, my parents made a sign -- this was just after the Republican Convention -- that read "Our Family Values Clinton" and took it to rallies, where at different moments my mother managed to shake both Clintons' hands. (Bill was warm, she told me, and definitely sexy. Hillary was cold.)

Rumor has it that Hillary Clinton is struggling to save face by securing the vice presidential nomination.

In an effort to halt intra-Democratic partisan bloodletting, some, including The Atlantic's own Andrew Sullivan, have suggested that Barack Obama run for president with Hillary Clinton as his running mate. And it seems that some in the Obama camp are taking the idea seriously, so seriously that senior Obama advisors are reportedly weighing whether or not to take on Clinton's campaign debt -- including, amusingly enough, Clinton's campaign debt to herself. Note that Clinton has consistently argued that Obama is not ready for the rigors of the presidency, and not ready to take on America's rivals on the world stage. He is too green, he is too trusting. If Obama does indeed acquiesce to the Clintonites' desperate pleas for some kind of face-saving gesture, he will prove Clinton right.

Hillary Clinton wins the Pennsylvania primary with 55% of the vote.

Does Hillary Clinton represent the future of the Democratic party? At first glance, the idea seems laughable. As Ruy Teixeira has observed, the white working class - the core of Clinton's support in Pennsylvania and in the Democratic electorate writ large - is shrinking as a share of the U.S. population, while the mass upper middle class, a crucially important of Obama's base (and one that enjoys outsized cultural and political influence), is expanding at a rapid clip. And though Clinton has won a large share of the growing Latino vote, it's possible - as a number of Obama partisans have suggested - that this could be a function of some combination of '90s nostalgia and a reluctance on the part of new immigrants and second-generation Americans to embrace a politics of hope and change, both effects that will presumably erode over time.

Mark Penn resigned as Hillary Clinton's chief strategist, amid criticism for taking consulting contracts that clashed with Clinton's policies.

The news of Penn's having been forced out set off a wave of recrimination that's likely to last all week, in part because Penn won't have many defenders. Few people in politics are as reviled, especially inside the Clinton campaign, where he feuded with just about everybody.

Hillary Clinton's latest ad features the senator taking a call at three in the morning to respond to an economic crisis.

When I asked Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser, to give his impression of the ad, he quipped: "It's more likely that the call at 3 a.m. is, 'Senator, you've just lost another superdelegate.'" Mark McKinnon, an even more creative McCain adviser, had an idea: the campaign should respond with an "ad" of its own. Calls were made. McCain ad whiz Justin Germany worked with McKinnon's script and had the video ready a few hours later.

Barack Obama wins handily in Mississippi.

The most important number for Hillary Clinton coming out of last night's defeat in Mississippi isn't twenty-three (Barack Obama's margin of victory, in percentage points) or five (the number of delegates he'll add to his almost certainly insurmountable pledged-delegate lead), but 98,589 -- his margin in the popular vote, which will be tacked on to his pre-existing edge of roughly 646,000. For Clinton to have any chance at persuading the Democratic superdelegates to put her over the top at the convention, this is the lead she needs to reduce or wipe away. MORE

Hillary Clinton defeated Barack Obama in the Texas and Ohio primaries — reopening the race, and inviting new speculation over the 2008 Democratic ticket.

Consider the unheralded virtues of an Obama-Clinton ticket. First, politics. Both durable, distinct factions of the Democratic party — united, and working at full throttle. McCain's national-security edge — blunted overnight. Obama's domestic-policy edge — sharpened instantly. Ohio, Michigan, Florida, New Mexico — suddenly, much less a worry for Democrats. MORE

Tonight's primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont will settle nothing. It's already decided.

Barack Obama's still-likely nomination owes a debt to John Rawls: the inequalities built into the Democratic delegate selection system benefit the little states and history's most aggrieved figure -- the liberal activist. Let's say Hillary Clinton romps to victory in Ohio and Texas and Rhode Island. Tens of thousands of extra voters. At most, a few extra delegates. But a win is a win, right? Twenty-four ... okay, forty-eight hours later, when the afterglow has faded and the Hill raisers are on vacation, Clinton delegate guru Harold Ickes will sit down at his desk, scratch his chest through the open folds of his shirt, and have the same problem he has right now: Barack Obama's earned delegate lead is virtually insurmountable.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama square off in what is very likely to be their last debate.

