A visibly ill Hillary Clinton is at home in Chappaqua, sipping tea and honey, trying to get her voice back for a Tuesday afternoon round of satellite interviews (she coughed so hard during one interview Tuesday morning, it had to be cut off). Meanwhile, the expectations Kabuki goes on: no clear winner is expected tonight. Should Barack Obama lose in California or Massachusetts, two states once thought to be solid Clinton country, it would be a “bad night” for him, says the Clinton team. Two of her top advisers, Howard Wolfson and Mark Penn, held a conference call today, mapping out the “next phase” of the race, leading into the March 4 states. Penn, her chief strategist, says the campaign would like to have “about a debate a week” between now and March 4, and announced that the campaign has already accepted several invitations for debates in Ohio, Texas and Washington, sponsored by CNN, ABC News, MSNBC (Chris Mathews, who has been merciless in his criticism of Clinton, will host), and even FOX News. Penn says the Clinton camp believes she will benefit from “an extended conversation” allowing viewers to make a “head to head” comparison between Clinton and Obama. Clearly her team feels debates showcase her strengths, and could serve to focus more scrutiny on Obama than he gets at his huge, star-studded rallies-which are big on excitement and glamor but short on policy details. Penn was also gleeful over a comment that Obama made Tuesday during a television interview, in which he likened the mandate in Clinton’s health-care plan to “telling a homeless person to buy a house.”
“I don’t think this is something even Harry and Louise would have said,” Penn cracked, referring to the famous ad attacking the Clinton health-care plan of the early 1990s. Look for this line in a debate or a commercial before the sun comes up on Wednesday.
Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, did his best to explain why the Clinton campaign has had to move the goalpost from Feb. 5 to March 4, when the next round of significant primaries are held. “We are all learning” he said, about the complex rules of the Democratic Party, which tend to allocate delegates proportionally and are designed to prolong the contest between two evenly matched candidates, a situation the party has not faced since the current rules were adopted in 1988. “Unless you have an early knockout punch thrown, you are going to get into a situation where two well-funded candidates are going to be unable to amass the requisite number of delegates.” The next battle: persuading the Democratic National Committee to seat the pro-Hillary delegations from Michigan and Florida, despite their decision to move their primary dates up so far on the schedule that the DNC stripped them of their delegates.
Wolfson also mentioned the considerable influence that Ted and Caroline Kennedy, “two icons of our culture”, have had since endorsing Obama last week and campaigning for him nonstop since and cutting testimonial ads featuring Caroline. Left unmentioned: the apparently unhelpful role Bill Clinton played in catalyzing the Kennedy reaction, with his harsh comments about Obama in the run-up to the South Carolina primary last month.
