A month ago, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign neared what were then billed as the make-or-break primaries in Texas and Ohio, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell wondered if his state, scheduled to vote on April 22, was in for “six weeks of peace” or “six weeks of hell.” The answer, as anyone who has played human Ping-Pong between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia lately, became clear once Clinton won Ohio and the primary portion of the Texas ‘primacaucus’ system, snarling the delegate math and forcing the race for the Democratic nomination into its fourth month. Sailing along on Clinton’s campaign plane shortly before midnight Thursday, Rendell, munching a chocolate éclair and working a crossword puzzle, didn’t seem too miserable with his lot - but, he cautioned, the outcome in his state won’t end the race between Clinton and Barack Obama either. “No one wins Pennsylvania in a blowout,” Rendell told NEWSWEEK. “She’s not going to win by some huge margin -and neither is he.”
The blowout, of course, is the scenario that both campaigns, the reporters who cover them and the donors who pay for them have been counting on ever since Super Tuesday (February 5) – and before that, New Hampshire (where Hillary was to have been doomed by Obama’s 14-point lead in the polls) failed to deliver. Rendell, who has endorsed Clinton, says the victory margin in his state is usually closer to three to five points. If he’s right, then neither Clinton, who currently leads in the polls by an average of six percent, nor Obama can knock the other out of contention in Pennsylvania, despite all the make-or-break chatter. Still, the math is much more daunting for Clinton; Obama currently leads 1414 to 1250 in elected delegates; counting estimated super delegates his lead is 1639 to 1503. 2025 are needed to win the nomination-that is, if the disputed Florida and Michigan delegates are not counted.
Clinton, who takes the stage in Pennsylvania to the theme from “Rocky,” is banking on her roots in the state and some increasingly populist rhetoric to fight a few more rounds. In nearly every speech, she talks about her late father, who was born in Scranton and later played football at Penn State. She talks nostalgically of summer evenings spent playing Pinochle at her family’s summer cabin in the northeastern part of the state. Her newfound, more personal tone comes at a time when the campaign is under the direction of a new strategist, Geoff Garin, who took over this week after her previous strategist Mark Penn was demoted in the wake of controversial business dealings. Penn had earned the enmity of other Hillary staffers for his insistence that she emphasize her commander-in-chief credentials, not what he called “the weepy stuff.” Garin, widely liked in Democratic circles, has already urged greater emphasis on Hillary’s biography. “I think it’s good from time to rime to remind people of her life story,” Garin told NEWSWEEK. “Her life is rooted in the middle class, her values are rooted in the middle class; she is a person who is strong through her faith and conviction. We need to remind people of that from time to time.”
Obama may have boosted Clinton’s new strategy by handing her a rare gaffe. Speaking at a private fundraiser in San Francisco last weekend, Obama talked about the despair he had heard from residents of small Pennsylvania towns hurt hard by unemployment. “It’s not surprising they get bitter,” Obama said in a bootleg recording posted by the Huffington Post on Friday. “They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Thrilled that Obama had “dissed middle America,” says one of her aides, Clinton fired back. “Pennsylvanians don’t need a president who looks down on them,” she told at audience at Drexel University in Philadelphia. “They need a president who stands up for them, who fights for them.”
Obama’s remarks come as a potential godsend to Clinton, whose message was overshadowed at the beginning of the week with news of Penn’s demotion -and yet another round of campaign-in-disarray stories. Penn was forced to step aside as strategist (though he retains polling duties) after it emerged that he had advocated on behalf of his private public relations firm for a trade deal with Colombia that Clinton opposes. Trade deals are hardly the stuff of most elections, (“One in 10,000 Pennsylvanians couldn’t tell you who Mark Penn is,” says Rendell) but in union-friendly Pennsylvania where thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost, and where opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement runs high, the controversy carries special weight.
Penn’s Colombia ties were compounded by information revealed in recently released tax records showed that in 2005 Bill Clinton earned $800,000 in speaking fees from a Colombian firm, Gold Service International, which supports the deal. Hillary grew so exasperated with repeated questions on trade with Colombia, that at a press conference in Pittsburgh Thursday, she launched into a strained laughing fit before once again, stating her opposition to the deal -and criticizing the Colombian government for its human rights abuses. “It doesn’t matter who talks to me,” she said. “It doesn’t matter the circumstances.”
Her prickly response reflects the tricky and perhaps untenable line Hillary walks, trying to distance herself from Bill’s controversial dealings like the Colombia trade deal, (which, while baffling to the average voter, serves also as shorthand for his influence in her potential administration), while trying to evoke the more positive associations Democrats have with her husband’s administration. Several times in Pennsylvania, she sarcastically asked of those who criticize the 1990s, “What part didn’t they like, the peace or the prosperity?” (It didn’t help, of course, that even as she tried to clean up one mess, Bill was creating another, lashing out at the media for making too much of Hillary’s characterizations of her supposedly sniper-ridden 1996 Bosnia trip.)
Were it not for the Obama gaffe, the his-and-her messages on trade with Colombia and sniper fire in Bosnia might have distracted further from Clinton’s increasingly populist economic message. In Pittsburgh on Thursday, Clinton promised that as president she would take a “time out” on negotiating new trade deals. In Philadelphia on Friday, she lashed out at China in unusually harsh language, for engaging in unfair trade practices that have cost Pennsylvanians their jobs. “I will take on China,” she said, " which has been exporting to us tainted fish, and toys laced with lead, and polluted pharmaceuticals that have cost the lives of Americans." When someone booed, she shot back. “That’s OK, we have free speech here, unlike China.” The audience roared its approval. In Indiana, which votes on May 6, and where thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost, and adviser promises that Clinton’s message will be “all China, all the time.”
And since the race won’t end in Pennsylvania, there will be weeks and weeks for her to make her case. And weeks.