For those of us who've watched about seventeen million Democratic primary debates since the campaign kicked off, last night's debate was profoundly unedifying. Wrangling over the question of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance does not, for example, become more interesting on repeat viewing. Worse, a large number of left-of-center experts believe that this disagreement isn't actually important, and has only come to appear significant because it's been talked about so much. To admirers of Bill Clinton's record on trade policy, it was somewhat painful to watch Barack Obama assail it followed by Hillary trying to insist that she'd never said anything positive about NAFTA rather than defending her husband's eminently defensible record (and her own history of public statements) on the merits.

Perhaps the debate's most noteworthy moment was when Tim Russert managed to remind us all once again why he's one of the most pernicious forces working in journalism today, seeking to link Obama to Louis Farrakhan's record of anti-Semitic statetements. Obama, of course, reiterated the fact that he harbored no such sentiments and had condemned Farrakhan on many occasions. Clinton responded with a bizarre salvo that sums up much of what's gone wrong with her campaign -- haranguing Obama for "denouncing" Farrakhan rather than "rejecting" his support.

As a result, the Democrats appear set to nominate a candidate with both a record and a platform that are a good deal more liberal than what the party's offered in recent years without him ever having faced sustained criticism from the right. For a liberal, freedom from the timidity that's reigned in the Democratic Party ever since 1994 is an exciting prospect, but a moment's thought of how untested the new, more self-confident liberalism actually is is also a bit frightening.

Hillary Clinton campaign struggles to recapture her once-formidable lead over Barack Obama.

Barack Obama may well be ready to destroy the deepest, most fundamental law of the political universe: that somewhere, somehow, the Clintons will find a way to win.

How can Hillary Clinton possibly pull this off? The mathematics are there. If two-thirds of the remaining superdelegates -- what her campaign cleverly and class-consciously insists on calling the “automatic” delegates -- break her way, then she will win.  The history is there, and this race has been full of black-swan moments.

The remaining 16 states and 816-odd pledged delegates will probably cut in her favor. Forget these static factors: for the first time, the elite political class is finally beginning to question -- or at least, to be aware of -- some of the irritating messianism of Barack Obama. 

The Clinton campaign calls for seating Democratic delegates from Florida and Michigan.

Hillary Clinton is going to have a comeback. A respectable showing in Wisconsin will propel Clinton forward in Ohio and Texas, where she enjoys deep reservoirs of support and demographic terrains that play to her strengths. So why, ask her Democratic critics, is her campaign so aggressively pushing the idea of seating delegates from Michigan and Florida? Keep in mind that all candidates agreed not to contest these elections as a nod to the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary states, and that there was an understanding that delegates selected in these uncontested primaries would not be seated. To many, this smacks of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Julian Bond, ostensibly neutral in the Democratic race, has argued that failing to seat the delegates would represent an effort to deny minority voters their basic rights -- an entirely novel charge that wasn't raised earlier on, before Obama established a small but significant lead. Obama supporters are horrified. 

Barack Obama wins convincingly in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.

Is the Democratic race over? Has the momentum so decisively shifted to Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton no longer has a realistic chance? The most striking thing about last night's round of Potomac primaries is that results overturned the emerging consensus over "wine track" versus "beer track," women and men, blacks and Latinos. After Super Tuesday, Kenneth Bear noted that Clinton had become the candidate of the silent Democratic majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women. But now that's changed as Obama racked up significant gains in these and other groups. To demonstrate that he's more than the candidate of feel-good politics, Obama is now training his guns on "Bush-McCain Republicans." And now the bruising counterattacks, the skullduggery, and the alarmism will begin anew.

Senator Clinton writes her own campaign a check for $5 million.

Politics has been good to the Clinton family. It has certainly been good for the Clinton family's wallets. Had Hillary and Bill Clinton never entered long, grueling careers in public life, it's easy to imagine that they would have become quite wealthy. But would they have somewhere between $10 and $50 million? And would they have nearly as many generous friends, willing to open their hearts and their homes and their wallets at a moment's notice? So when Senator Clinton loans her own campaign a tidy sum, perhaps it is best understood not as an act of desperation -- there is every reason to believe she will win the Democratic nomination -- but rather as a sound investment. While $5 million is an extraordinary sum for mere mortals, a Clinton restoration all but guarantees that it will be repaid comfortably and quickly, especially since her campaign was never really in dire financial straits. Don't cry for me, Chappaqua.

How John Edwards remade the Democrats

So who will John Edwards endorse? That's the question on the minds of Democrats everywhere now that the former senator and vice presidential candidate has bowed out of the race. MORE